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!
I’ve used a RockPro64 and a Rock Pi 4 for that purpose before. They do it quite well.
The main reason people recommend Raspberry Pi’s when talking SBCs is the software support (OS choices) and comminity size.
No one in the SBC industry beats Raspberry Pi at those things, and they can be quite important ones.
I just bought a Mac mini for $50 from a local university’s surplus store. I plan to use it as spare hdd space for another device (it came with a 1tb drive), but even being older, it’s still very capable.
Perhaps a similar device could work for you?We have two very prominent universities in the area. Around graduation I discreetly dumpster dive their trash bins. You’d be surprised what I’ve found. Laptops, desktops usually small form factor, monitors, you name it.
you mean, unseparated from the rest of the trash?
Yep, I forgot we have an older MBP that can still manage minimums for Docker. Already had redlib up on it.
If you dont need an sbc or something arm based mini pcs/thin clients/laptops work well. I run redlib, yamtrack and a monero node on hp t630 w/ 16GB ram (bought before the rampocalypse for ~ $60) and a torrent seedbox/streaming nas on wyse 3040 (~$10). Here’s a great website about thin clients https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
I have a 16GB ram HP t630 running vaultwarden (bought for £50) and some other stuff and a HP ProDesk 400 G5 16GB ram (bought for £100) running jellyfin & immich. They’re great. I also have a Wyse 3040 that I intend to run as pihole, just haven’t got round to it yet.
Thanks - I think a NUC/thin client will be how I end up going. I just didn’t even think about them in terms of meeting the criteria of “small thing I can leave running and not care about.” I think I still have an old laptop my partner used to use that would work, which might be my tester.
I was looking at bee-link a while back, shame prices have gone through the roof on everything though.
Yeah I grabbed a… Mele quieter or something back in November to replace the noisy greenpower thing I’d had for about 2 years and I got a bit more back than what I spent on it, looking at the mele tiny pc today and it’s doubled in price since I got it. So far it’s been nice though, passive cooling unlike the noisy fan on the other one.
Have a look at DietPi. That is a single-board-computer optimized Linux distribution that, in contradiction to what the name might suggest, runs on (almost) all of the SBC’s out there. It has stripped away all the things you don’t need and only installs and loads what is needed to run the software you choose, resulting in a very lightweight but powerful operating system for these kinds of devices. It has its own software catalog with a broad selection of optimized software, but you can of course install anything you want. Ive been running this on a Raxda Rock4 without any problems, and would definitely suggest this even on a Raspberry over the regular Pi image.
Plus one for Dietpi here. It really simplified installing all my services on a Pi Zero, and it’s available for most chinese SMB brands and x86 too. If I can find an used thin client for 60 euros with low shipping costs I’ll definitely use Dietpi.
Will do, thanks!
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.
Scrounge an old laptop, maybe super cheap if the screen isn’t completely working. Plug in a monitor to deal with screen problems.
Yeah, that’s my fallback idea. I would sort of prefer the ease of a single board option I can just shove behind the router, but this might be easier.
Note that I have seen a lot of people make some really cool “rehousings” of their laptops to turn them into transparent boxes mounted to the wall, usually made of something like acrylic. They look awesome, but haven’t tried it myself since I just self-host using my laptop in its original chassis
Power demand on an old laptop might actually cost you more in the long run.
How many cents per month would you estimate? Would it break the bank?
1 to 2€ a month is a fair baseline IMO.
You won’t get under that with a raspberry either without deep tinkering (tinkering you can apply to a laptop too ofc).
Around £100 a year from 50w, if you run this for several years then you tell me if that matters.
Yeah don’t get a server-laptop lol.
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…
This was my approach. Broken screen? Who cares! It’ll run headless anyway. Dead battery? Whatever, I’ll be plugged in 24/7.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PoE Power over Ethernet RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer
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Also to consider are NUCs. I for one got a Firebat with N100 and 8 or 16 GB of RAM and it was already a few years ago cheaper than a RPi 4.
N100 CPU beats any SBC in every aspect except maybe power? Still very low consumption tho. This will leave you headroom for years of selfhosting, because once you get going, there is no coming back.
Nothing more valuable in privacy terms than keeping your photos off the cloud (immich), then data off the cloud (copyparty, nextcloud,…). It never stops and the n100 will support that no problem.
N100/N150 doesn’t use that much more power and going for x64 instead of ARM could be a pretty big benefit too. Depends on what you want of course.
Awesome idea, thanks! I want something that can spend 99% of the time just hiding behind other consoles, and this would work perfectly for that.
Personally, I shuffle photos from my phone to my laptop and then backup manually, which is not awesome. Having my own cloud-based backups for that would be great. Might even get my partner to go for it, which is the hard sell.
I’m using soquartz compute modules on soquartz blades, because of the nvme slot and PoE. Just one cable for each is so nice in a tiny rack. They are running dietpi and docker swarm with dokploy.
I generally recommend the pine64 stuff, but shipping and tax might be high depending on where you live :/
Used Lenovo mini PCs are nice (m720q for example)
Or for example the Futro S740 if you do not need the power of the m720q
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. 🤣🤣
Great advice. I found an old laptop and I’m putting it through the paces now, and I’m really surprised at how easy all of this is. Setting up my own Invidious instance took minutes. Immich is where I’ll need to plateau out, I expect. My partner will immediately fill up the laptop by dumping her phone onto it, so that will need to wait for a long-term solution. That being said, a Lenovo mini whatever seems like a solid standard.
I have a RPI 4b and 3 lenovos (m93p, m710q, p330).
You can’t beat the RPI for power draw (~2w idle and ~7w under max load) but I suspect if you wanted to look at $ to utility measure you’d probably prefer the Lenovo M93P. $50 USD. Mine has i7-4785t, 16GB ddr3 (2x8iirc?) with ethernet, USB etc. Bought 2023/4. I expect base model is still that price now (mines upgraded). The only caveat is that it doesn’t have HDMI, it has display port out, but that’s just a $5 dongle or SSH issue. M73 would be a touch cheaper.
Iirc the TDP is 35w max and can be lowered / undervolted a touch (don’t update the BIOS - it blocks throtlestop).
I turned mine into a retro PC slash game server for the kids (luanti etc). But the siren call of doing truly impossible things with the RPI is too beguiling :)
Eg: running diet pi (headless) with all of my services (media stack, privacy, docs, search, images etc) takes about 300 megabytes (or 650mb if I have to boot into xfce).
300mb, 2-3w.
That shouldn’t be possible. I love it.
My next goal is to create an expert system / pseudo llm that sources answers based on user provided markdown or PDF, ZIM files and 4get search or Tavily.
The advantage here is that 1) speed will be stupid fast as no neural network crap (outside of optional extra Markov chain garnish) 2) not stochastic (but allow for llm as optional “plug in module” - pi might actually run a 135M at non glacial speeds) 3) still serves openAI compat endpoint.
Thanks for this, this sounds like where I’m headed. I just hadn’t even considered thin clients/mini PCs, and it sounds like a lot of people are using Lenovos for this exact thing. I’m not at the point yet of doing something big, just small home lab, but I would like to get to the point of hosting immich for the family, and maybe having an LLM or SD in there at some point. But by then I’m hoping the RAMpocalypse is easing up. For now, it’s just privacy front ends until I know what I’m doing.
Go for it! The m73 is cheap enough (and powerful enough) to run all that and ddr3 is still not insane (say, 2x8gb 1600mhz sodimm if want / need). $100 or so, all up, if you shop around / your local market pending.
Raspberry pi is more elegant / more constrained / more “fuck you, figure it out” but unless you need the challenge, Lenovo is simpler and all around easier first step :). You can’t stick a gpu in it (I think the m920 is the oldest one that has pcie - dunno what they go for. The usual combo is something like a 920 and a Quadro P1000 4GB GPU. Maybe ~$300 all up if we’re guessing. At which point, there are better, non shoe box options)
Nanopi. I have a couple. They’re not bad.
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
