Not something that would have to be on all the time, but more something that can be off overnight. This question feels like it has an obvious yes/no answer that I’m missing.
Edit: pihole was a bad example
I really like having separation of duties between my main laptop and my home servers. I’m constantly screwing around with my laptop and I really don’t want eg a laptop reboot to screw up my phones ability to resolve DNS.
My home servers sit in the garage and rarely get touched unless I’m doing some serious maintenance.
From experience I would say avoid this. I started my homelab this way. First it was a plex server just so 1 family member could locally stream movies without me having to copy it to a flash drive. Then another family member saw it, so it was 2, then 3. Less than a year later I have ~10-15 regular regular streamers and I can’t play video games on my computer from the hours of 4PM to 1AM because my CPU was being hit so hard.
Eventually I built a new gaming rig, pulled out my GPU. Turned the old machine into a full time server and gamed on the new machine.
Exactly the same thing I did. Now I’m looking to upgrade my server PC cus it’s still running an i5-4690K and struggles if anyone needs transcoding.
Haha that sounds familiar. My plex server is on a 4770k and my unRAID server is on a 4790k. Finally getting parts to decommission the 4770k.
It would make sense to host something on your main machine if your main machine will be the only machine that needs to access it.
If you have any other devices that will use that hosted service, imagine how annoying it will be to try and use it, forget that you didn’t turn your main machine on yet today and you have to get up and go turn it on. And for what? What positive benefit would you get to counteract that inconvenience?
No. It will become a pain. For 100$ you can get an SBC or, better yet, a second hand HP Mini computer with 6-8th gen i3/i5 CPU that is most likely enough for your needs.
If your “main machine” is a Orange Pi 5 plus… then why not.
Obviously you can. But I can’t see the point of, especially if that service is Pihole nonetheless.
If any other device on your network, such as your phone, exclusively uses pihole for DNS, they won’t be able to resolve web addresses when your computer is off - effectively cutting off internet access. Pihole should really be running 24/7 to avoid complications.
