Hi all,
I want to spin up a small home server. Nothing crazy, maybe 4 or 8GB ram at most. 1 Docker instance running a few privacy frontends (Invidious, Redlib, Xcancel, SearxNG, etc.) and split tunneling VPN connections for each one.
Obviously, a Raspberry Pi 4 or higher is the internet’s favorite choice, but I don’t need wireless connectivity, I just need a single HDMI and 2 USB ports to get everything set up, one ethernet port, and a dream in my heart.
Has anyone use alternatives like Le Potato or Orange Pi? I’m curious what their community support is like, and if there’s a FOSS-friendly standard.
Thanks!
A larger sized used motherboard or even a new cheap one often has more capability if you can deal with something that is larger…
I see a ton of i5-8th gen 2-in-1s with dead batteries, but under 100 on ebay
Unless you specifically need ultra low power draw, a minipc is always a better bang for your buck, the cheapest solution is the dusty old laptop sitting on the shelf at the back of your closet…
It always starts small. I started with a 15 year old pre-ryzen AMD laptop, and an old external USB 4TB hard drive. NEW the laptop was $299.
A year later, I have a ruckus/brocade managed switch, a Lenovo M700 Tiny running home assistant and Jellyfin, while my main media/file server is a Xeon E3-1275v3 with 2 SSDs, and 6 8TiB SAS3 enterprise hard drives in a ZFS pool. And a Pi5 running adguard home as my DNS server.
And I’ve already used 60% of it. 🤣🤣
For a first machine a used Mac mini, especially one that precedes the T2 chip(although that’s not a deal breaker) is probably the best bang for the buck, solid hardware that will get what most people really want from a server unless they want a full on homelab, and they are easy to find cheaply on eBay. Also comes with the advantage of being able to run OSX with fewer hoops if you had a specific use case for that(running blue bubbles in the background or syncing to iCloud… mostly just convenience stuff if you have a leg in that ecosystem could also make a potential slow migration away less irritating)
If you can find a cheap NUC first tell me where because they are great options
Lenovo think centers can be found refurbed for under $100 too and will also be available for a long time because those fuckers were in every bank, hospital/drs office, and all manner of non-tech related offices for years and years.
Or you could be like me and jump two feet in with a used enterprise server, I dunno if I’d recommend this but I do know a lot more than I did when I started and have tons power and capacity to expand. And I’ve gotten more than enough use out of them to justify the $300ish I paid for my Poweredges plus electric bills. But do your research it took me a year to find documents on how to bypass the idrac drive virtualization bullshit and my power draw significantly dropped afterwards
I run a RockPro64 with Arch Arm. No need for a monitor - you just connect over SSH.
I’ve owned a few devices like Orange Pi but really more as a curiosity that I never did much with. I have, however, seen discussions suggesting that when you move away from the RasPi ecosystem, support for various tooling gets more complicated because you’re in a much smaller pool of hardware and this makes them more effort to setup. I don’t know the validity of that, but it sounded plausible to me.
Just get a Pi. Just because you don’t need wifi doesn’t mean it won’t potentially be useful down the road.
radxa has very good sbc’s at the most economical pricing and great software support. only thing is they get sold out pretty quickly. something like X4 or rock 5B will be best for your needs. dragon q6a is also extremely efficient but they get sold out almost immediately after stock comes.
they sell through https://arace.tech/ so subscribe to them if for back in stock alerts
Used micro PC is often the best deal. Companies offload old SFF i5 and lower machines all the time. They’re all over eBay.
I used to be of the erroneous mind set that a server had to be some big honkin’, dim the lights, piece of equipment, but that’s not necessarily true now days with modern architecture. Doesn’t take a lot to get a lot back.
Just look at the processors in the Synology offerings, you didn’t need much to run a bunch of services.
I was thinking about waaaay back in the day, before the popularity of Synology, but you are correct. I think this is the year I will finally rid myself of these boat anchors.
Dude same. Back in the day I was dead set on getting older blades and a couple Dell 710 in a rack and “that’s what a real homelab is.”
Now, I still got the rack because I think they look cool, but it’s all decommissioned workstations, a white box unRaid server, and micro/mini PCs; there’s not a single traditional server box in place.
Now, I still got the rack because I think they look cool
I recently decommissioned one of my Dell T320s, and replaced it with the Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 and maxed out to 32 gb RAM. I paid $117 USD for the Optiplex 7020 SFF which came with 8GB RAM, and I maxed it out with three more 8 GB RAM sticks for about $75 USD.
The Dell T320 costs ~$40/month in electrical costs in my locale to run. The Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF costs $5-8/month to run. So, less than the duration of this year, I will have recouped my initial $200 investment in the Optiplex 7020 SFF just in power consumption alone, and I’ll have ‘left over’ money if I wanted to get yet another Optiplex 7020 SFF. I have 40+ containers running on the Optiplex 7020 SFF, and it hasn’t broke a sweat yet. Far more quieter than the Dell T320 and less heat funneling into the server room.
I’m going to sell the T320 which is also maxed out at 32 GB RAM, so I’ll have more $$ to replace the other T320. Winner winner chicken dinner.
I love it. The savings are real and can be immense.
I’m shocked with what I’ve been able to do with an old Dell SFF desktop.
Upgraded to 48GB of ram it’s running ESXi hosting a couple Debian VMs, a DietPi VM, 3 Windows VMs, a massive data drive, idles under 20w and peaks at 80w when I’m doing video conversion.
At this point I’m shopping for some old mini PCs to run the VMs as independent servers because their idle power is so low.
Same: https://lemmy.world/post/47654461/24048649
I’m looking for a couple more Optiplex 7020 SFF or similar and just get rid of all the heavy equipment.
This is the way to Go!
I have a HP Elitedesk 800 G4 Mini which is running everything (besides storage) in my Home Network. You can Look at the Tiny/Mini/Micro section at Serve the Home https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
Yeah, I was looking earlier, and sort of didn’t know what to even look for, but then everyone here made suggestions of what to look for. I’m all over this!
Idk if you ever wander over to Reddit, but there’s a poster in /r/homelabsales selling 7 Dell mini PC systems right now.
Thanks- I found an old laptop to give things a test run. I’ll do some thin client shopping once I cut my teeth a bit.
Have fun! It’s a great hobby.
Thanks - I’ve put it off for a while, and didn’t realize how easy this all was to set up!
Get a NUC or old laptop and install your distro of choice on it. Much less hassle than barely supported ARM boards with ancient kernels.
It probably isn’t going to cost less to get something without wifi.
Lenovo thinkcentre tinys
Going directly against your ask: a raspberry pi 3b is cheap and has what you need. :)
Get an old Android phone, possibly with a dead screen (bootloader must be unlocked). Flash PostmarketOS on it, or (if not supported) Termux. Its idle usage (with WiFi on, screen off) may be considerably less than 1w. It’ll have considerable amounts of CPU cores and RAM, more than a cheap VPS.
Nanopi. I have a couple. They’re not bad.
