damnthefilibuster

Hey team,

Years ago, SO gifted me an Alienware Aurora R7.

It has an Intel I7-8700 and Nvidia GTX 1080 (8GB VRAM), 16 GB of DDR 4 RAM. (what else is relevant to this question?)

My question to you is basically this -

Given that I'm not gaming with it anymore, I want to use it for only two things -

1. Plex Server
2. Running random local LLM stuff like Kotaemon (https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon)

Let's say I have $1000 to throw at a GPU and I'd like to get 16 GB VRAM (or 24 if it's possible). I want to install it myself rather than take it into a shop.

What's a GPU I can buy that will fit,

1. within my budget?
2. within the chassis?
3. with the CPU and motherboard without issues?
4. with the needs I've detailed (namely Plex transcoding, and running ML models)?

I am an absolute noob when it comes to figuring out what hardware to buy (hey, we got us an Alienware sucker here).

So lemmings, help me out! I'd rather not ask ChatGPT.

I love PiHole. I've used it in the past and it was powerful! I also use an OpenVPN/Wireguard based VPN.

So is there a service that combines the two features? Lets me import adblock lists and also VPN configurations?

Preferably something that runs in a docker container that I can throw upon portainer and running within minutes!

Thanks!

I just saw the ASUS handheld in the wild. It was running some FPS game pretty well.

Can anyone help me compare the two - Steam Deck OLED vs comparable ASUS version? Which do you prefer? Pros/cons?

I’m almost decided to buy the Deck OLED, but seeing that in the wild made me pause. It looks nice.

Hey folks, I wanna gift a steam deck to myself. The main games I’ll (infrequently) play on there are CS:Go and age of empires 2 HD, both of which I own and never get a chance to play on a regular PC.

I suppose I want the OLED one. Is it ok to go for the 64 GB version or should I go for the higher storage tier? It has expandable storage yeah? Or is that not reliable or fast enough?

Also, what’s going on with the pricing? It’s just obviously better to buy direct. Why are people trying to sell it on Amazon? I get people trying to sell on eBay and Craigslist but Amazon? What’s the deal there?

I read a comment on here some time ago where the person said they were using cloudflared to expose some of their self-hosted stuff to the Internet so they can access it remotely.

I am currently using it to expose my RSS feed reader, and it works out fine. I also like the simplicity of Cloudflare's other offerings.

Any thoughts on why cloudflared is not a good idea? What alternatives would you suggest? How easy/difficult are they to setup?

Hey folks!

I have a WD easystore 14 TB External HDD connected to my Plex server (running on windows 11).

I am using about 4 TB of it, but not for anything truly important. It’s storing plex media mostly.

I’d like to use it for storing memories. But how do I trust it?

What are good tools for me to keep a check on the drive so that I can hopefully get enough warning when it starts losing sectors?

I have some tool installed based on recommendations online and I started a “surface test” of the disk and it said it’ll take a measly 300 hours. Not ideal.

Folks, I have a node.js script running on my Windows machine that uses the dockerode npm package to talk to docker on said box and starts and kills docker containers.

However, after the containers have been killed off, docker still holds on to the memory that it blocked for those containers and this means downstream processes fail due to lack of RAM.

To counter this, I have powershell scripts to start docker desktop and to kill docker desktop.

All of this is a horrid experience.

On my Mac, I just use Colima with Portainer and couldn't be happier.

I've explored some options to replace Docker Desktop and it seems Rancher Desktop is a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop, including the docker remote API.

1. Is this true? Is Rancher Desktop that good of a drop-in replacement?
2. Does Rancher Desktop better manage RAM for containers that have been killed off? Or does it do the same thing as Docker Desktop and hold on to the RAM?

Are there other options which I'm not thinking of which might solve my problems? I've seen a few alternatives but haven't tried them yet - moby,
containerd,
podman

I don't actually need the Docker Desktop interface. So pure CLI docker would also just work. How are you all running pure docker on Windows boxes?

Folks,

I'm looking for a self-hosted GitHub alternative that I can just plop into Portainer as a docker-compose and get working.

My main interest is in something that sort of works with GitHub - if there's a way I can pull repos from GitHub into this self-hosted git using a webUI and maybe even push my changes to repos on GitHub, that would be nice. I'm not hard-and-fast on this though as this is mostly an experiment right now and I don't know why I need this.

What are you folks using to host your super secret local code and why?

I've been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is... delicious!

I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).

So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).

Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?

Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.