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Previously I was using Samsung N150P (netbook) as my home server and it served me around 6 years. >> https://programming.dev/post/708584
Though after upgrading to Debian 13, additional 90 packages were installed just with the upgrade. I also had a little adventure with it :) >> https://programming.dev/post/708488
Anyway, this new mini PC I got is from 2016 and surprisingly it has 8GB DDR3 RAM (I’m rich now). It’s generally in good condition. Even though it’s Celeron N3000, this one doesn’t have hyperthreading so only 2 cores. Still it’s a real upgrade over Atom N450 CPU.
Since last year, I was planning to get a Raspberry Pi and moving from there. However thanks to AI overlords it got so expensive I had to bail from that fantasy. I got this for 40$ and with 8GB RAM I think it was a good deal.
I was already planning to change my home server to Alpine for a while but I just couldn’t touch a perfectly fine system because lazy. So this time I went with Alpine and I already love how small it is. I just installed a couple monitoring tools and packages like sudo along with Pi-hole so currently it has quite few packages.
Don’t worry though, I’m planning to use that RAM, with time. :)
Nice. I got 2 thin hp pro/elitedesks. One to run my MC servers and one for other homelab stuff though that one keeps fucking crashing/turning off and I cannot fucking figure out why. It only ever runs fine after installing the OS if you ever rebolt it it will just not stay on for more than a couple days.
Hmm, maybe it has a bad RAM. Have you tried memtest86 on it?
I replaced the empty CMOS battery and tested the RAM and it still just goes down after a couple days
But not right after the fresh installation? May sound weird but have you tried a different distro or a different init system? Might worth to explore.
I tried debain server and ubuntu server. Same issues with both. You have any suggestions?
To be fair, a lot of server distros have systemd. So, maybe Alpine since it has OpenRC? However it has musl instead of glibc so that might be a problem depending of your use case.
Though cannot think of anything really, breaking after reboot says it’s most likely software related. But why would that happen, no idea.
Honestly, AI pricing or not, raspi just isnt a good time for a home server. I used to churn through SD cards on mine, and the software compatibility was quite annoying, particularly with docker images.
Intelx86 minipcs have been far easier to deal with IMO. And $40 is a bargain.I’ve been using Rapsberry Pi’s for almost a decade now and I have yet to burn out a single SD card on them. But maybe I don’t really put them under the same strain others do.
It could be that I was using particularly shit SD cards, or putting too much continuous load on them, but I have killed a handful of them over the time I used them. I dunno, could be user error for sure.
I have never managed to kill an SSD though, so I trust them much more.
In my case, I had swap space on the SD card, and suspect that’s what killed it. After replacing the card and disabling swap, I haven’t had any problems for the last couple years
I’ve got a box I made with a air filter and 200mm fan on one end, then it blows through a “tunnel” that has a network switch and 4 Raspberry Pis inside, one runs Frigate with an AI hat, another runs home assistant, another is running my Pi Hole, another is basically a NAS with a 2TB external USB drive, and they do a whole bunch of other miscellaneous ad-hoc tasks. The clean airflow keeps them cool just sitting there with open PCBs and the normal little heat sinks, they’re all wired to the switch so only 1 ethernet cable comes out.
On the one hand, a single Core i3 PC could probably handle ALL the tasks easily enough, but… what about when Frigate goes weird? I don’t want my whole home DNS/DHCP and home automation to go with it. Same for everything else, and if one of the microSD cards goes bad (none have yet after over 1000 days of 24 hour continuous operation except during power outages) - that’s just one thing going bad, not EVERYTHING.
I must admit the 2TB external drive is cheap junk, and those things do “wear out” - even internal SSDs go bad over time, I’ve had it happen at work more than once within about 5 years of normal use. I try to get the better microSD cards for the Pis and so far they’re not having problems for me.
One thing you can look into if you like messing around with system configurations is partitioning your microSD with “immutable” partitions where any changes are written in RAM (yes, RAM heavy Pis are even more expensive than they used to be, but it all depends on your application…) I do this for my Pis that run around in the world and get their power cut off without warning - failures are so rare in the first place it’s hard to know if all the partition work is worth the effort, but so far I’ve never had a corrupt file system with the immutable partitions carefully configured, and I have had several before I started doing that - not failed SD cards, just corrupt filesystems that needed to be re-formatted.
4 Raspberry Pi’s
Get a load of this cat flexing their wealth :D
The isolation of services makes some sense, but I found that there was plenty of single points of failure anyway (power, internet, router, pihole), so not worth worrying about a few more. And the reliability of the nuc has mostly given me peace of mind. I do have a separate nuc for a NAS, though.
I bought them a long time ago, and always refused to pay scalper prices. My Zero 2Ws were all $15, most of the others are Pi4 and Pi5 from before the RAM inflation.
Power is nice and stable in this arrangement, a bunch of the RasPi foundation supply bricks on a power strip mounted to the breeze-tunnel.
I’ve been a NUC fan since forever, but last year I had two NUCs that I bought in 2020 die within a month of each other, one had a power supply issue and I think the other one had a worn out SSD - it was working fine when I unplugged it, but when I plugged it back in 6 weeks later it wouldn’t boot.
Like I said, one old / low power NUC could do this, but when it dies far too much of our smart home goes dumb all at once.
Did you add the fs2ram stuff. Uses RAM for all the temp writes and stuff so SD card only deals with actual file storage access.
I tried some things like that, not sure which ones specifically. The ones I tried were very fiddly though.
They (fs2ram and similar) are annoyingly, frustratingly fiddly and not worth the effort IMO… until I got Claude to do the fiddly bits for me… It isn’t just the initial setup, it’s also the additional hoops you have to go through whenever you want to change something on the “protected” partition. Fiddly is the word for it, not hard, but time and brain-power consuming.
If you’re not doing a lot of writes, log2ram might be good enough and isn’t that hard to set up
Another thing LLM agents are good at is reading log files and giving you clues as to what just went sideways, when that includes a system restart it’s nice to be able to look back acrosss the logs of the past several cycles.
I mean, I think you have reason to trust SSDs more anyway. They’re just physically designed for more wear and tear than SD cards are, even if I’ve never destroyed an SD card myself I’m aware of their lack of resilience compared to SSDs.
And yeah, I always dropped the extra money for Samsung Pro SD cards, maybe that’s part of it, too.
I agree with you about the sd cards. But pi 4 and higher can boot directly from SSD (in a usb enclosure, or for pi 5 via pci-e add on card). It takes a lot of the pain out of hosting on pi. I also still have an old pi 3b chugging along as a NUT server running off an sd-card with a read-only file system - another solution for the card rot problem.
And they are still lower power then anything x86. For me a mix of both pi and mini-pc work great.
I had a pi4 booting from a USB ssd, but it was very flakey. Just a slight bump on the SSD and it would disconnect and never remount, so I wasn’t super confident with it. Happened with a few different SSDs on different ports as well.
As for power, my pi4 + SSD was chugging down 15w, and the nuc that replaced it was also around 15w when limited properly, so it isnt as clear cut as it used to be. That was with identical services, homeassistant and a few local web services. I suspected the pi4 was never really able to idle.
My Pi 3b is configured to host PiHole, Unbound, and Kiwix (Wikipedia), yet it only writes to SD once a month for Kiwix, and once a week for PiHole. Unbound and all logs live in memory.
I tried to get logs into memory, but found that it was a bit tedious chasing down a dozen or so services that logged to different places. And when my pi developed a spontaneous reset issue, not having logs was a bit of a problem.
raspi was an option back then, but now it’s inflated and almost any MiniPC is a better choice
Why Intel mini PCs? I run an AMD mini PC that seems to work great but I don’t ask much of it yet.
Not really Intel specific, just intel seems to be the most commonly available.
I just lazily used “Intel” to mean x86.
Isn’t Intel Quicksync needed for Jellyfin transcoding? I got a mini PC for my server and specifically looked only for Intel. Got another mini PC for my desktop workstation and specifically looked for a Ryzen, that iGPU is doing a great job of running all the games I’m interested in.
Intel Quick sync is exactly the reason I got a NUC running an Intel as opposed to AMD.
I have a full size PC with a nvidia gt1030 for Jellyfin, I think it uses nvidias transcoding api when that is available.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/hardware-acceleration/
Looks like there are lots of options for hardware accel, so as long as you have one of them it should be fine?
Ah, gotcha! I was worried for a second that I made a poor choice.
have an ASUS PN51 with the Ryzen 5 in it running Ubuntuwith docker containers for each appliance.
Yeah I agree, I can do many more things with this comparing to RPi. Interestingly this one also has a microSD slot, though I went with regular SATA SSD and obviously it’s quite faster than a system running on a microSD card. I just can’t believe the pricing on RPi devices. It’s almost three times the price here comparing to what I got.
The pricing is just insane. Its $450-500AUD for a 16GB pi5 (without storage), and I recently got a secondhand nuc with 16GB and storage for $200AUD.
Pis also don’t seem to have a second hand market (which as a hoarder of pi3’s I am part of the problem).
That’s just a lot!
Yeah, I checked second hand market and Pi’s are almost none-existant here and the ones I found weren’t cheap either. I also noticed that there were a lot of 32-bit Atom CPU mini PCs for 25$, but they were a downgrade from my netbook. Comparing to them 40$ is great I guess.
Kinda want a low lower draw device to use as a server, ideally proxmox and just backup the whole VM image once its setup. But not sure how much I would really use. Very basic Apache/php, pihole, not sure if there is too much else.
Maybe factorio servers if I get into clusterIO stuff again.
Apache may be a little heavy for this because of the really low CPU power. However later Celerons should do better, this one doesn’t even have hyperthreading. No idea about Factorio server though.
Can’t you run Apache on pretty old hardware? I thought it was something you could happily run on even some of the older versions of raspberry pi. Probably depends on what you are hosting on it of course.
Technically you’re right. Apache can run on pretty much anything. Though when I say Apache, my mind shifts to LAMP immediately. Sorry about that. However LAMP can run on this too but the performance wouldn’t be good I assume.
Used mssql-server at work where we usually use windows and its a bit shit if you want low memory hosting. Though when I have run MySQL I haven’t tested low resource systems to compare that either tbh.
I guess it would be better with MySQL. MSSQL is generally on the heavy side. Though, haven’t tried before but theoretically it should be possible to install LAMP with SQLite instead of MySQL. It can be actually fine on a hardware like this.
I run one of these thin clients:
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) x86_64 Host: HP ProDesk 400 G5 Desktop Mini Kernel: Linux 6.12.113+deb13-amd64 Uptime: 3 days, 21 hours, 47 mins Packages: 421 (dpkg) Shell: zsh 5.9 CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-9500T (6) @ 3.70 GHz GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 630 @ 1.10 GHz [Integrated] Memory: 2.37 GiB / 15.47 GiB (15%)I bought it on ebay for ~£100. It idles between 3W - 5W and rarely goes over 20W.
I have jellyfin and immich on it.
I wouldn’t call that a thin client, it’s actually quite powerful for a home server IMO. :)
Actually that’s impressive wattage for idle usage.
Immich is a good idea, though mine probably wouldn’t run it well.
What do you run, if you dont mind me asking?
Currently scavenging parts for my own storage server, but i have an older NUC lying around that i freshen up for some added compute, just curious what you can do with that hardware.
Currently only Pi-hole but I’ll install Jellyfin and Syncthing soon. Initially I was planning to install Joplin server as well but since they started to lean on LLMs I’m looking for alternatives, maybe even something homemade, haven’t decide yet. Surprisingly you can do many things with these devices. Even my netbook can do a lot of things, so I’m expecting more from this.
Neat! It’s always good to remind oneself that outside of gaming and other similar taxing tasks older hardware gets you way further than people think.
Where I’m from sourcing parts is a hassle unless its current or last gen, so always good to see what others are doing to benchmark my efforts.
Well, for daily usage home server stuff, there is plenty of CPU power here. Though throttling the CPU with any tasks probably is not a good idea because of passive cooling. Usually what I do don’t get pass half of the CPU power, at least it was like that on the netbook. I would expect a better performace from this.
By the way, not entirely sure but I think this one can handle a some kind of Minecraft server.
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/840057824814
So close to something like this, eh? I had no idea Gigabyte ever even made mini PCs.
Something like that, yeah. Though this one has better CPU (Celeron 3205U), and two RAM slots apparently. Also mine didn’t have an SSD too. I too didn’t know they made mini PCs.
Nice! Where did you but it?
In Turkey. Comparing to US eBay prices our second hand market prices are quite high generally. This one didn’t have a secure payment too, by secure I mean it wasn’t protected by the website, basically bought it via paying over IBAN. It was kind of a gamble. I guess that was the reason why no one bought it before me. Lucky me. :)
I’m only a little jealous!
Love these little boxes, so much better than a Pi for similar power consumption.
Yeah, maybe this is a good thing. I don’t like ARM that much anyway.
Love to Alpine Linux! I run it on a mini PC as a home router and on a Raspberry Pi. It’s fantastic!
I agree. Love how it’s lighter than Debian <3
So are you using planning storage via USB (for Linux ISOs), I’ve been doing it for 5+ years (on a NUC, so similar to yours) but it always feels a bit scary but I’m not sure what to get that isn’t a real desktop tower (or a NAS case) but still has room for 2-4 HDDs …
This one has only one SATA slot and only PCIe slot it has is for Wi-fi. So, probably not. Though maybe a couple ISOs with rtorrent wouldn’t hurt.
Some mini PCs have pcie cards so you can use a HBA card but if not there’s adapters from m.2 to pcie.
I have something between a mini and normal desktop tower that has the half height PCIe. it has room internally for 2 drives but I bought a hard drive cage (like the ones that go inside a big desktop tower and just mounted it to the outside of the case.
