I’m still interested in Self-Hosting but I actually tried getting into self-hosting a year or so ago. I bought a s***** desktop computer from Walmart, and installed window server 2020 on it to try to practice on that.
Thought I could use it to put some bullet points on my resume, and maybe get into self hosting later with next cloud. I ended up not fully following through because I felt like I needed to first buy new editions of the server administration and network infrastructure textbooks I had learned from a decade prior, before I could continue with giving it an FQDN, setting it up as a primary DNS Server, or pointing it at one, and etc.
So it was only accessible on my LAN, because I was afraid of making it a remotely accessible server unless I knew I had good firewall rules, and had set up the primary DNS server correctly, and ultimately just never finished setting it up. The most ever accomplished was getting it working as a file server for personal storage, and creating local accounts with usernames and passwords for both myself and my mom, whom I was living with at the time. It could authenticate remote access through our local Wi-Fi, but I never got further.
My home server runs on an old desktop PC, bought at a discounter. But as we have bought several identical ones, we have both parts to upgrade them (RAM!) as well as organ donors for everything else.
7th gen intel, 96GB mismatched ram, 4 used 10TB HDD, one 12 with a broken sata connector that only works because it’s sitting just right in a sled. A couple of 14’s one M.2 and two sataSSD. It’s running Unraid with 2 VM’s (plex and Home Assistant), one of which has corrupted itself 3 times. A 1080 and a 2070.
I can get several streams off it at once, but not while it’s running parity check and it can’t handle 4k transcoding.
It’s not horrible, but I couldn’t do what I do now with less :)
Running a bunch of services here on a i3 PC I built for my wife back in 2010. I’ve since upgraded the RAM to 16GB, added as many hard drives as there are SATA ports on the mobo, re-bedded the heatsink, etc.
It’s pretty much always ran on Debian, but all services are on Docker these days so the base distro doesn’t matter as much as it used to.
I’d like to get a good backup solution going for it so I can actually use it for important data, but realistically I’m probably just going to replace it with a NAS at some point.
It’s not absolutely shit, it’s a Thinkpad t440s with an i7 and 8gigs of RAM and a completely broken trackpad that I ordered to use as a PC when my desktop wasn’t working in 2018. Started with a bare server OS then quickly realized the value of virtualization and deployed Proxmox on it in 2019. Have been using it as a modest little server ever since. But I realize it’s now 10 years old. And it might be my server for another 5 years, or more if it can manage it.
In the host OS I tweaked some value to ensure the battery never charges over 80%. And while I don’t know exactly how much electricity it consumes on idle, I believe it’s not too much. Works great for what I want. The most significant issue is some error message that I can’t remember the text of that would pop up, I think related to the NIC. I guess Linux and the NIC in this laptop have/had some kind of mutual misunderstanding.
I used to selfhost on a core 2 duo thinkpad R60i. It had a broken fan so I had to hide it into a storage room otherwise it would wake up people from sleep during the night making weird noises. It was pretty damn slow. Even opening proxmox UI in the remotely took time. KrISS feed worked pretty well tho.
I have since upgraded to… well, nothing. The fan is KO now and the laptop won’t boot. It’s a shame because not having access to radicale is making my life more difficult than it should be. I use CalDAV from disroot.org but it would be nice to share a calendar with my family too.
Maybe a more reasonable question: Is there anyone here self-hosting on non-shit hardware? 😅
Rehabilitated HP z440 workstation, checking in! Popped in a used $20 e5-2620v4 xeon CPU and 64gb of RAM and it sails for my use cases. TrueNAS as the base OS and a TalOS k8’s cluster in a VM to handle apps. Old but gold.
10400F running my NAS/Plex server and raspberry pi 5 running PiHole
I have pi-hole on my Mac mini using docker but I stopped using it, it makes some things super laggy to load
Interesting, I haven’t had any issues with things loading with mine, maybe it’s your adlists causing issues? Try disabling some, there might be false positives in there giving you issues
I tried the default ones
It’s not top of the line, but my Ryzen 1700 is way overkill for my NAS. I’ll probably add a build server, not because I need it, but because I can.
I’m happy with my little N100
Me using Threadripper 7960X and R5 6600H for my servers: 🤭
You can pry my gen8 hp microserver from my cold, dead hands.
Enterprise level hardware costs a lot, is noisy and needs a dedicated server room, old laptops cost nothing.
I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.
Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…
I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.
Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/
I started my self hosting journey on a Dell all-in-one PC with 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, and Intel Pentium, running Proxmox, Nextcloud, and I think Home Assistant. I upgraded it eventually, now I’m on a build with Ryzen 3600, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, and 4x4 TB HDD
My first server was a single-core Pentium - maybe even 486 - desktop I got from university surplus. That started a train of upgrading my server to the old desktop every 5-or-so years, which meant the server was typically 5-10 years old. The last system was pretty power-hungry, though, so the latest upgrade was an N100/16 GB/120 GB system SSD.
I have hopes that the N100 will last 10 years, but I’m at the point where it wouldn’t be awful to add a low-cost, low-power computer to my tech upgrade cycle. Old hardware is definitely a great way to start a self-hosting journey.
Somehow Jellyfin works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1366x768 ?? WTF
This was common in budget laptops 10 years ago. I had a Asus laptop with the same resolution and I have seen others with this resolution as well
Here in Brazil, there are still a lot of laptops, monitors and tvs being sold with that resolution.
That’s a whole 86x48 more than 1280x720!
😆nice
I just learned that this resolution resulted from 4:3 screens which got some wideness added to reach 16:9 from an awesome person in this comment thread 😊
I had to check the post not logged in, weirdly I only see your comment when I’m logged in, but yeah, I (almost) only ever ssh into it, so I never really noticed the resolution until you pointed it out
Some old netbook I guess, or unsupported hardware and a driver default. If all you need is ssh, the display resolution hardly matters.
Sure, just never saw this numbers for resolution, ever 😆
Most 720p TVs (“HD Ready”) used to be that resolution since they re-used production lines from 1024x768 displays
Ahh, I see, they took the 4:3 Standard screen and let it grow to 16:9, that makes a lot of sense 😃
I am to young for knowing 4:3 resolutions 😆
My NAS is on an embedded Xeon that at this point is close to a decade old and one of my proxmox boxes is on an Intel 6500t. I’m not really running anything on any really low spec machines anymore, though earlyish in the pandemic I was running boinc with the Open Pandemics project on 4 raspberry pis.
Plex server is running on my old Threadripper 1950X. Thing has been a champ. Due to rebuild it since I’ve got newer hardware to cycle into it but been dragging my heels on it. Not looking forward to it.
Isn’t ryzen not recommended for transcoding? Plus, I’ve read that power efficiency isn’t great. Mostly regarding idle power consumption.
Ryzen is not recommended for transcoding because the Radeon integrated GPU’s encoding accelerator is not as fast as in intel iGPUs. But this does not come into play if you A) have 16 cores and B) don’t even have an integrated GPU.
And about idle power consumption: I don’t think it’s a point of interest if you are using a workstation class computer.
I think it’s a point of a interest for any hw running 24/7 but you do you.
Regarding transcoding, are you saying you’re not even doing it? If you are, doing it with your cpu is far more inefficient than using a gpu. But again, different strokes I guess.
Dunno whether they are transcoding or not nor why they have such a bizarre setup. But I would hope 16C/32T CPU from 2017 could handle software transcoding. Also peak power consumption while playing a movie does not really matter compared to idle power consumption. What matters more is that the motherboard is probably packed with pcie slots that consume a lot of power. But to OP it probably does not matter if they use a threadripper.
I would hope 16C/32T CPU from 2017 could handle software transcoding
I didn’t say it couldn’t handle it. Just that it was very inefficient.
peak power consumption while playing a movie does not really matter compared to idle power consumption
I mentioned both things. Did you actually read my comments?
I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.
I thought it was nearing death anyways, since the power button only worked if the computer was flipped upside down. I have no idea why this was the case, the computer would keep running normally afterwards once turned right side up.
The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely, it was RAID0 and I wouldn’t have downloaded anything useful), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.
It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn’t subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn’t going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn’t justify its continued operation.
Always wanted am x3, just such an oddball thing, I love this. I had a 965 x4
The X3 CPUs were essentially quad cores where one of the cores failed a quality control check. Using a higher end Mobo, it was possible to unlock the fourth core with varying results. This was a cheap consumer Acer prebuilt though, so I didn’t have that option.
Maybe not shit, but exotic at that time, year 2012.
The first Raspberry Pi, model B 512 MB RAM, with an external 40 GB 3.5" HDD connected to USB 2.0.It was running ARM Arch BTW.
Next, cheap, second hand mini desktop Asus Eee Box.
32 bit Intel Atom like N270, max. 1 GB RAM DDR2 I think.
Real metal under the plastic shell.
Could even run without active cooling (I broke a fan connector).This was my media server and kodi player for like 3 years…still have my Pi 1 lying around. Now I have a shitty Chinese desktop I built this year with i5 3rd. Gen with 8gb ram
I have one of these that I use for Pi-hole. I bought it as soon as they were available. Didn’t realise it was 2012, seemed earlier than that.
What’re you hosting on them?
Mainly telemetry, like temperature inside, outside.
Script to read a data and push it into a RRD, later PostreSQL.
ligthttpd to serve static content, later PHP.Once it served as a bridge, between LAN and LTE USB modem.
7 websites, Jellyfin for 6 people, Nextcloud, CRM for work, email server for 3 domains, NAS, and probably some stuff I’ve forgotten on a $4 computer from a tiny thrift store in BFE Kansas. I’d love to upgrade, but I’m always just filled with joy whenever I think of that little guy just chugging along.
Interested in how it does jellyfin, decent GPU or something else?
It does fine. It’s an i5-6500 running CPU transcoding only. Handles 2-3 concurrent 1080p streams just fine. Sometimes there’s a little buffering if there’s transcoding going on. I try to keep my files at 1080p for storage reasons though. This thing’s not going to handle 4k transcoding very well, but it does okay if you don’t expect too much from it.
I’m skeptical that you are doing much video transcoding anyway. 1080p is supported on must devices now, and h264 is best buddies with 1080p content - a codec supported even on washing machines. Audio may be transcoded more often.
Not a huge amount of transcoding happening, but some for old Chromecasts and some for low bandwidth like when I was out of the country a few weeks ago watching from a heavily throttled cellular connection. Most of my collection is h264, but I’ve got a few h265 files here and there. I am by no means recommending my setup as ideal, but it works okay.
Absolutely, whatever works for you. I think its awesome to use the cheapest hardware possible to do these things. Being able to use a media server without transcoding capabilities? Brilliant. I actually thought you’d probably be able to get away with no transcoding at all since 1080p has native support on most devices and so does h264. In the rare cases, you could transcode beforehand (like with a script whenever a file is added) so you’d have an appropriate format on hand when needed.
Most of my content is h265 and av1 so I assume they are also facing a similar issue. I usually use the jellyfin app on PC or laptop so not an issue but my family members usually use the old TV which doesn’t support it.
AV1 is definitely a showstopper a lot of the time indeed. H265 I would expect to see more on 2k or 4k content (though native support is really high anyway). My experience so far has been seeing transcoding done only becuase the resolution is unsupported when I try watching 4k videos on an older 1080p only chromecast.
Hell yeah, keep chugging little guy 🤘
Heck yeah
Which CRM please?
EspoCRM. I really like it for my purposes. I manage a CiviCRM instance for another job that needs more customization, but for basic needs, I find espo to be beautiful, simple, and performant.
Sweeeeet thank you! Demo looks great. Now to figure out whether an uber n00ber can self host it in a jiffy or not. 🙏
