by Nilrem404 on 7/19/23, 7:14 PM with 95 comments
I live in an apartment, so unfortunately I cannot run full fat rack mounted equipment for space, heat, and noise reasons. Also, a partner who isn't keen on the sight of it
I was thinking maybe some small thinkcenter or dell micro PCs + a NAS (Thinking QNAP because they are cheaper). Lower TDP would be great too. Power costs are a concern.
Thinking about Nextcloud, plex, jellyfin, home assistant, local backups, etc... I know that it evolves quickly
by nicbou on 7/20/23, 7:13 AM
https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/home-server
The other is my timeline thing. I love the idea, but messed up the implementation. It's a bloated mess that I dread working on. It should be a presentation layer for my /backup directory, not an opinionated backup solution cum data archive management system.
I plan to rewrite it into a much simpler project.
https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline
The last one is Syncthing, since a week or two. It's much simpler than Google Drive or the timeline thing's elaborate rsync setup, so it will replace both.
A while ago, I read that "a person's main task is not computing, but being human". This has heavily influenced my relationship with technology, including the tech I create for myself. I want calm technology that blends into my life, and self-hosted software is rarely that.
by majkinetor on 7/19/23, 7:57 PM
External drive, 18 TB
hosts bunch of web services 24/7 - calibre, jelyfin, qbittorent, hfs web server to host files, tailscale vpn etc. The 4k projector, TV, and HiFi are connected to it. I can even do programming on it from the sofa when I feel like it.
great for surfing the web, hording, media and even games.
basically 0 maintenance
I hate dedicated stuff like synology, and non-applications they provide - its too much work and configuration, too expensive too and they feel toyish. I prefer OTB full OS (Windows 10 in my case) with normal tools (for example foobar player, vscode editor, doublecmd file manager, mvp video player, normal package manager) and easy to use and replace stuff. For example, I use another external drive for periodic backups, with custom powershell scripts that do incremental backups and verify them, disconnected all the time until backup should be done (to protect from viruses and surges). I can take backup drive with me for offline consumption of all the data, or access my network via VPN (you definitelly need offline access to your data as internet connection may suck when you are not at home)
Its all under 1k EUR.
by remedan on 7/19/23, 10:12 PM
- 12th Gen Intel NUC with an i7-1260P, 64GB of RAM and 1TB NVMe drive
- Synology DS920+ with three 10TB WD Red drives, NVMe cache and upgraded RAM
- Mikrotik hAP ac3 router
- APC Back-UPS BX 750VA UPS
I monitor the power consumption with a smart plug and Home Assistant. It averages around 100W for everything above.
The stuff that I have running includes Gitea, Matrix, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Home Assistant, and some small websites.
If you're interested, here's what it all looks like, running next to me as I type this in my kitchen/office: https://i.imgur.com/duOM2Bh.jpg
by 28304283409234 on 7/20/23, 7:55 AM
Mostly services just run native on Debian. Gitlab, a few websites, Nextcloud, Minecraft. All data is located in /data which I backup once a year since family pictures are not more important than my time.
by stevefan1999 on 7/20/23, 10:23 AM
AMD EPYC 7302 in Supermicro H11SSL-i rev 1. hacked to use Rome CPU (as the microcode can be replaced in BIOS update, this saved quite a few bucks)
128GB DDR4 ECC RAM
2x 1TB NVMe drives
2x 14TB hard drives
Running Proxmox, Kubernetes, Ceph, a couple of game servers and my personal Docker passthough server (you can actually use Docker remotely, with the caveat that local mount binds are not available). In the future it will also run my Github Actions self hosted runner and a couple more CI workers. Basically using it as my Threadripper alternative (the parts are all decommisioned server hardware that comes in cheap -- even the CPU is quite cheap to say the least)
by sirpilade on 7/19/23, 7:41 PM
by jkingsman on 7/19/23, 8:34 PM
by raphaelj on 7/19/23, 8:18 PM
It's basically like a Raspberry Pi, but with a beefier GPU. It's not extremely fast, but is decent as a web and file server.
TDP is extremely low, 3W idle, 8W top.
by rtchau on 7/20/23, 5:53 AM
If I'd change anything, I'd turn the Khadas into a media PC and plug it into my TV and retire my broken old AppleTV (some older generation that doesn't allow installing apps), I'll inherit my wife's 12" Macbook and add wire it up the same way as the other one, and then get rid of the i5 and bring the power consumption down a bit (the Core M-5 in the 12" Macbook is surprisingly powerful, and with the I/O on the Macbook, it'd beat the i5 hands-down, aside from the RAM limitations). At some point I'd love to build a small cluster of ARM boards when they step up in capability a bit (and when I can find some reasonably priced ones that can support 32GB RAM or more), and then any dev stuff I do can run in minikube or something similar. I'd like to play around with RISC-V at some point too.
For your purposes... I'd recommend a thin formfactor with a decent CPU, 64GB RAM and as much storage as you can stuff into it, then run TrueNAS.
by ja27 on 7/19/23, 8:49 PM
Newest is a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini, i7-6700T, 32GB RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD. I had the SSD, the machine was ~$100US on eBay, and came with 1 stick of 16GB RAM so a matching second was only ~$24. I think right now I could pick up the same for about $200 including the SSD. It runs Proxmox with a few VMs for Minecraft, dev work, a Windows desktop, etc. Really a pretty capable machine for light-ish duty. I can barely hear the fan most of the time and just 35W TDP.
Older is a Gigabyte Brix with a Celeron J4105, 8GB RAM, and an M.2 SATA SSD. It's primarily been my Plex server but hosts a couple Docker containers and a website. It has four external USB3 hard drives. They're getting pretty old but I sometimes see them pop up in usable configs for ~$100 on eBay. I normally never hear the fan (the hard drives are louder) and just 10W TDP.
I'm really considering getting another ultra small form factor like that HP, but with the 7th gen i7 so it has hardware support for encoding HEVC / H265.
I've also had an old i3 Thinkpad running until recently. Also nearly silent and bonus that it has it's own battery and display/keyboard when I need to debug something.
by JLCarveth on 7/19/23, 8:11 PM
by sdflhasjd on 7/19/23, 8:27 PM
It tops out at a higher power, but idle is something like 15 watts, so still low enough to forget about.
by PuffinBlue on 7/19/23, 8:52 PM
Each run proxmox, clustered together. Very cheap, low power and surprisingly not terrible. No fans so quiet too.
These aren't going to be good for Plex though. But the rest they'll do just fine.
For plex you probably want something like a NAS (bought or self made), with a good GPU for hardware transcoding. Note that doesn't necessarily mean separate GPU, I think you might be able to use quicksync on most Intel CPUs now.
I have a dedicated TrueNAS Scale box with something like 48TB of raw SSD storage running Emby in the official apps. And the stuff to populate said SSD storage with media. Bit overkill really, but fun.
Also have another big 32 thread AMD machine for 'work' home labbing - i.e. learning, tinkering and breaking stuff. It's separate from my personal cluster for security and for reasons of the personal stuff being a bit more important to me that it runs, hence the cluster and failover.
by stavros on 7/19/23, 8:27 PM
by Dachande663 on 7/19/23, 8:54 PM
by dusted on 7/19/23, 8:36 PM
A supermicro motherboard with a 1.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2603v3 CPU. 32 GiB ECC memory.
Operating system on a 256 GiB samsung SSD. Main storage on 8x12 TiB HGST HUH721212ALE604 in zfs raidz2 Secondary (backup) storage on 4x5 TiB HGST HDN726050ALE614, zfs zraid2 (only some things are backed up to this). Storage controllers are just plain sata controllers on the motherboard + 2x pcie sata controllers.
Tertiary backup storage on supermicro server that I got for cheap, actually a faster machine, only 16 GiB ram, but 2x xeons, faster ones. That chassis has 36 disk slots on SAS backplanes and SAS controller.. But the machine is older and uses more electricity so I only manually turn it on every 2 months to sync (using zfs send/recv), the disks in that is whatever random stuff I find.
by captn3m0 on 7/19/23, 8:31 PM
It stays in the TV cabinet in our living room.
by disambiguation on 7/19/23, 9:25 PM
My always-on-device is some old PC parts (i7, 32g ram) running unraid on 2 ssd's (256g in parity) and docker services. For example this where Jellyfin will run while mounting assets remotely from the 720.
Finally, I have a brocade switch and a protectli box laying around that I've been saving for a rainy day to setup opnSense and 10G networking.
by chazeon on 7/19/23, 9:09 PM
I also have a FriendlyELEC, an arm box that is running OpenWRT as a router and also serves Ubiquiti's controller.
There is two part of software/hardware I should be retiring/moving; both are Homebridge, one on Raspberry Pi Zero W and one on another Windows PC Hyper-V Ubuntu, but I just don't have time to move them yet. The Raspberry Pi Zero is especially annoying because it is so underpowered that it feels painful to wait for anything to upgrade.
by rootusrootus on 7/19/23, 8:10 PM
I probably should have stuck with ESXi. Running Home Assistant as HAOS has some conveniences that may be worthwhile depending on how much like you to tinker. But it also runs totally fine in a Docker container and that has it's own upsides.
by gh123man on 7/19/23, 8:49 PM
I wanted a NUC, but as it turns out a used laptop on Ebay could fetch the same specs (i7-1185G7, 16gb) for less than half the price of the equivalent NUC (without an SSD or memory).
An added bonus is you get a UPS and KVM included!
by jhot on 7/20/23, 4:54 AM
Compute is more sleek. I have an AsRock DeskMeet with an i5 12400, GTX 1650 super, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB m.2. Running around 25 containers and not even having to work hard. The GPU handles transcodes for both Plex and Jellyfin, and most volumes are NFS shares from the NAS.
This iteration of hardware has been running since early this year and it's very performant and quiet. I took out all the fans but the 200mm exhaust in the NAS and can only hear the DeskMeet when the CPU fan really kicks up.
by galkk on 7/20/23, 9:03 AM
For small stuff I have raspberry 4b 4gb and 2 drive symbology nas.
I have gaming asus router axe-11000, but want to switch to 10gb Ethernet, and that will lead to upgrading nas too. A lot of stuff is limited by the fact that I’m renting so even dropping cable to fiber modem in garage was adventure
For storage I have
by anderspitman on 7/19/23, 8:47 PM
by theandrewbailey on 7/19/23, 7:29 PM
i7-2600
16 GB RAM
2 hard drives: 1.5 TB system, 14 TB network storage
Runs:
HAProxy
A custom written blog on Payara
PostgreSQL
Funkwhale
Pi-Hole
ReadyMedia/miniDLNA
nginx (for webdav)
Used to run Jitsi and Ergo IRCd, but haven't needed them anymore
Since I've recently moved my daily driver desktop to the basement (with the help of long cables and a hole in the floor), I might eventually use KVM to run them off the same box.
by kevincox on 7/19/23, 7:52 PM
I run Jellyfin, Torrents, some backups, Minecraft, Matrix server, a Matrix bridge, Metabase, Mumbe server Navidrome and a few odds and ends.
by 1MachineElf on 7/19/23, 8:31 PM
by bravetraveler on 7/19/23, 9:39 PM
CPU: Threadripper 2920x
RAM: 128GB DDR4-3600 (ECC would make more sense, I think)
Disk: RAID1 gen4 NVMe for the OS, two 5x5TB RAIDZ-2 volumes for long term storage
GPU: Arc A750 for transcoding
NIC: *bonded* 10GbE (SFP would be cheaper)
This is mainly a NAS/transcoding box that happens to run a lot of VMs -- varying purposes, mostly what you'd expect with testing a lot of Ansible
by vogon_laureate on 7/20/23, 6:47 PM
by jmpwat on 7/19/23, 8:25 PM
I also have a dell micro with a 6th gen i7 and 16GB ram I use as my primary windows machine, but previously it was hosting all the aforementioned services by itself.
I'd go with some kind of mini PC and an external drive or two, or direct attached storage rather than a synology
by BrandoElFollito on 7/19/23, 9:39 PM
The main server is an old tower, ca. 6 years old. It costed 600€ at that time: a Skylake processor and 12 GB RAM. I use it to run about 20 services via docker (it includes the ones you mentioned). It is more than enough.
I used to have a small PC (chinese, bought on Aliexpress for about 150€ I think) to run Pihole (filtering, DHCP, DNS) but I moved it to my Internet box (yes, we have internet boxes that allow you to run VMs on them).
This with a Cisco switch, a Ubiquity AP and a UPS.
Total power is 60W, the temperature is around 35°C.
by electricant on 7/20/23, 8:25 AM
It sports 4GB RAM an old 64 GB SSD for the operating system (debian) and three 2 TB HDDs in a btrfs RAID1 array giving ~3TB of usable space which is plenty for my own needs.
It runs the following services:
- DNS server (unbound + custom domain filtering)
- Syncthing
- OpenVPN client & server
- PostgreSQL + lighttpd + PHP for various small websites
- Samba & NFS
- Transmission (for linux distros of course)
by andrewmunsell on 7/19/23, 8:47 PM
The N100 is slightly more expensive but also has an even lower TDP.
What's nice is that for software that can use an Intel iGPU for hardware video transcoding, these are more than powerful enough to do so and yet draw significantly less power than a full fat GPU. Unless you want to run an LLM or something like Stable Diffusion...
by popey on 7/20/23, 1:54 PM
by syntaxing on 7/19/23, 11:00 PM
As for the server backup, I just use active business backup on the Synology NAS which does rolling snapshots of the whole volume.
by elehemeare on 7/19/23, 8:16 PM
~700GB of cache/ container volumes on the 2.5"s as a mergerfs pool, ~38T across the HDDs in mergerfs+snapraid.
Noise and heat are kept at a meaningfully low level, and the case blends in appropriately with the living room. All the normal home-cloud workloads, along with k8s homelab stuff (so I can computer janitor in my free time).
by Netcob on 7/19/23, 8:43 PM
by breakds on 7/20/23, 5:05 AM
1) a NAS/Server with 10700 + 12 TB HDD x 15 forming a ZFS, with 128GB of RAM.
2) A pair of machine learning servers, each of them with a threadripper 3955wx, 256GB RAM and two 4090s
3) A more powerful machine learning server, with a threadripper 5975wx, 512GB RAM and two 4090s.
All of them run NixOS. They are mainly used to serve a bunch of services: hydra/nix binary cache, shiori, grafana/prometheus, paperless, syncthing, filerun, assistant etc. And also training jobs all the time.
I would highly recommend NixOS to run on your servers for the services.
by CharlesW on 7/19/23, 8:42 PM
My use cases are similar to yours, and I recently "upgraded" from an 8-bay QNAP NAS filled with 4TB drives (RAID 6) to a 2-bay QNAP NAS (TS-233) with very large hard drives (RAID 1). The TS-262 and TS-264 have some interesting upgrades over that base model.
by erulabs on 7/19/23, 8:17 PM
That said, I use an old workstation as my home router and server. It’s worth the power bills in saved subscription cost alone. Much more relevant is how much of my time I spend on it!
by packetlost on 7/19/23, 9:40 PM
Another host built with consumer components: MiniITX with a Ryzen 2700X that was pulled from my main desktop when I upgraded. It runs most services that I actually use, including Plex which has a NFS mount to the above mentioned NAS.
3 Orange Pi 5 Plus SBCs that I recently set up for distributed application and ARM testing.
If I was starting from scratch, I'd buy a Synology Diskstation for NAS and a couple cheapo Ryzen Mini PCs.
by thedanbob on 7/20/23, 11:45 AM
by cagey on 7/19/23, 9:00 PM
[1] https://dirvish.org/ [2] https://github.com/pauldreik/rdfind
by jrey2112 on 7/19/23, 8:52 PM
I had a 7 year old QNAP which eventually died. I was able to purchase this one and move my drives over after updating the internal software first. Nothing lost. I then one by one took out my 4TB drives and replaced with 16TB drives, then expanded the space. Everything "just worked".
by jqpabc123 on 7/19/23, 7:46 PM
by Dah00n on 7/19/23, 8:19 PM
There's also a enterprise HP switch where I disabled the fan and it reports "temperature normal" even though it is in the same cabinet. Fibre to OPNsense in the living room.
It doesn't have to be complicated or pretty.
by marapuru on 7/19/23, 8:30 PM
Their systems were relatively cheap and perform well. Community is a bit smaller as opposed to the Synology one though.
by lwhsiao on 7/19/23, 8:49 PM
That's a full-custom build with a used AMD EPYC, Asrock Rack ROMED8-2T, and a boatload of HDDs, which fit great in a Fractal Design 7, which seems to match your desire for not-a-rack.
by lousken on 7/19/23, 10:24 PM
by tonfreed on 7/20/23, 1:59 PM
Also have another rack server incoming, which I'm going to make into an openstack aio and run all my fun side projects on it so my wife stops complaining about me leaving my desktop on overnight
by dmitrygr on 7/19/23, 8:23 PM
by t0mas88 on 7/19/23, 8:54 PM
Only limitation is that it doesn't have ethernet ports, so I needed a USB 3 to ethernet adapter. But those exist in usb-hub form and work quite well.
by eiiot on 7/22/23, 5:10 PM
by imagetic on 7/19/23, 8:37 PM
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/ for a desktop or shelf sized unit, those are actually quite nice, and repairable with off the shelf hardware.
by starttoaster on 7/19/23, 8:26 PM
The NUCs run my HA kubernetes cluster and all the apps I run out of my home. The Pis are primarily for playing around. The NAS is my general NFS server storage which mostly gets used by my k8s cluster.
by dijit on 7/19/23, 8:36 PM
Synology NAS with a bunch of 16TiB drives.
Runs basically everything I want including a gitlab instance (which is externally accessible: https://git.drk.sc )
by MattPalmer1086 on 7/19/23, 11:10 PM
I replaced it with a raspberry pi 4, with 2 external 4Tb usb drives. Runs Plex, and handles all the backups of other machines on my network. Very low power, a little slow I guess, but works well enough for me.
by pwpw on 7/20/23, 1:34 PM
by vigeek on 7/19/23, 7:56 PM
Running a bunch of virtual machines. Plenty of power, stays cool and takes up very little room.
by doubled112 on 7/20/23, 12:38 PM
I also have a 16GB Orange Pi 5 with a 500G NVMe running some things. It’s surprisingly powerful.
by swizzler on 7/19/23, 8:40 PM
by digitalsanctum on 7/19/23, 8:31 PM
Depending on your use case, maybe just run a couple $5 machines on DigitalOcean?
by tmaly on 7/20/23, 12:25 AM
by martin8412 on 7/19/23, 8:39 PM
by btgeekboy on 7/19/23, 8:44 PM
by NotYourLawyer on 7/19/23, 8:32 PM
by ThatMedicIsASpy on 7/19/23, 8:45 PM
Last BIOS update: December 15, 2022
Fedora Server + Docker: Nextcloud, Homeassistant, webdev, backups.
Idles at 25 Watt - 0% CPU & 1.4GB RAM.
by Kab1r on 7/19/23, 8:34 PM
by johnea on 7/19/23, 10:31 PM
128G of RAM
AUDHEID K7 case w/ 8x 3.5" hotswap bays
This is a low power, low noise rig that still serves...
by monkeydust on 7/19/23, 7:17 PM
by thefz on 7/19/23, 9:07 PM
And a bunch of HDDs, SSDs, NVMEs.
by grepfru_it on 7/20/23, 6:12 AM
60TB total space with each system having two 500gb ssds for the boot disk
by tristanb on 7/19/23, 8:29 PM
by pacifika on 7/20/23, 12:16 AM
by mamcx on 7/19/23, 9:15 PM
A mac mini + SSD enclosure is more than enough