NERV: The Home Server That Runs Our House
There's a small computer in our house named NERV (yes, after the Evangelion organization) that quietly runs the household's software. It's an Intel NUC running Ubuntu, everything in Docker, and it has slowly become the most load-bearing object we own that isn't the refrigerator.
What it runs
- A household dashboard — one page with the stuff we actually check, served by Caddy.
- Bookmarks — a self-hosted linkding instance; several hundred bookmarks that used to be scattered across browsers now live in one searchable place we own.
- Karly's crochet app — its own write-up.
- An eBay message bot — watches buyer messages for my resale business and pings me on Telegram (details here).
- Kitchen tooling — recipe and grocery-list plumbing, write-up coming.
The part nobody warns you about: encrypted disks + reboots
The drive is fully encrypted, which is great until the machine reboots and sits at a passphrase prompt while everything it runs is down. The fix is an old sysadmin trick: a tiny SSH server (Dropbear) baked into the early boot environment, so I can connect during boot and unlock the disk from anywhere. Headless full-disk encryption without walking to the closet.
What I've learned self-hosting
- Boring is a feature. Ubuntu LTS, Docker, systemd, cron. The exciting stack is the one that pages you.
- Automate the deploy or you won't ship. Anything that requires me to SSH in and run commands gets updated never. Anything that auto-deploys from git gets updated constantly.
- Self-host for ownership, not savings. The dollar math is a wash. The point is that our bookmarks, recipes, and tools are ours — no shutdown announcement email can take them away.