Administered by:
Next #SelfHosting question: what are people using as low-powered home servers for things? I have an ancient desktop and various Raspberry Pi devices, but perhaps there's some specific hardware that peoiple favour for these kinds of projects?
I'm thinking the server should live in my garage (a separate building) or potentially in a relative's house. Low power consumption a plus!
(Thank you for the amazing responses to my query about #SelfHosted photo archives, by the way.)
#OpenSource #Linux
@Flamekebab I document my hardware configuration here including some energy metrics with some basic usage:
https://gitops-docs.s3.shivering-isles.com/hardware/node.html
In general I recommend to look at project tiny-mini-micro:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC53fzn9608B-MT5KvuuHct5MiUDO8IF4
@Flamekebab I like ARM SBCs for the low power draw.
I've got an #olimex #olinuxino #lime2 and a #RockPro64
Thin clients are a pretty good bang for the buck too. Although power consumption is generally higher
@Flamekebab I'm using a couple Lenovo Tiny PCs in addition to some Pis.
One is an M900 with an i5. It has an nvme as a root drive and a spinning disk for storage. I recently installed a Coral TPU, as well, just to play around with. This runs Proxmox for VMs and LXC and handles the majority of my services.
The second one is an M710 with just an i3 and an SSD. This is my "external" server and it just runs some basic web apps exposed to the public.
@Flamekebab I haven't used them myself, but I love the Dell Wyse thin clients as raspberry pi unitasker equivalents. X86 in a tiny passive-cooled box, 15w peak? Yes please.
For everything that needs more, small-form-factor Elitedesks and Thinkcentres are great.
@Flamekebab I am a strong proponent of using recycled workstations or servers to keep them out of ewaste yards. You can find some really good deals on enterprise grade servers or used mini PCs.
Downside is the power consumption but most of these servers remain idle most of the time and barely consume any power.
@LordChaos82 I'm a big fan of it too. However I'm wary of false economy and buying more than I need.
The stuff I'm doing shouldn't really need much hardware so I'm a little hesitant. I don't want to get anything too old, lest it be unsupported in some obscure way or be inefficient compared to modern stuff. Conversely I don't want to buy the latest and greatest when a bare minimum would suffice!
@Flamekebab One of my servers is a used Lenovo Think center M710q that I bought for $50. It has proxmox installed and runs a couple of VMs and quite a few LXC containers with docker, without even skipping a beat.
Have a look around and you can find some really good deals on the used 1L mini PCs.
@Flamekebab Intel NUC are great if you want out of the box solutions, they are quite power efficient (5-8W idle)
@Flamekebab It really depends what the task is. The Intel N100 gives a lot of computing power for a very modest power draw (still about 4 times that of a Pi, mind). I use one as my router, and it manages to deliver the full bandwidth of my gigabit fibre connection while running a full SPF firewall. I also use an older i3-based mini PC as a server for a bunch of Docker containers. Its power draw is more than the N100, but it was very, very cheap.
@hedders @Flamekebab I was thinking about this for my own home setup. Compute sits at a few places. Router is one, so is storage (NAS CPU has to process reads/writes). Less redundancy, but why not 1 high-core count node doing it all?
@tetrislife in principle there’s no reason not to do it all on one box. I didn’t simply because my home network grew up piecemeal; I bought a NAS, then later upgraded my router, added a couple of pi-holes, etc etc …
@hedders Do Celerons still suck like the old days?
I was looking at this on eBay:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/186558778718
@Flamekebab no, the N100 is quite a lot of bang for your buck. It really depends on what you want to run on it.
@Flamekebab @hedders agree with hedders, that's a lot of bang for the buck. Like someone else in the thread I run a N100 as router and easily max out my 1gbps over wireguard. Don't run any other really compute heavy loads on it, but I reckon I've got room to spare. If you want transcoding, anything newer (as the N100) is unfortunately loads better due to HW encoding/decoding.
@Flamekebab
I’ve always been a fan of the pizza box servers, such as the Supermicro 5019D. You’re effectively limited to SSDs or external storage, but they’re a good balance of power, efficiency, and size to me.
Moving my bulk HDD storage to separate disk enclosures was the best thing I ever did to my server setup. When the time comes to upgrade the server, I can just unplug the entire array, swap the small server out, then plug them all back in.
@Flamekebab For you, those tiny/mini/micro PCs are probably a great option. You can often find newer systems used for a good price. Depending on your storage needs, a separate disk enclosure would leave you with the opportunity to easily upgrade it to something more powerful or power efficient down the road, without needing to take physical storage capacity into account on your host.