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?
That’s an antique. The list of stuff you want to run probably needs several gigabytes of RAM. I think Nextcloud alone needs 512MB. I’d recommend newer hardware, you can find stuff on ebay for under $100 that would be a LOT more powerful than what you have. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p4432023.m570.l1313&_nkw=sff+dell+optiplex&_sacat=0
This is what I’d do OP.
I’m a huge fan of the lenovo thinkcentre m92p tinys. Basically the same thing as the dells for ~$150CAD. 3 of them (plus a couple PIs) run my homelab with lots of room to grow.
Won’t be able to do much, and even if you can do some stuff you have to keep on mind that the energy efficiency would be poor enough that you’d still be better off with a cheap pi from a cost perspective.
Really good point. Is a Pi recommendable for selfhosting?
If you want something small and cheap, it might be worth getting a used thin client PC.
I got a cheap £20 Igel thin client from eBay as raspberry pi’s were still far too expensive, plus I already had a spare 4GB ddr3 sodimm to drop into it and a 120gb wd green ssd that I’d stripped from its case and fitted internally into the thin client.
After upgrading it one ended up with a 1.2ghz AMD GX-412 cpu, 4gb DDR3, 120gb sata ssd and an external usb 3 1tb hard drive i also had laying around.
As a component of my homelab, it’s running Debian 12, docker with a few containers (pigallery 2, Libreddit, portainer, searXNG), it’s my backup Emby server and my main Pihole and PiVPN client.
Completely silent, sips power and still has capacity spare to run more containers and other projects that catch my interest.
That’s a pretty cool solution, honestly. I’m considering all options here! I’d hate to invest then find out there are more cost-effective options or that I somehow limited the server’s potential.
Working really great for me. I originally just bought it to run Pihole on a dedicated machine and have a secondary pihole instance on my Unraid server in case either of them went down but leaving it sitting there with just PiVPN and Pihole duties seemed wasteful.
I’m getting even more out of it running some of the lighter containers on it with plenty of spare room to do more.
I’ve logged/uploaded my upgrade process here just so you can get some ideas on what I did.
https://imgur.com/a/ExcLdttIt is bulkier than a raspberry pi, being around the size of a router but the low cost and being able to utilise hardware that I had sitting doing nothing made me go this route rather than just getting a pi.
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.
Forgetting the lack of processing power and RAM, it’s likely a box that old will eat power. It’s just not worth it for something that old.
A used thin client along the lines of the lenovo think* series will be affordable and do the job.
Slap dos on it and go old school gaming
Also a sick option
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System LTS Long Term Support software version NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.
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Good bot
Seems not to be marked as bot. Will block manually since the Lemmy setting to prevent bot posts from showing up doesn’t work here.
Don’t, it’s horribly inefficient.
I’m not sure you could even run pihole on 512MB RAM.
My first server was quite a bit tougher than that and it had some serious issues when I started asking it to do a lot at once. You might be able to get it going, but I suspect you might not be too happy with the performance you get out of it.
It’s a bit shocking how much hardware you can get for how cheap. Even an Intel Atom box available for less than a hundred bucks that has no fan would likely run circles around that thing. One thing I’d definitely suggest is no matter what, an SSD if you’re planning to run multiple platforms.
My plan is to keep the bare minimum on the boot drive required to get these services running. This is probably a Linux crowd, but I don’t speak the language and would rather keep it all in Windows if I can help it
Just a heads up that you might find it easier to learn a bit of the lingo than to try to translate all the entry-level stuff from linux to windows.
If you do figure it out though, you should document the process and put it up somewhere.
Best place to learn the basic Linux I’d need to get this off the ground?
The best projects will have well written documentation that steps you through exactly what to do.
I started off not knowing anything about hosting and now I run like 6 services.
