- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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
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
Dude whaaaat? Commercial display signage outside and what could need that many Ethernet runs in a house?
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
You have it backwards. We self host to justify the hardware setup.
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
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.
Best starter for self hosting:
Although laptops technically have a built in battery backup 😎
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).
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.
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.
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.
What’s a ramless NVMe? Specifically the ramless part, I know an NVMe is an SSD.
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
Some fancy SSDs have additional DRAM cache:
The presence of a DRAM chip means that the CPU does not need to access the slower NAND chips for mapping tables while fetching data. DRAM being faster provides the location of stored data quickly for viewing or modification.
TIL, thanks!
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.
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
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.
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
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Red or red pros? I heard all 4tb reds were SMR’s now?
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.
I started out with a laptop and it worked fine, but I always wondered, wouldn’t the energy consumption be much higher? Even with the screen off, a laptop isn’t made to run 24/7, right?
I think it’s mainly the battery that isn’t made for 24/7 charging. The other components are fine. And as a laptop is made not to waste electricity, it’s efficient with the energy consumption, too. Just turn off the screen and it’ll use as much as a Raspberry Pi or less…
You are now banned from /c/selfhosted
… meanwhile on [email protected]
what?
Your suggestion that racks of server hardware shoved into a shoe closet is unnecessary overkill betrays the very ethos of selfhosting! Your dangerous philosophy of minimalism and efficiency cannot be tolerated!
Burn the heretic!
no i don’t suggest anything both are cool and it depends on how big your selfhost projct are and how much you want to spend on it some people self host on 2 gigs of ram and it’s work fine
I genuinely can’t tell if you’re playing it straight to try and improve my poor attempt at humor, or if there’s a cultural barrier that I’m not getting across.
i think cultural barrier let me give itva search
ok so you are against me
Hmm… “against”…? As in opposed to? or as in beside?
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 :)
😆
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)
software
