Notes on running a small home server
I have kept a small server in the closet for about four years now. It started as a place for photo backups and slowly grew into something the whole family relies on.
The most useful lesson was to keep it boring. Every clever setup I added eventually broke at an inconvenient moment, while the plain parts kept working.
These days it runs a file share, a calendar and nightly backups to an external disk. Nothing more, and that is exactly why it is still running.