An n100 PC is much better than that crapberry pi
I think any mini-pc/old laptop is better, and probably cheaper than a raspberry pi nowadays
I would have disagreed with you when Pis were like $50 and chaining 3 Pis together with a hard drive was a fun project to do self hosting.
Now to get to the beefiest raspberry pi, it’s $120. And in the range, yeah, for price and reliability, use a mini-pc/laptop.
I’ve found that a pi is good enough, computationally, but not reliability wise.
A lot of things like advanced light control goes through my host, so any lockups or crashes are bad. My pi held up for about 18 months before it began to play up. I’ve found a small NUC system has higher reliability for the same price and power usage.
Kubernetes is designed to improve reliability
That doesn’t help against hardware thermal runaway. The pi would overheat its own ram chips and hard lock up. A simple power cycle fixed it.
So close. Started on raspberry pi. Went for a cluster with dpckrt swarm. Finished with a nas and a 10years old game computer as a mediacenter. (That the electricity bill whoch made me stop the cluster)
Same, in fact you can also went down in RPi models. Basically the more you know, the less you need, e.g. going from Plex to Kodi to minidlna…
The only problem I’ve had with Raspberry Pi is that some apps want to write a lot of stuff to “disk”, and the default “disk” on a Pi is a MicroSD card which dies if you keep writing things to it. Sure, you can always plug something into a USB slot, but that adds a bit of friction to the whole process.
Oh, also, I wish it were easy to power a whole bunch of Pi units. Each one needing its own wall wart is a bit annoying, and I’ve had iffy results using weaker, less steady power supplies with multiple ports intended for things like phones.
I ended up just buying an industrial mSD card. Has yet to fail.
I really recommend a HAT with SSD, totally worth the investment.
Wouldn’t an SSD run into problems down the line with too many Writes?
In my experience, that concern is way outdated.
Theoretically, yes, but I suspect the manufacturing quality of SD cards is a lot lower than SSDs
Most SD cards aren’t really suitable for the kind of workload an operating system generates (that being mostly random i/o). Make sure to get a reputable A2 (application class 2) rated card, they aren’t that expensive but perform way better.
Raspberry Pi themselves launched a card recently, I haven’t tried that one but it’s probably a good choice too.
I have literally been on this exact journey. Mind you I’m on NixOS across two boxes so not quite a raspi… Perhaps my downsizing is not yet complete
See, I don’t pay for the electric bill to keep my collection of old enterprise equipment running because I need the performance. I keep them running because I have no resistance to the power of blinkenlights.
This struggle usually takes place over a weekend.
This guy selfhosts
Absolutely the best way to learn though. The number of places I’ve walked into that had no clue about containers or even a vpc and thought Google drive was an API is too damn high.
I have actually had to write something that used the Google drive API for a friend’s company once and it was… Unpleasant. Counterintuitive. Woefully inconsistent. My solution worked but it sucked and I am a bit ashamed of it
thought Google drive was an API is too damn high.
horror
I need a kubernetes cluster with high availability, load balancing and horizontal pod autoscaling, because that is something I want to learn. I don’t care that it’s just for wife’s home-made dog collars webshop.
This is the way
You can do it on a handful of Raspberry Pis rather than one, then.
Imagine, if you will, a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pis!
A man of culture, I see!
I don’t get this; a Pi isn’t even in the same conversation as an old rackmount server you can get for free. You couldn’t stuff half the compute, ram and storage into a Pi or a dozen Pis for 10X the cost of grabbing something off eBay for a hundred bucks.
That’s if the Rpi Foundation is deigning to let us peasants even buy them these days.
I have an old rackmount server I got for free. Dual Xeon X5650s, 192GB of RAM, four 8TB HDDs, and a pair of 250GB SSDs. I can only use it in the basement because it’s too loud to run anywhere else, but even then, it’s currently off because it trips its circuit breaker under heavy load.
A power strip full of Pis in a k3s cluster doesn’t do that. I used a 2GB model 4 for the control plane and 3Bs as the workers.
Why do you think you got it for free ;)
Eh, it was good when I got it. Who am I to turn down a free dual socket server though? :)
Useful in winter I suppose!
The problem is that server will probably use more electricity, it’ll be clunky to store, and it’s going to be loud as fuck.
i think the best choice is a cheap used pc or laptop, or server. Reduces electric waste. I also host my own server on a 19 year old Dell Insprion 1300
exactly, you can still do HA and LB on old gear, even K8s if you must
Reduces electric waste
A lot of older equipment actually wastes more electricity.
But it will cut down on electronic waste.
not always. especially laptops
not always a lot of
Not necessarily.
A i5-6500 has a TDP of 65W while a i5-13600K has a TDP of 150W.
If you get something modern that has the performance of a i5-6500 it will be a little bit more efficient. The key is that more performance uses more power.
TDP ≠ power draw. TDP is literally the Thermal Design Power aka what is the amount of thermal load a system designer should account for. Yes it can give you a rough and dirty idea of maximum power draw, but real world power draw can be entirely different because that depends on load.
For example, if your i5-6500 runs at 50-70% load while the newer processor only runs at 20-30% load due to IPC and instruction improvements the newer processor might very well use less power over the course of month than the older one despite the newer one being capable of drawing more
You’re also comparing a 4c4t part to one with 14c/20t not to mention comparing a mass market part to a gaming specific part. The 6600k (which is targeting the same market segment as the 13600k) has a 91w TDP. Go compare your 6500 to the i5-13500 except again it’s still comparing apples to oranges when you just look at raw specs and TDP ≠ real world power consumption
13600K
If you buy a high watt CPU, that’s on you. Ryzen 7 also came out in 2022 and had many 65 watt cpus that could outperform an i5-6500.
not necessarily
a lot of
They take up so much space though.
This is why rack mounts were made. Hell, I’ve seen a lot of custom builds where people have mapped out the server on their wall and it takes up no floor space. Something like this: https://i.xno.dev/kG9Wx.jpg
That is very cool
Oh I love that!
Yes, but also no. Older hardware is less power efficient, which is a cost in its own right, but also decreases backup runtime during power failure, and generates more noise and heat. It also lacks modern accelerated computing, like ai cores or hardware video encoders or decoders, if you are running those appd. Not to mention lack of nvme support, or a good NIC.
For me a good compromise is to recycle hardware upgrades every 4-5 years. A 19 year old computer? I would not bother.
my 19 year old laptop runs the web server just fine, and only needs 450 mb ram even with many security modules. it produces minimal noise
Bro, I am just hosting a WordPress backup, an RSS reader, and a few Python scripts
Wordpress needs the latest GPU these days, didn’t you know? /s
I have a Lenovo M710q with a i3 7100T that uses 3W at idle. I’m not mining bitcoin, server is idle 23h a day if not more.
Think centre tiny here
Low consumption, two ddr4 slots, one 2.5" slot and one nvme slot! Lots of outside slots.
Costed less used than a new pi too. They have gotten too expensive IMO.
Pi has gotten crazy expensive.
Same mentality but HP Elitedesk Minis
Just add dell micro to the list and you have what I run - 9 tiny/mini/micro PCs run everything here. Though I may move a few things to a VPS soon.
Edit:
- (4) Dell Micros
- (3) Lenovo Tinys
- (2) HP Minis
How would you class them, if you think you could/would/should? I’m so impressed with the thinkcentre tiny I wonder if it can get better at all.
Mostly equitable.
Ive had a slightly higher failure rate with the Dells, but the sample size is too small to be relevant.
The Lenovos more often than others ive found outfitted with a dGPU which comes in handy in some scenarios, but I think that comes down more on which enterprises more often purchase Lenovos and want the dGPU, and that its just what ive come across in the used/decommissioned territory.
Short answer - they are basically all the same.
Thanks!
ServeTheHome has a series “tiny mini micro” for exactly this reason.
lenovo thinkcentre m910q supremacy
Yesss I have a m910q as my main with (IIRC) a 6500T 4 cores.
And a m710 with the CD contraption for backup (the CD is just for fun, the PC is the backup) :-p
Yeah what I’ve always done is use the previous gaming/workstation PC as a server.
I just finished moving my basic stuff over to newer old hardware that’s only 6-7 years old, to have lots of room to grow and add to it. It’s a 9700k (8c/8t) with 32GB of ram and even a GTX 1080 for the occasional video transcode. It’s obviously overkill right now, but I plan to make it last a very long time.
I need
It’s just fun to play with, there is no “need”.
Yeah, I enjoyed my time with k3s setup at home as well, but right now I don’t really want nor need that 😄
I had to buy a lenovo thinkcentre mini because was cheaper than a brandnew raspberry pi.
Switched from a raspberry pi 3 to a second hand x86 thin client (lenovo thinkcentre m920q) because raspberry pi 4 were not available at the time. Made me learn proxmox and a bunch of other cool stuff my raspi couldn’t handle.
I’m rooting for ARM / RISC-V to become more popular in desktop computing / servers though.
I did similar once the pi4s were hard to get and expensive. A used x86 mini pc was cheaper and magnitudes more powerful. It runs all my server needs. I’m a simple person: homebridge, plex server, retro game library.
I’ve always liked riscv. Just the idea of literally everything on the device being open source is a fun idea. Manuals to everything.
Just because the ISA is open source doesn’t mean that the end product or even the design will be open source.
RISC-V is licensed permissively, giving anyone the right to make a proprietary (or FOSS) RISC-V processor.
Often times, you’ll see mostly open source cores, but then some extention is proprietary.
Waiting for proxmox-arm becoming a thing (I know there’s some community versions trying it but I’m not sure how reliable they are)
The hardware virtualisation available for arm just isn’t there yet
Apple Silicon Macs do a great job with virtualization. Outside of them there’s just no nice high end hardware that’s well suited for something like proxmox. It’s either low end SBC, or the hyper proprietary ARM servers that I don’t think we can even buy.
Modern Android phones include a hw-accelerated hypervisor. In Android 16, there will be a feature to run a full Linux VM through what Google calls protected Kernel VM (pKVM).
Qualcomm has their own implementation called Gunyah
Those are heavily customised, we’re talking raspberry pi’s here
Is there RISC-V hardware already? I thought the specification was still under development.
Very much so, not quite ready for prime time maybe, but you can play with it, StarFive is quite well-known for their chips in this space for example
Ok great! Time to get me some presents.
There are some Raspi competitors offering SBCs with RISC-V chips, there is even a RISC-V Mainboard for the framework laptops, but the last time I checked they sadly didn’t reach the performance levels of comparable ARM chips.
Psh if I’m writing at that level I don’t need the performance yet. Thanks!
