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Old PC as Server
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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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.
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Igel/ud/ud3/M340C/
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.
That's what I'm using, it barely uses more power than a pi & it's a 64bit x86 4core with 16GB Dual Channel, 256GB SSD.
I've seen newer versions of what I have for cheaper than the average Pi4, I would never consider the Raspberry over this solution given how monolithically more powerful it is for how small they are.
I have Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Server without a desktop GUI and I control it on my PC via CMD with SSH user@localipaddress
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/ExcLdtt
It 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.
ServeTheHome on Youtube has a great series called "Project TinyMiniMicro" which reviews commodity ultra-small business PCs from the standpoint of their usefulness as servers. I currently have 2 of these and will be replacing my 3rd server with one as well.
They're great as long as you don't need to shove a bunch of drives in them, low power, and often can be found used at dirt cheap prices as large corporations buy them by the thousands and then dump them used every time their IT plant undergoes a refresh.
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.
I found that booting and connecting over SSH went way faster once I got a better SD card. Running an install script that took half an hour was down to just a couple minutes
Hmm. I run mine off a usb3 ssd and it's faster, but still slow.
I'll put it this way as somebody barging into the conversation: I love tinkering with SBCs, but setup, install, usage, and maintenance are all a hell of a lot easier on x86 still.
Personally I have very little energy for unexpected issues, and when I gave up on SBCs for serving (as opposed to tinkering) everything got much easier and my progress got much faster.
I've been buying dirt cheap used business PCs for servers, works great, doesn't break the bank, and there are tons of parts available if you stick to the major manufacturers.