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!

  • Telodzrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    1 month 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
      5·
      1 month 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
        3·
        1 month 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·
          1 month 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.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Yeah, I was looking earlier, and sort of didn’t know what to even look for, but then everyone here made suggestions of what to look for. I’m all over this!

  • zebidiah@lemmy.caEnglish
    15·
    1 month ago

    Unless you specifically need ultra low power draw, a minipc is always a better bang for your buck, the cheapest solution is the dusty old laptop sitting on the shelf at the back of your closet…

  • riimoh@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    10·
    1 month 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
      5·
      1 month 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
      2·
      1 month 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.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 month 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·
        1 month 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·
          1 month 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.

  • Professorozone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    30 days ago

    A larger sized used motherboard or even a new cheap one often has more capability if you can deal with something that is larger…

      • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 month 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

    • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      The newer Dell Optiplex micro like the 5070 come with more modern hardware, HDMI and all that. I was fortunate to get a couple for free from my BIL who works in IT and was given them as E-waste.

      • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        I usually try to stay within the upper ranks of DDR3 equipment. DDR4, while a better option, is far more pricey than DDR3.

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    61·
    1 month ago

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

        • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          1 month 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·
          1 month 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·
      1 month 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
        2·
        1 month 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

  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    1 month 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
    5·
    1 month 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?

  • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    It always starts small. I started with a 15 year old pre-ryzen AMD laptop, and an old external USB 4TB hard drive. NEW the laptop was $299.

    A year later, I have a ruckus/brocade managed switch, a Lenovo M700 Tiny running home assistant and Jellyfin, while my main media/file server is a Xeon E3-1275v3 with 2 SSDs, and 6 8TiB SAS3 enterprise hard drives in a ZFS pool. And a Pi5 running adguard home as my DNS server.

    And I’ve already used 60% of it. 🤣🤣

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      29 days ago

      Great advice. I found an old laptop and I’m putting it through the paces now, and I’m really surprised at how easy all of this is. Setting up my own Invidious instance took minutes. Immich is where I’ll need to plateau out, I expect. My partner will immediately fill up the laptop by dumping her phone onto it, so that will need to wait for a long-term solution. That being said, a Lenovo mini whatever seems like a solid standard.

  • pro_user@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 month 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.

    • SavinDWhales@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      29 days ago

      +1 on dietpi

      Have it running on a HP t630 I got for <20€, as “the wifi stick is no longer detected”.

      …right.

      Also got a Wyse 5070 for about 50€ with 8gb ram. The HP is pulling a little less Watts, so it’s the pihole/unbound server for now

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 month 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.

    • blargh513@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      An old laptop from about 13 years ago barely breaks a sweat running proxmox and a handful of containers and two vms.

      Waste not want not. Plus it comes with a keyboard, touchpad and monitor. Plus, built in ups. You might need to add a USB Ethernet dongle but you don’t have to.

      I bet just about anyone you know has their old laptop in a drawer somewhere. They’d probably give it to you.