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Comment by wildekek | Hacker News Reader

I wonder who this is for. It could be a great homelab server, but only 16GB of mem ruins that idea.

Why do you think 16GB is not enough for a home server? I am currently running a NAS with SMB, NFS, Nextcloud, LDAP, mail server, Roundcube, Uptime Kuma and a couple of websites and using around 1GB of RAM. Just curious what other people is doing.

Probably stuff it to the brim with virtual machines, that kind of usage

Well, yes, if you go full enterprise with 6 VM's and 30 Docker containers I can understand how you'd aim for 64GB of RAM but then, why would you want to use a fanless mini PC for it?

Fanless, mini and 64 GB or RAM in a single device is going to be a tough challenge anyway.

I think super micro makes such edge devices. But then we are talking a different category now.

Interesting!

https://www.ahead-it.eu/en/shop/servers/embedded-iot/intel-a...

Those?

Technically they are fanless but I wonder how well they would work outside of a rack with high ambient, they seem to be fanless themselves but still rely on having plenty of air pulled across the casing. Mounting them vertically might work. 850 euro though!

Yep. I think they would throttle under heavy sustained load. But I don’t think these are for sustained load or home servers. Probably designed for places like traffic cams where maybe large image models need ram and prefer no moving parts that can fail. Even places like factory floors.

This is for me, large city dweller with no basement or a place to tuck away a noisy server with fans. In fact, I already have something like this, with older specs, produced by no name Shenzhen company, tucked away under the couch and hosting a bunch of services.

Can you please confirm that "under the couch" is a literal statement. If so, could you please provide further details? I am extremely curious.

“Under the couch” is a literal statement. This is a modern, not traditional couch, so its legs are raised maybe 10 inches? Gives some room for access and passive cooling.

Doesn't it get loads of dust?

Getting it dusted and vacuumed was the part of the deal I have with my wife regarding the existence of this server :-)

I live in a tiny village with a shit ton of space for anything, but would prefer this over a power hungry server anyway… At least until i fill part of the barn roof with solar panels.

What kinda services? Lots of hn comments say something like the above and I’m just deciding to ask this time.

For me specifically: wireguard, strongswan (ikev2 vpn in iPhone), freshrss, paperless ngx, webdav server for iOS apps like genius scan and photosync, filebrowser for web access, archivebox, wallabag, airsonic, gitea.

Not the person you are replying to, but I host my local dev environments, HomeAssistant for various home automation tasks, Unifi controller, Paperless-ngx, Jellyfin media server, NAS and cloud backup of PCs, adguard, and occasionally some game servers for friends. There's a tremendous amount of self hosted software available for about any purpose you can think of though.

I use them for k8s nodes. Well... I use cheaper ones for nodes. At ~100$/node, you can't really go wrong.

I feel these machines in particular are probably for office work where everything needed is online. I don't do IT but I would imagine that these machines would make the reduction of windows licensing fees pretty straightforward if your business is all done online.

It seems the CPU only supports up to 16G :-/ I wonder if there are any technical reasons for this or if it's Intel's market segmentation strategy intentionally crippling it.

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