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!
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.
A larger sized used motherboard or even a new cheap one often has more capability if you can deal with something that is larger…
Oh, I can deal with something that’s larger…
-wait, not like that.
Cheeky.
I run a RockPro64 with Arch Arm. No need for a monitor - you just connect over SSH.
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’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.
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 see a ton of i5-8th gen 2-in-1s with dead batteries, but under 100 on ebay
Lenovo thinkcentre tinys
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.
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
It probably isn’t going to cost less to get something without wifi.
Nanopi. I have a couple. They’re not bad.
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)
I went rpi4>n100> a couple n100s and that pi> the dxp4800, I think it’s a pentium, and those n100s. I think I’m ok here, I have networking, compute + local backup, and storage all in their own box.
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.
