I have an early 2000s PC (pre-SATA) with 512MB RAM (I’d love to tell you about the CPU, but its under a cooler that isn’t going anywhere) that’s been sitting in closets for about 15 years. Assuming I’m willing to buy into it, can something like that reasonably host the following simultaneously on a 40GB boot drive:

Nextcloud Actual Photoprism KitchenOwl SearXNG Katvia Paperless-ngx

Or should I just get new hardware? Regardless, I’d like to do something with this trusty ol business server.

Edit: Lenovo or Dell as the most cost-effective, reliable self-host server in your opinion?

  • glue_snorter@lemmy.sdfeu.org
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    1 year ago

    It’s OK, but I’d suggest:

    Atom > arm64 > arm32

    I ran on a Pi 4, but switched to a PC for jellyfin. The pi can’t transcode for shit. It was slow to boot and slow over SSH.

    Look for a NUC - they’re designed for desktop use, so they have more poke than a Pi. The N6005 CPU is a good choice, the N5105 is ok. These are x64, so you’ll have the widest range of packages. 4GB will do, if its upgradeable later. NUCs usually take SODIMMs, which you can pick up on ebay for peanuts.

    Bear in mind that network chipset will be your bottleneck in some use cases. If it has a “gigabit port” but only a cheap chipset, and you use it as a router, you might max out at ADSL speeds… in that case you’ll wish you’d gone for a box designed for soft routing, which are a fair bit pricier.