- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24850430
EDIT: i had an rpi it died from esd i think
EDIT2: this is also my work machine and i sleep to the sound of the fans
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the best home server is a computer you’re not using, the second best home server is a bajillion dollar server rack you looted from behind a meta LLM farm
Sure, from behind it…
I went overboard but only because I was having fun with it and didn’t like the octopus of hard drives plugged into my NUC
w520 goes hard. Still a very capable machine with the sheer amount of cpu horsepower it has from that era.
Not comparable to modern chips of course, but for what you can get those things for, damn it’s not bad.
How is it overkill? Those are just PCs in rack cases. For all you know, they could be $150 budget builds made of decade old hardware bought off eBay.
i’m ok with that as soon as they serve the idea of self hosting it depends on how big you want the project want to be
Check out r/homedatacenter
My only “server” is a modest DS218+ which runs more mainstream services that I see in those huge ass servers like in the pic, what am I missing? (I have 6 GBs of RAM):
- Arr stack (Bazarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Overseerr, Prowlarr)
- Plex
- Calibre and Calibre web
- DizqueTV
- Dozzle
- Flaresolverr
- Heimdall
- Iperf3 server
- JDownloader2
- Komga
- Openspeedrest
- Pi-hole
- Plex-Auto-Languages (for the Synology PMS and my Nvidia Shield TV Pro)
- PlexTraktSync
- Portainer
- Qbittorrent
- Riven/Rclone/Zurg
- Speedtest
- Tautulli (X2)
- Vaultwarden
- Zerotier
Everything is silent and running with Docker, aside from a bunch of stock Synology services (and Tailscale), I really feel like the only reason to own better hardware is for a better transcoding experience… And usually you don’t want to transcode.
dayem buddy thats cool i’m still a noob in selfhosting and using docker im using some containers like adguardhome and metube photoprism and memos still tweaking cuz i started 1 week ago
I think the issue for some people (why they may buy expensive hardware) is that their server is not “enterprise grade”, literally meaning a whole server rack with a SAN, firewall, etc. If you’re new to this hobby, please consider this unsolicited advice:
Use whatever hardware you already have or buy only what you need to achieve your goals.
Some people want to “cosplay as a sysadmin” like what Jeff Geerling sells on his tshirts. That can mean doing this stuff for fun or maybe self teaching for a job. For those folks, buying “enterprise” could possibly make sense. But I would argue that even the core concepts of that hardware can be learned on stuff you already have.
Enterprise hardware is loud, inefficient, and will likely have idiosyncrasies that making them run at home kinda suck. An old laptop is perfect as a place to host stuff or play with software.
One of the things engineers/admins have to do in a datacenter is plan for rack power efficiency. That often means planning for the capacity you are going to use, for the space you have and choosing the cheapest solution for that.
I think its considered generally more impressive with how much you can do within the constraints you have, vs having so much capacity for a cheap price. Like, how many services can you run on a Raspberry Pi? Can you create “good enough” performance for a storage area network using just gigabit? The skills you get by limiting yourself probably out perform working with “the real stuff”, even if your purpose is trying to get a job. I’d argue the same for folks who simply want to self host. Run what you got until it stops, and then try to buy for capacity again.
Your power bill, the environment, and your wallet will thank you.
Downsizing from an ex biz full fat tower server to a few Pis, a mini PC and a Synology NAS was the best decision ever here.
The new hardware was paid for quickly in the power savings alone. The setup is also much quieter.
You don’t think about power consumption a lot when working with someone else’s supply (unless it’s your actual job to), but it becomes very visible when you see a server gobbling up power on a meter at home.
You’re right about the impressiveness of working creatively within constraints. We got to the moon in '69 with a fraction of the computing power available to the average consumer today. Look at the history of the original Elite videogame for another great example of working creatively and efficiently within a rather small box.
I use an Asus laptop I bought during COVID as my server. I dropped in 64GB of RAM, a pair of NVM drives and an old 2.5” SATA SSD. More than enough for my use cases. The only real software tweak I made was limiting battery charging to 60%.
how would you limit the batt i really care
For my Asus laptop the setting is maintained at the hardware level. I didn’t bother trying to find Linux software that could control it (I think there is one) but instead just booted into Windows and set it there and it will persist after that in Linux.
UPS right on board (kind of)
Here’s mine. Might need to repaste it tho, the fans are literally always running pretty noticably loudly and CPU temps are at ~49° even though it’s idiling all the time at max 1%-2% CPU usage.
On a side note - is it normal for Redis to always be using 1-2% CPU even when there’s no traffic?
i literly were you but. my laptop died what are you running now?
Do you mean specs wise or software wise? It’s a Lenovo Y50 with 8 gigs RAM, an i5 4210H, and a GTX 960M.
I’m running Ubuntu server with docker and a few containers (mainly Nextcloud)
If wanting to have cool oscilloscopes and blinkenlights is wrong then I don’t want to be right.
no one said it’s wrong keep going
Many selfhosters are also homelabbers
Homelab = I have a bunch of computers I experiment and learn with, often breaking stuff and starting from scratch
Self-host = I have a bunch of computers where I run my own email service, I replaced Netflix with plex/jellyfin, I have a Minecraft server for my friend group, etc
Thanks! I am still pretty inexperienced so I’m inadvertently doing both at the same time with the same few machines haha
That’s the thing, it’s pretty typical to have both and do both at the same time! You just have some machines more stable so you don’t wipe your photos when you break k8s.
I don’t know if I can completely explain the difference, but I would classify myself as a home labber not a self-hoster.
I use Proton for email and don’t have any YouTube/Twitter/etc alt front ends. The majority of my lab (below) is storage and compute for playing around with stuff like Kubernetes and Ansible to help me with my day job skills. Very little is exposed to the Internet (mostly just a VPN endpoint for remote lab work).
I view self-hosting as more of a, “let me put this stuff on the internet instead of of using a corporation’s gear” effort. I know folks who host their own Mastodon instance, have their own alt front ends for various social media, their own self-hoster search engines.
I bought a cheap mini PC with an Intel N100 processor as my entry into self hosting, so far it absolutely crushes every task I’ve thrown at it
How do you manage storage limitations on Mini pcs?
So far I haven’t needed mass storage. The Mini Pc itself has a 1TB nvme drive, which I could expand upon since there’s space for another 2.5 inch drive inside the case, plus USB ports for external drives. Obviously not close to a real NAS, but again, so far I have not had any need for that.
In my case, 2 USB 3.0 hard drive enclosures with twin drives, in ZFS mirror configuration. I keep the the disks “awake” with https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/hd-idle, and it meets all my needs so far, no complaints about the speed for my humble homelab needs.
Don’t worry, I’m using an over 10 year old on-board Atom Mainboard, and it works fine with several services running.
I got like 6 old computers from 2000 to 2016 all doing different things. If I had a choice between a high end server and cobbled together mess I would always choose the mess. Lot more entertainment and fun to figure out
Mine are a bit more recent (2012-202*) but same thing. Old hardware gets used for something, my “server” is just my old i5 11500k with as much ram as I could throw at it and as many drives as I can fit in the case. Oldest is a laptop that’s my bench computer.
Helps me justify upgrades, hardware’s been capable for a long time, always impressive to me just how capable things are, and sometimes it’s part of the fun (if you enjoy problem solving) to work around limitations. Off-lease enterprise stuff interests me, would need to figure out where it lives though.
Noice!
This is mine:
Lol is this an eeepc?
(Edit: Samsung logo - it is not) 🤣
They are both smol though :D
indeed smol bois
My “rack” consisted entirely of old laptops, two of which were eeepcs, for years and it worked great. I replaced them all with a single NUC later heh
The eeepc was a modern marvel at the time change my mind!
dayeeem nice really with 2 gigs
Yeah, the normal N150 had 1 GB RAM but plus model had 2 GB. Served me well. Nowadays it barely uses it though. :)
How would you connect to your “server” when you don’t know it’s IP? With static IP or DNS or both?
For local services? - just type in static IP that I’ve assigned myself, otherwise I have a subdomain pointing to my online services. works like a charm
Dynamic DNS or static IP. Whatever is convenient for you. If humans are connecting, it is generally prefered to type in a domain name, rather than an IP address.
Yeah dynamic DNS works pretty good for me, after I set it up I never had any problems with it.
