A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Western Digital My Cloud EX2 (Original) for storage
Raspberry Pi 5 for Home Assistant, Navidrome, Jellyfin, Kavita, Immich, Paperless and eventually NextCloud. Though it's being a bastard and won't run right now.
I need to get a Nano Pi to run OPNSense and Pi-Hole and I'll be happy.
NanoPi R2C has 1 gigabit speeds and you can run LibreCMC with little to no blobs :)
It is a Ethernet only router though, no WiFi.
My plan was to get one of those flying saucer looking WAPs to handle the WiFi. Would that work?
Runs off to look up LibreCMC 😂
Server - Desktop Tower
Raspberry pi
Thoughts - I'm considering downsizing. I don't really need all that much space, and it can be a headache at times. With drive replacement costs on top of power (~$320 a year) I consider either going to a vps or downsizing to what could run on a small compute like the n100 or a raspberry pi5, etc.
Look for 5W idle consumption boards + CPU combos which go down to package C6+ state. HardwareLuxx has a spreadsheet with various builds focusing on low power. Sell half your disks, go mirror or Raidz1. Invest the difference in off-site vps and or backup. Storage on any SBC is a big pain and you will hit the sata connector / IO limits very soon.
The small NUC form factors are also fine, but if your problem is power you can go very low with a good approach and the right parts. And you'll make up for any new investments within the first year.
Thanks! I need to look more into what the power implications of 8 drives is - they never spin down, so I assume they are a non-trivial portion of my power consumption.
That said, I've been considering upgrading to something recent and low power anyways. It would be a good opportunity to sneak in some useful features too,
Which the old hardware wouldn't support without adapters, cards, etc.
Responding to myself...
Datasheet reports 7.05 idle watts (~11w at active random read) so depending on what it considers idle, it'd be 8*7.05|11= 56.4:88W
Server clocks in at ~102W. Halving the drives would reduce the power by 27 : 43%
And in theory other components (motherboard, CPU...) must be using anywhere from (102-88) :(102-56.4)= 14 : 45.6 W.
Oh okay that's a lot of power. For reference, I just set up an old Haswell PC as a NAS, idling at 25W (can't get to low Package C states) and usually at 28-30 running light workloads on an SSD pool. My plan was to add a 5 disk cage and at least 3 HDDs, with Raidz2 and 5 disks being the mid term goal. Absolutely unnecessary and a huge waste. I settled on less but larger disks, and in mirror I can get 12-18 TB usable space for under 500€. Less noise and power draw too.
I'm running my email server on a POCO F1 ex-Android phone (running PostmarketOS now).
I wish I could get NixOS running on it, then I'd move other things also there.
PA-220 fw for internet access. An old workhorse, Synology DS1812+, for filesharing. A mac mini with Ubuntu running Plex and Roon also hosting Dashy in docker. A Hwg-ste to measure temp in my cabinet. I host a RIPE probe. An RPI4 running Zabbix. My next project is moving from PA-220 to something in the 400 series (probably 415) so I can upgrade to newer PANOS.
N100 that just got built today with only Ubuntu and portainer installed. I still gotta migrate what I had in my main PC, which was emby, sonarr, bazarr, qbittorrent and prowlarr. It'll be...fun
Ryzen 2700X on a gigabyte B450i
Arc A380
2 mirrored 4TB HDDs and 1 12 TB HDD, luks encrypted and on 2 zpools (I have an "unsafe" mount path for data on a single drive like media)
removable flash drive with boot partition and main SSD keyfile
-Zwave dongle
That's it.
I can run everything I need to on it and my home internet is only 100/30 still because I don't live in a city, so 2.5gig networking isn't worth the cost. a380 does all of the hardware transcoding I need at a fairly low power. It isn't as good as just getting a newer NUC, but it was cheaper and a fun project.
Also doing a full renovation, so KNX will be connected for home assistant to control my lights and things and my smart home stuff will probably balloon.
Power
Network
Storage
Compute
A second prod host will join the R520 soon to add some redundancy and mirror the Virtual SAN.
All VMs are backed up and kept in an encrypted on-site data store for at least 4 weeks. They're duplicated to tape (encrypted) once a month and taken off site. Those are kept for 1 year minimum. Cloud backup storage will never replace tape in my setup.
Services
As far as "public facing" goes, the list is very short:
Though I do run around 30-40 services all up on this setup (not including actual non-prod lab things that are on other servers or various SBCs around the place).
If I had unlimited free electricity and no functioning ears I'd be using my Cisco UCS chassis and Nexus 5K switch/fabric extenders. But it just isn't meant to be (for now, haha).
I have a pi5 running everything like a pihole and my lemmy instance
Not sure if I'm late on the draw here, but:
Debian 12 "Bookworm" Ancient 2007 Quad Core Intel Q6600 ASUS P5N-T Deluxe Motherboard 8 GB RAM 64GB SSD for the OS and a few applications 6x2TB Laptop HDDs in RAID 5 - scavenged from electronics scrap All wrapped up in a spare full tower I had from an old build
For now, the few services I have running are local network only. They are simply a few Docker containers running PiHole and Portainer. The RAID array is set up as a network share via SMB for my various personal devices to dump files to.
I am very new to the whole self-hosted thing and enjoying learning. Really, new to Linux, servers, networking, etc. Would love to hear some recommendations on what services I should look into, resources for learning more, critiques, etc. So far, browsing topics on here has been pretty helpful.
I have a 10 year old CPU running Intel i3 (don't know what generation) with 12GB of ram, few HDSs (8TB, 2TB and 1TB) , SSD(128GB) for Debian.
The motherboard has a VGA and I don't have any VGA display with me. So if anything goes wrong at reboot, I mostly do guesswork and resolve it.
The PSU fan is whining and hanging on to its life.
I am an atheist , but I pray to God for my PSUs life.