I used to have old ThinkStation as a home server. Even older ones like S20 I have couple of laying around is still pretty capable system (I’m typing this on one) and as they’ve been CAD workstations and things like that when they were new many have 12+GB of RAM already. I got mine for free troguh a work contact, but they should be available via ebay or (preferably) your local version of it for pretty cheap.
Then you just need new drives and their prices have dropped too. 100€ is a bit of a stretch, but if you can get a whole computer from someone in the industry it should be possible. I have a few systems laying around I could get rid of for a case of beer or something, but shipping alone from here would eat up majority of your budget (if anyone is interested in x3550 m3 throw me a message, located in Finland, I might remember the model wrong but that’s roughly in the ballpark).
Other than thinkstations I’d say you’ll want a xeon CPU with at least 4 hyperthread cores, 16GB RAM and all the drives your budget has left. SSD for a boot drive(s) is nice to have, but spinning rust will get you there eventually.
Many rack mounted servers only accept SAS-drives which are a bit more expensive. Tower mounts generally use SATA so you can just throw in whatever you have laying around. The main concern is amount of RAM available. For older systems it might be a bit difficult to find suitable components, so more you have already in place the better. For VM server I think 16GB or above is fine for learning and it might be possible to shoehorn most of the stuff in even with 8GB. Performance will definetly take a hit with less RAM, but with that budget some compromises are necessary.
So, in short, with that budget it might be possible if you have a friend who has access to discarded workstations or happen to stumble in a good deal with local companies. It’ll require some compromises and/or actively hunting for parts and with old hardware there’s always possibility of failure so plan accordingly.
Start small. Find good used hardware first before thinking what services to run. I would start with an old desktop.
Self-hosting is a journey, not a destination. No matter what you buy you'll probably need to buy new hard drives. Used hard drives are a bit of a gamble.
Where do people buy used systems in Denmark? Show us a few things you're interested in and people can give you recommendations.
Also, instead of Photoprism, I would suggest Immich. I was a huge supported of Photoprism for years (even donated money) but their development is too slow. Immich is way faster and has an android app. Anyways, give it a look.
I think 8 GB of RAM is sufficient for all those services. I run them all with Yunohost and I rarely get over 4 GB RAM used.
dba.dk is a pretty popular site for buying used stuff in Denmark, but for electronics I usually go on eBay and sort by EU only (IIRC they removed that option so now the results are tainted with lots of UK gear that’ll be hit with import taxes).
Both deals sound amazing to me, but get 8GB or prepare for RAM upgrade. 4GB could be enough for what you listed there, but you might find more services to run in the near future 🤪
I think those tiny PCs are perfect if you dont need more SATA ports. Its hard to beat them with that low price
First of all, thanks to all who replied! I didn’t think there would have been that many people who self-host a SSO-server, so I am happy to see these replies.
As a side-note, I have also been looking into making the setup more robust, i.e. add redundancy. For a “light redundant” senario (not fully automatic, but -say- where I have a 2nd instance ready to run, so I just need to adapt the DNS-record if it is needed), can I conclude from the “makeing a backup” question, that I just need to run a 2nd instance of postgres and do streaming-replication from the main instance to the backup-instance ?
Or are there other caviats I haven’t thought about?
Well, the issue here is that your backup may be physically in a different location (which you can ask to host your S3 backup storage in a different datacenter then the VMs), if the servers themselfs on which the service (VMs or S3) is hosted is managed by the same technical entity, then a ransomware attack on that company can affect both services.
So, get S3 storage for your backups from a completely different company?
I just wonder to what degree this will impact the bandwidth-usage of your VM if -say- you do a complete backup of your every day to a host that will be comsidered as “of-premises”
if you backup your vm data to the same provider as you run your vm on you don’t have an ‘off-site’-backup, which is one criteria of the 3-2-1 backup rule.
The issue is not cloud vs self-hosted. The question is “who has technical control over all the servers involved”. If you would home-host a server and have a backup of that a network of your friend, if your username / password pops up on a infostealer-website, you will be equaly in problem!
A data cloud backup loss should be fine, because it’s a backup. Just re-up your local backup to a new cloud/second physical location, that’s the whole point of two.
I don’t see a need to run two conccurent cloud backups.
In this case, it is not you -as a customer- that gets hacked, but it was the cloud-company itself. The randomware-gang encrypted the disks on server level, which impacted all the customers on every server of the cloud-provider.
Yeah absolutely, but tonyou as an individual , it’s the same net effect of your cloud backup is lost. Just re-up your local backup to a different cloud provider.
I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to all the self-hosters out there whenever Cloudflare changes their policy on DNS or their beloved free tunnels. People trust those companies too much. I also did at some point, until I got burned by DynDNS.
We start paying for static IPs. If cloudflare shuts down overnight, a lot of stuff stops working but no data is lost so we can get it back up with some work.
They’re just creating a situation where people forget how to do thing without a magic tunnel or whatever. We’ve seen this with other things, and a proof of this is the fact that you’re suggesting you’ll require a static IP while in fact you won’t.
Where I live, many ISPs tie public IPs to static IPs if they are using CG-NAT. But of course there are other options as well. My point was that the other options don’t disappear.
Though I do get the point that Cloudflare aren’t giving away something for nothing. The main reason to me is to get hobbiest using it so they start using it (on paid plans) in their work, or otherwise get people to upgrade to paid plans. However, the “give something away for free until they can’t live without it then force them to pay” model is pretty classic in tech by now.
However, the “give something away for free until they can’t live without it then force them to pay” model is pretty classic in tech by now.
Yes, this is a problem and a growing one, like a cancer. This new self-hosting and software development trends are essentially someone reconfiguring and mangling the development and sysadmin learning, tools and experience to the point people are required to spend more than ever for no absolute reason other than profits.
I have been looking into a way to copy files from our servers to our S3 backup-storage, without having the access-keys stored on the server. (as I think we can assume that will be one of the first thing the ransomware toolkits will be looking for).
Perhaps a script on a remote machine that initiate a ssh to the server and does a “s3cmd cp” with the keys entered from stdin ? Sofar, I have not found how to do this.
The real issue here is backups vs disaster recovery.
Backups can live on the same network. Backups are there for the day to day things that can go wrong. A server disk is corrupted, a user accidentally deletes a file, those kinds of things.
Disaster recovery is what happens when your primary platform is unavailable.
Your cloud provider getting taken down is a disaster recovery situation. The entire thing is unavailable. At this point you’re accepting data loss and starting to spin up in your disaster recovery location.
The fact they were hit by crypto is irrelevant. It could have been an earthquake, flooding, terrorist attack, or anything, but your primary data center was destroyed.
Backups are not meant for that scenario. What you’re looking for is disaster recovery.
On the other hand, most of the disaster senarios you mention are solved by geographic redundancy: set up your backup // DRS storage in a datacenter far away from the primary service. A scenario where all services,in all datacenters managed by a could-provider are impacted is probably new.
It is something that, considering the current geopolical situation we are now it, -and that I assume will only become worse- that we should better keep in the back of our mind.
It should be obvious from the context here, but you don’t just need geographic separation, you need “everything” separation. If you have all your data in the cloud, and you want disaster recovery capability, then you need at least two independent cloud providers.
Nope. Full self hosted livestreaming. I personally use it to stream games. I started a communit at !owncast/lemmy.world and I’ve listed a few different streams. Some folks game, classic movies, music, etc. It’s your own self hosted Twitch or YT streaming, etc.
I’m not understanding what you’re stating. Me streaming a video game isn’t blogging. If you mean that there isn’t a list of folks all streaming, well there’s directory.owncast.com to find folks. If you mean only you can stream to it, well that’s not true as you can set up multiple stream keys and allow others to stream to it as well. So I’m really not understanding what you’re stating.
dont want to get into a semantic argument about how you distribute data. but if you have a site where you post your own personal shit all the time, including 'streaming', youre doing nothing different than 'blogs' from 20 years ago. the number of viewsers/casters is irrelevant.
yes, i love all the new tech. its just funny how we keep renaming the same pieces.
streaming is just yesterdays podcasts which were everyones vlogs before that. its all the same shit.
i just found it funny they owncast guy claimed to not be able to 'talk' about his 'blog + video'
This is literally the self-hosted community. I’m talking about self-hosted livestreaming platform. If you want to call it a blog + video, ok sure. Everything is basically a rehash of everything else. Just trying to share some self-hosted information. And I’m not the dev of Owncast or anything, just someone trying to make others aware of self-hosting software.
@originalucifer@ozoned hm.. Why do you call it blog then? It's just someone's web page with text, pictures and video published to it. Languages evolves and new words can describe new implementations better.
it was about communication. we want to struggle so hard against calling it something we dont want, its now labeled 'difficult to describe'. which i find silly
It's not that difficult to describe. The media is described based on its content, format, and time of release.
If the core content is text-based, it's a blog. If it's audio-based, it's a podcast. If it's video-based, it's a either a vlog (for personal content) or simply video (for topical content). These all assume the content was first created, and then released.
If it's released at the time it's produced, it's a livestream, or just a stream.
Backups are usually encrypted from most popular backup programs, either by default or as an option (restic, borg, duplicati, veeam, etc…). So that would take care of someone else getting their hands on your backup data.
I never store my actual files on a cloud service, only encrypted backups.
For local data on my devices, my laptop is encrypted with bitlocker, and my Android phone is by default. My desktop at home is not though.
Indeed. Whatever you put in a cloud needs backups. Not only at the cloud provider, but also “at home”.
There has been a case of a cloud provider shutting down a few months ago. The provider informed their customers, but only the accounting departments that were responsible for the payments. And several of those companies’ accounting departments did not really understand the message except for “needs no longer be paid”.
So for the rest of the company, the service went down hard after a grace period, when the provider deleted all customer files, including the backups…
Everything you want is definitely possible for the budget.
I used an old I5 laptop with 4GB of RAM for a year or two. If you need a lot of storage, an old HDD will be fine usually. A raspberry pi 4 or 5 will be slower, but would still work, but if Norway prices are anything like belgium, an old I7 laptop sips power and will save money in electric costs
A few tips:
Run nextcloud all-in-one or spend some time optimizing nextcloud. It will help performance a lot
Unless you are a serious photographer, use Immich, 100%. Immich is a google photos replacement that has a bunch of good user features like accounts and good security and sharing that photoprism just doesn’t. Photoprism is really geared towards professional photographers.
transmission + wireguard container for a VPN is the way to go …
radarr/sonarr/lidarr & prowlarr are good to use with transmission
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