That system also sounds a lot more capable than mine. How did you end up with 25 VMs?

Perhaps my recent NAS/home server build can serve as a bit of an inspiration for you:

• AMD Ryzen 8500G (8 cores, much more powerful than your two CPUs, with iGPU)
• Standard B650 mainboard, 32 GB RAM
• 2 x used 10 TB HDDs in a ZFS pool (mainboard has 4x SATA ports)
• Debian Bookworm with Docker containers for applications (containers should be more efficient than VMs).
• Average power consumption of 19W. Usually cooled passively.

I don’t think it’s more efficient to separate processing and storage so I’d only go for that if you want to play around with a cluster. I would also avoid SD cards as a root FS, as they tend to die early and catastrophically.

It sounds like Proton VPN (or its repo) is causing issues for you. Given that it’s a paid service, you can probably contact their support.

Alternatively, you can also look for the repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d, something like /etc/yum.repos.d/file_name.repo, for Proton VPN. You can then disable it by renaming it to .repo.disabled and try again (sudo dnf upgrade in the terminal). Note: This is not really a permanent solution, as it will disable updates for Proton VPN.

It sounds like the criterion is “is newer microcode available”. So it doesn’t look like a marketing strategy to sell new CPUs.

Nice, congrats on getting it to work! :) Native Debian packages are also nice. It can just get difficult if you want the latest stuff.

I used the docker compose template from https://hub.docker.com/_/drupal and mostly changed the image:

# Drupal with PostgreSQL
#
# Access via "http://localhost:8080/"
#   (or "http://$(docker-machine ip):8080" if using docker-machine)
#
# During initial Drupal setup,
# Database type: PostgreSQL
# Database name: postgres
# Database username: postgres
# Database password: example
# ADVANCED OPTIONS; Database host: postgres

version: '3.1'

services:

  drupal:
    # image: drupal:10-apache
    # image: drupal:10.3.7-apache-bookworm
    # image: drupal:10.3.6-apache-bookworm
    image: drupal:11.0.5-apache-bookworm
    # image: drupal:10-php8.3-fpm-alpine
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    volumes:
      - /var/www/html/modules
      - /var/www/html/profiles
      - /var/www/html/themes
      # this takes advantage of the feature in Docker that a new anonymous
      # volume (which is what we're creating here) will be initialized with the
      # existing content of the image at the same location
      - /var/www/html/sites
    restart: always
    environment:
      PHP_MEMORY_LIMIT: "1024M"

  postgres:
    image: postgres:16
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: example
    restart: always

The details for the v11 image are here: https://hub.docker.com/layers/library/drupal/11.0.5-apache-bookworm/images/sha256-0e41e0173b4b5d470d30e2486016e1355608ab40651549e3e146a7334f9c8f77?context=explore

Yes, the docker images don’t use the sury.org php packages (they use the php docker image).

“11.0.5-apache-bookworm” also seems to work, maybe you can try that version?

I wanted to recommend using a Docker container but I ran into the same issue with the default config for “drupal:10-apache” (aka “drupal:10.3.7-apache-bookworm”). Opening “node/add/article” results in the OOM error. Downgrading to “drupal:10.3.6-apache-bookworm” resolved the issue. Looks like a Drupal regression to me. Maybe you can also try an older version of Drupal 11?

If you don’t want to reinstall the OS, you can probably use Clonezilla: https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live%2Fdoc%2F03_Disk_to_disk_clone

Maybe you need to update the drive ids for your bootloader (grub) afterwards, not sure about that.

Edit: Maybe the advanced “-g auto” option does that for you.

It seems that 18.04 was the last release for 32-bit x86 (i386): https://askubuntu.com/questions/1376090/latest-version-of-ubuntu-for-i386-architecture-32-bit

But you could just go for Debian which still supports it.

It’s an Apple Silicon Mac Mini. Do you have a particular reason to think the new one is less efficient?

I don’t have one (and I don’t want one), but Anandtech measured the M1 version at 4.2W in idle. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested I think you can also get that from other Mini PCs (e.g. NUCs).

I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don’t think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94