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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
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.
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):
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.
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
You have it backwards. We self host to justify the hardware setup.
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).
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.
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!
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
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.
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 :)
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