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!

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    There are companies dealing with used and refurbished hardware. There are loads of PCs around that are not bloated enough for Win11, but still make good home servers. Depending on specs and prices, buy more than one for extra RAM, a second SSD, and spare parts.

  • Monument@piefed.worldEnglish
    5·
    4 hours ago

    I just bought a Mac mini for $50 from a local university’s surplus store. I plan to use it as spare hdd space for another device (it came with a 1tb drive), but even being older, it’s still very capable.
    Perhaps a similar device could work for you?

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      We have two very prominent universities in the area. Around graduation I discreetly dumpster dive their trash bins. You’d be surprised what I’ve found. Laptops, desktops usually small form factor, monitors, you name it.

  • Telodzrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    7 hours ago

    Used micro PC is often the best deal. Companies offload old SFF i5 and lower machines all the time. They’re all over eBay.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      6 hours ago

      I used to be of the erroneous mind set that a server had to be some big honkin’, dim the lights, piece of equipment, but that’s not necessarily true now days with modern architecture. Doesn’t take a lot to get a lot back.

      • Telodzrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 hours ago

        Dude same. Back in the day I was dead set on getting older blades and a couple Dell 710 in a rack and “that’s what a real homelab is.”

        Now, I still got the rack because I think they look cool, but it’s all decommissioned workstations, a white box unRaid server, and micro/mini PCs; there’s not a single traditional server box in place.

        • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          4 hours ago

          Now, I still got the rack because I think they look cool

          I recently decommissioned one of my Dell T320s, and replaced it with the Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 and maxed out to 32 gb RAM. I paid $117 USD for the Optiplex 7020 SFF which came with 8GB RAM, and I maxed it out with three more 8 GB RAM sticks for about $75 USD.

          The Dell T320 costs ~$40/month in electrical costs in my locale to run. The Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF costs $5-8/month to run. So, less than the duration of this year, I will have recouped my initial $200 investment in the Optiplex 7020 SFF just in power consumption alone, and I’ll have ‘left over’ money if I wanted to get yet another Optiplex 7020 SFF. I have 40+ containers running on the Optiplex 7020 SFF, and it hasn’t broke a sweat yet. Far more quieter than the Dell T320 and less heat funneling into the server room.

          I’m going to sell the T320 which is also maxed out at 32 GB RAM, so I’ll have more $$ to replace the other T320. Winner winner chicken dinner.

      • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        3·
        5 hours ago

        I’m shocked with what I’ve been able to do with an old Dell SFF desktop.

        Upgraded to 48GB of ram it’s running ESXi hosting a couple Debian VMs, a DietPi VM, 3 Windows VMs, a massive data drive, idles under 20w and peaks at 80w when I’m doing video conversion.

        At this point I’m shopping for some old mini PCs to run the VMs as independent servers because their idle power is so low.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    5·
    5 hours ago

    This was just posted to selfhosted, and does a great job showing what RPi is competing with.

    It’s a tool for seeing actual idle wattage draw for a lot of mini-PCs.

    Many are in the single-digit idle power - the RPi claim to fame - but have a lot more capability than Pi, plus come in useful packages.

    Just thought it would be a useful link for here.

  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    5 hours ago

    If you don’t mind some low specs, and are focused on lowest price, a potato pi runs for about $30 IIRC, and is plenty to do small stuff like an openvpn server.

  • zergtoshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    6 hours ago

    As others mentioned used SFF PCs, here’s my recommendation based on my own experience.

    I bought several used Dell Wyse 5070. The 5070 was announced in May 2018 and used as thin client.
    They’re tiny, silent (no fan) and you can fit a NVMe SSD via adapter (PCIe A/E key -> M key) in the WiFi card slot next to a SATA SSD. I picked the ones with Intel Celeron J4105 (Quad Core) with 1.5GHz, up to 2.5GHz burst and put 32 GB RAM in one of them (that was before prices went nuts).
    Beware, only if you pick the right dual ranked RAM modules (e.g. Patriot PSD416G26662S), you can have a max. of 2x16 GB. To start your journey, 4 or 8 GB might just be enough and don’t cost an arm and a leg.
    Now I have a PVE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) running with several virtual servers and lxc, one 5070 hosts a PBS (Proxmox Backup Server) and both devices are far from their limit. In case of hardware failure I have spare 5070s.
    Each 5070 cost around $65 and runs at around 8 watts at average. Dunno about current prices though.

    It fits my needs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
    Maybe it fits your needs as well?

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      8 watts… That’s RPi territory but with lots more actual horsepower when needed, in a useful package.

      I love the concept of the Pi, but this stuff is so hard to compete with.

      • zergtoshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        It can go higher than the 8 watts, though.
        The 8 watts are with rather low CPU load, but with 1 SATA SSD and 1 NVMe SSD.
        At full CPU load I expect it to be closer to 15 watts. With what the device is runningn high load happens rarely and not for long.

      • 5in1K@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago

        I found a bunch of ddr4 and ssds in scrap so I ordered some bare ones to make a server. Two 3060’s and two 3070’s. With the 6 core chips.

        • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Two 3060’s and two 3070’s. With the 6 core chips.

          Nice! I generally stay at the upper end of the models which use DDR3. Yes, it’s not as snappy as DDR4, but the prices are much better.

      • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago

        I have actually been rather pleasantly surprised with the 7020 SFF. Going in, I was like 'OK it’s a $117 USD. Not going to break the bank to test it out. So I now have 40+ containers running on the 720 and my load averages look like it’s not even turned on. LOL

  • exu@feditown.comEnglish
    46·
    11 hours ago

    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.

  • riimoh@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    22·
    11 hours ago

    Also to consider are NUCs. I for one got a Firebat with N100 and 8 or 16 GB of RAM and it was already a few years ago cheaper than a RPi 4.

    N100 CPU beats any SBC in every aspect except maybe power? Still very low consumption tho. This will leave you headroom for years of selfhosting, because once you get going, there is no coming back.

    Nothing more valuable in privacy terms than keeping your photos off the cloud (immich), then data off the cloud (copyparty, nextcloud,…). It never stops and the n100 will support that no problem.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      8·
      9 hours ago

      N100/N150 doesn’t use that much more power and going for x64 instead of ARM could be a pretty big benefit too. Depends on what you want of course.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      Awesome idea, thanks! I want something that can spend 99% of the time just hiding behind other consoles, and this would work perfectly for that.

      Personally, I shuffle photos from my phone to my laptop and then backup manually, which is not awesome. Having my own cloud-based backups for that would be great. Might even get my partner to go for it, which is the hard sell.

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16·
    11 hours ago

    Scrounge an old laptop, maybe super cheap if the screen isn’t completely working. Plug in a monitor to deal with screen problems.

    • James R Kirk@startrek.websiteEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      Yeah the best option is the old PC you already have. Unless you’re transcoding video or into LLMs it will be more than enough.

        • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          7 hours ago

          1 to 2€ a month is a fair baseline IMO.

          You won’t get under that with a raspberry either without deep tinkering (tinkering you can apply to a laptop too ofc).

        • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          8 hours ago

          Around £100 a year from 50w, if you run this for several years then you tell me if that matters.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      Yeah, that’s my fallback idea. I would sort of prefer the ease of a single board option I can just shove behind the router, but this might be easier.

      • sbeak@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        7 hours ago

        Note that I have seen a lot of people make some really cool “rehousings” of their laptops to turn them into transparent boxes mounted to the wall, usually made of something like acrylic. They look awesome, but haven’t tried it myself since I just self-host using my laptop in its original chassis

  • StrawberryPigtails@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4·
    8 hours ago

    Last I checked (roughly 2 years ago, preRAM price spike) SBCs weren’t the most cost effective option for self hosting anymore. I would actually look into used thin clients or desktops. Even new, the hardware is often less expensive and more capable than SBCs. Sometimes they’re also more power efficient.

    As for community support for the SBCs other than RPi, for most of them it has been close to non existent. Some better than others but the RPi was the community favorite and got all the attention due to its low price at the time.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Thanks - I think a NUC/thin client will be how I end up going. I just didn’t even think about them in terms of meeting the criteria of “small thing I can leave running and not care about.” I think I still have an old laptop my partner used to use that would work, which might be my tester.

      • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        I was looking at bee-link a while back, shame prices have gone through the roof on everything though.

        • snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          5 hours ago

          Yeah I grabbed a… Mele quieter or something back in November to replace the noisy greenpower thing I’d had for about 2 years and I got a bit more back than what I spent on it, looking at the mele tiny pc today and it’s doubled in price since I got it. So far it’s been nice though, passive cooling unlike the noisy fan on the other one.

    • determinist@kbin.earth
      2·
      11 hours ago

      I have a 16GB ram HP t630 running vaultwarden (bought for £50) and some other stuff and a HP ProDesk 400 G5 16GB ram (bought for £100) running jellyfin & immich. They’re great. I also have a Wyse 3040 that I intend to run as pihole, just haven’t got round to it yet.

  • pro_user@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    12 hours ago

    Have a look at DietPi. That is a single-board-computer optimized Linux distribution that, in contradiction to what the name might suggest, runs on (almost) all of the SBC’s out there. It has stripped away all the things you don’t need and only installs and loads what is needed to run the software you choose, resulting in a very lightweight but powerful operating system for these kinds of devices. It has its own software catalog with a broad selection of optimized software, but you can of course install anything you want. Ive been running this on a Raxda Rock4 without any problems, and would definitely suggest this even on a Raspberry over the regular Pi image.

    • john_t@piefed.eeEnglish
      5·
      11 hours ago

      Plus one for Dietpi here. It really simplified installing all my services on a Pi Zero, and it’s available for most chinese SBC brands and x86 too. If I can find an used thin client for 60 euros with low shipping costs I’ll definitely use Dietpi.

    • kindenough@kbin.earth
      1·
      9 hours ago

      Dietpi is a great suggestion.

      Running rpi4 + pihole on dietpi for years now. It is overkill but solid. Updates thru SSH…easy does it.