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

    • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      9·
      9 天前

      I’d say not just starter… My rack is full of tiny/mini/micros. Proxmox on all, data on the three NAS boxes, easy to replace a box if needed (for example, the optiplex 7040 that the board died on).

      Way quieter than a regular rack, lower power use, etc. If all goes well following an intended move, I should be able to safely power it off solar + batt only. Grand total wattage for all these boxes is less than my desktop (when I last checked at least, I was running about 300-350W. I did swap two that have dgpu’s now, so maybe a touch higher).

      • pezhore@infosec.pub
        6·
        8 天前

        My homelab is three Lenovo M920q systems complete with 9th gen i7 procs, 24GB ram, and 10Gbps fibre/Ceph storage. Those mini PCs can be beasts.

        • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          8 天前

          There are some 13th gen i9s at work that are usff (like a fat version of the tiny, they are p3 ultras) I can’t wait to get my hands on at home. dGPU, 2.5gbit + 1gbit on board, 64gb ram on these as purchased, etc, etc. Total monster in under 4l.

          I actually ended up with a cluster of those over a standard server for a client, way more power and lower price, and with HA to boot. Should have a few all to myself next year and I can’t wait to be ridiculous with them.

    • Tja@programming.dev
      8·
      9 天前

      I recently got a M710q with an i3 7100T. It uses around 3W on idle. I threw 8GB of RAM and a 512GB ramless NVMe for a total of under 100€. Absolutely would recommend (if you don’t need too much storage). Also Dell has some machines.

      For more info, servethehome (they have a YouTube channel and a blog) has a whole series on “tiny mini micro” machines.

        • Rudee
          7·
          9 天前

          DRAM-less NVMe drives don’t have what basically amounts to a cache of readily accessible storage that makes large reads and writes faster. So they’re cheaper, but slower, and wear out faster

  • zod000
    25·
    9 天前

    If wanting to have cool oscilloscopes and blinkenlights is wrong then I don’t want to be right.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    241·
    9 天前

    Good choice. I think people often invest too much into hardware and SBCs, when an old laptop does just fine. Just monitor the battery or remove it, if you run that for years and unsupervised in the broom closet.

    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
      9·
      9 天前

      Depends. If you want something that will keep your files reasonably safe and accessible then a laptop isn’t great because most of them won’t let you mount multiple hard drives without doing something silly like running everything over USB.

      Of course that’s where an old desktop is the computer of choice.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        4·
        9 天前

        Yeah, it really depends on the use-case. I’ve attached several external harddisks via USB to unsuitable hardware before. That kinda works, but isn’t a good choice. But for some selfhosting of Bitwarden, home autiomation and calendar sync, an old laptop is more than enough. After that I bought an efficient mainboard, lots of RAM and built my own NAS for my files, and it does the other stuff as well.

        • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
          2·
          8 天前

          Yeah, it doesn’t take a lot to build a decent home server. I just rebuilt mine (the old one’s Turion II Neo was perhaps a bit too weak) and the most expensive part were the HDDs. I didn’t want to reuse the old ones.

          A slightly underclocked Athlon 3000G, 16 gigs of spare RAM, and three 4 TB WD Red Pluses give me all the power I actually need at a reasonable power budget. I initially wanted to go with an N100 but those never support more than two SATA drives directly.

            • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
              1·
              8 天前

              My bad. I went with the WD Red Plus, model WD40EFPX. It’s basically the successor to the old CMR Red line. The Pro line has 7200 RPM and is a bit noisier, which isn’t great for a living room server.

              I’ll correct my earlier comment.

  • merthyr1831English
    19·
    8 天前

    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

  • Synapse@lemmy.world
    19·
    9 天前

    Is having a bunch of oscilloscopes in your electronics lab self-hosting now ?

    Using old laptops or other repurposed computer for self-hosting is just great! Who does have an old computer collecting dusk in their home ? Anyone had the potential for self-hosting :)

      • Tja@programming.dev
        9·
        8 天前

        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

        • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          8 天前

          Thanks! I am still pretty inexperienced so I’m inadvertently doing both at the same time with the same few machines haha

          • Tja@programming.dev
            2·
            8 天前

            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.

          • bisby@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            8 天前

            The first few years of self hosting tend to have a lot of experimentation, so the overlap is natural.

            I’m hitting my grumpy old man phase of self-hosting where I want my Minecraft server and Jellyfin to to be stable so I don’t have to hear about it from my family. So ironically, my setup is starting to look more like an overkill setup because I want to self host with stability instead of tinkering around to see if I can run a different server distro, etc. My home lab years got me to find a real nice base, but now I just add things to that base and I don’t mess with the formula I have.

            IMO the distinction is that if you are doing it for fun (or education) and could afford to lose any service you run for an extended period, you’re home labbing. If you are doing it for cost savings, privacy, anti-capitalist, or control reasons and the services are critical and need to stay up, you’re self-hosting.

            tl;dr - experimentation vs utility

      • pezhore@infosec.pub
        7·
        8 天前

        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.

        • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          8 天前

          Thanks this makes sense!

          I think I’m somewhere in between the two. I’m still pretty inexperienced so I might say I’m self hosting through my homelab as I expect to screw something up any day now haha. So far so good though

  • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    12·
    8 天前

    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.

  • thezeesystem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    11·
    9 天前

    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

    • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
      2·
      9 天前

      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.

  • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
    11·
    8 天前

    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.

    • mugdad1@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      8 天前

      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

  • Prinz Kasper@feddit.org
    10·
    9 天前

    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