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Comment by djanogo | Hacker News Reader

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200.

These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version with remote management.

Currently running a HP G2 bought on Offerup for $70 with i5-6600T, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD running Ubuntu server with HomeAssistant VM and few containers. It idles at 7w, with <2% CPU for my work load.

I tried Raspberry Pi with HomeAssistant with it's piss poor antique storage solution, it idled at 5W, it went straight back to store.

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> fan cooled

As if that is a benefit.

Putting a server in a corner of my home and forgetting about it is an application where I want the machine to be powerful enough to work without active cooling, as small as possible, and with no moving parts. None of these constraints is difficult to accomodate in this day and age.

Ya it's possible to build a fanless system, but Apple or any OEM with those parts is not going to sell you that system <$100. Not with out of the box compatibility with every x86 software out there.

The fan ramps based on usage, as I said, Ubuntu server with HASS OS, VS Code Server, Netdata monitoring, NodeRed, Sonos Airplay, InfluxDB and few other containers, it's barely gets to 2% CPU usage and CPU temp at 25C.

Look at Pi, they have been at it for SO many years and that shit is slow with no real storage interface, they are only faster compared to their own previous generation.

> and that shit is slow with no real storage interface

We were talking about using it for a home automation system, which is just a very low traffic web server with some odds and ends. We are not talking about competing in the TOP500 or something. It's easily doable with a newer Pi.

I do like some of the thin clients you can get cheap off eBay. A used Dell Wyse 3040 only costs a bit more than a Pi, and gives me full x86. Still no fan. If I didn't have a stack of Raspberry Pis, that would be my choice with the shortages.

I would probably move my Home Assistant setup to one if I hadn't preordered their Home Assistant Yellow board which has built-in Zigbee and other features.

I did that too but those PCs are just stupidly massive for the purpose. Raspberry Pi 4s don’t require SD cards any more so the storage issue is moot. My RPi sits next to my router now, you wouldn’t even know it’s there unless you looked closely.

> My RPi sits next to my router now

Some brave souls have installed Home Assistant on their routers: https://www.snbforums.com/threads/home-assistant-entware-gt-...

Did you read the part which says "micro", these are about 2-3x the size of Pi with those cheap plastic cases. I had mine beside the router before I moved it inside TV console.

Pi will be single purpose device, the "micro" can be full blown server and comes with ALL parts required, no need to hunt for good PSU, case, cooling, storage. Some of them come with 1 Sata and 2x M.2 NVMe, so you can literally pass those NVMe to TrueNAS in proxmox and run full blown NAS with encryption/encoding/decoding in VM.

May be you mean 2-3x in every linear dimension but that still seem to be smaller than those in my mind. (While Mac mini is not known to be the smallest, it definitely exceeds 2-3x in some linear dimension already.) What kind you have in mind?

I just migrated all of my "production" home things to an HP Elitedesk 800 G3. It's great! Maxed out the ram and threw a 1TB SSD in. I'm using Proxmox and have:

* home assistant VM

* pi-hole primary LXC

* UniFi controller LXC

* media stack LXC (jellyfin is installed directly on the host to minimize hardware transcoding issues)

* a VM running various docker containers with dokku, including AppDaemon

It's barely ticking over most of the time and using very little energy.

We use zwave devices around the house and due to issues making zwave complex (RF + brick = bad, plus it's a very long house), I actually have a handful of Raspberry Pis with zwave sticks running zwavejs2mqtt scattered around. Yesterday I decided that I'm tired of dealing with the rPi-zero-W being so slow so I ordered a bunch of Dell Wyse 3040 thin clients off of eBay to replace them. Still trying to decide how I'm going to run them but probably it'll look something like Alpine diskless running docker and zwavejs2mqtt in a container.

Cool, and your elitedesk I believe comes with remote BIOS access with Intel vPro, that's even cooler, never have to plugin display.

Yeah. I haven't set that up yet after getting Proxmox up and running, but it's something that I should probably work on.

I've had such a good experience with this one that I keep trying to figure out if I can replace my Dell T20 minitower router running VyOS with one. The blocker is that the Dell actually has standard PCIe slots, whereas if I were to use a USFF I'd have to either go way up market to something like a Lenovo M920Q or accept USB ethernet adapters.

I have three Dell Optiplex micro PCs with vPro running Proxmox. It's so nice having full remote access to them, makes life so much easier.

I have similar services running on my synology nas w/ docker.

Where do you get the LXC container images from? I build most of mine from scratch because people on the Internet have no sense of propriety or taste, but now that means I'm maintaining a pile of Dockerfiles, which I never update in practice.

Proxmox has a template library. Most of my LXCs are just the Ubuntu 20.04 template with auto-updates turned on.

WHAT STORE DID YOU BRING THE PI TO? IS IT STILL THERE?

I'll second the recommendation for real PC hardware. Tinkering is fun up until it's not. When it becomes not fun is when something breaks, takes down a system you have come to rely on, and now it becomes work to recreate the functionality you used to take for granted. Seeing people go for the RPi for something they're going to put a lot of hours into makes me cringe a bit, having had several SD card filesystems get corrupt. If that's what it takes to get you started with self hosting, by all means go for it. But there is much nicer hardware for running servers on.

Having said that, I still use RPis for edge devices and the like.

PS I really like that idle power figure on your server. I wish there were a list of power consumption figures for integrated hardware, it seems quite hit or miss.

You can fix that SD problem by booting off a USB SSD instead. Much faster and more reliable.

I want to use a Pi4 8GB as an arm64 build host so I'm going the USB SSD route there. But adding on additional hardware ultimately seems like the "stone soup" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup) version of setting up a server.

Furthermore I'm hesitant to rely too much on the arm ecosystem in general. If one pops a drive with a Linux installation into any amd64 machine, it straightforwardly boots. Whereas just making an arm device boot can be its own tinkering session of figuring out its own bespoke partitioning scheme, firmware files, and U-boot image. Many times you're stuck using a non-mainline kernel since that's what the embedded developers hacked on to get something running. Devicetree compiler what? And sure, using a purpose-built distro can hide much of the complexity, until that distro decides your device is too old and drops support.

Heck, I've even moved my wifi AP's over to low power amd64 machines instead of the popular answer of OpenWRT/DD-WRT. When I want to upgrade to a new wifi standard, I'll just pop in a new wireless card. The same machines also run Kodi for the TVs (which used to be separate RPis).

I've gone this route as well. I had good luck with certain SD cards, and earlier versions of the Pi for small things. But I've tried to use them as wireless APs, and they fold under any real use. Wireless firmware hangs requiring a full reboot to fix. Pi4s have given me a ton of trouble, and I've been on the losing side of the SD card roulette and had USB drives fail under load. There is always some kind of IO or sagging voltage problem with a power supply wigging out or I got a bad one.

Moved to using low power thin clients on liquidation for similar pricing, and it's all been a breeze. I get real disk IO. I get a real wireless card which runs an AP night and day better. I get a real USB power budget with a much more trustworthy OEM power supply. Power profile and size is about double, but it's a very worthwhile trade. I like the 1L system profiles and lean to the HPs.

I don't mind ARM in the cloud, but at home I just want real hardware.

Old tiny desktop computers are expected to getting very cheap, due to Win11 dropped support. Intel platform is decent for idle power consumption.

Here's great article by STH https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

I currently run a home server on a librem laptop where I broke the lid and can't be opened anymore without breaking it further (I tried to repair it, but since some parts broke mechanically I couldn't really fix it)

Works kinda nice and is completely silent most of the time.

I'm still running an 8th gen HP micro server, but I would run something else if I could get >=8GB memory and 4 SATA ports for relatively cheap. I haven't seen anything that gets me there yet though.

Nope, no OEM wants to make that, not enough market for it. However you can buy NVMe to 6xSATA adapter, but your case might not fit those drives,

I planned on buying NVMe extension cable, cut a slit in case, run the cable outsidde, plug in NVMe to 6xSATA adapter outside of the case and keep the SSD's outside, this would need reliable external power supply for SSD (Amazon sells them for ~$30, but I don't trust them).

I believe you will get to ~10-15w with this setup, at which rate you could build regular ITX/MATX case to hold all SSD's with i3-10100 and be at ~16w idle.

Yeah there are some nice enough ITX cases with HDD bays [0], but any comparable replacement ends up relatively expensive, so it just hasn't made sense.

[0] - https://www.u-nas.com/xcart/cart.php?target=product&product_...

It sounds like you want a Synology, at least hardware-wise. This one supports up to 6 GB of RAM, four SATA ports, and idles with low wattage and low noise.

Built-in virtualization and docker. It's $500 at Newegg.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS420+#specs

They make bigger ones, of course.

Are you stuck with their software though? I've ended up pretty deep down the NixOS rabbit hole...

No idea. I'd love to know.

On the other hand, I'd wager you can look at what chipsets they chose, and cobble the same thing together for less (maybe even with 8gb).

I decided I didn't want my data backup to be a hobby, so I hold my nose and use their stuff.

It's fine, and it has some nice stuff like let's encrypt reverse https proxies, it emails every time the power or network drops, etc, etc.

Using my HP Z230 with 16GB ECC RAM, multiple VMs, 2 NVMe SSDs, and 2x3TB HDD.

> [...] Currently running a HP G2 [...]

Great, except it's fucking huge and noisy.

I'm running a kubernetes cluster on a pair of raspberry pi and a 4-bay NAS as storage. What kind of lunatic would store data on a single, non-redondant, disk or an SD card ?

Pi's don't have SATA or PCI - what's the I/O of the drives? Is it noticeable?

Perhaps late, but I'm using PXE to boot and run my pihole at home. Works quite well IMO

Something like 30MB up/down, drives are mounted directly inside kubernetes pods with NFS or iscsi depending on the application. Not noticeable, everything else is loaded from memory.

It's the twice the size of Pi with case, not sure what's "massive" about it.

That is not a half bad idea. How loud are those things?

I have an SFF Dell Optiplex I bought for $100 many years ago that’s still my main “homelab” machine. It’s fairly quiet besides the two 12TB spinning hard drives inside but the fan isn’t noticing.

A rack mount server would be out of the question as I live in a small condo, both for size and noise.

Barely audible, you have to have your ear <1ft from it to hear the hum.

Same for my HP Z230. Literally have to be within a foot or two to hear it.

When my G3 (newer version of parent's machine) is booting up all of the VMs it's running it can get kind of noisy but it settles down quickly to basically silent.

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