I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.
Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding — so it presumably won’t draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I’m guessing it’s ballpark accurate.
Works flawlessly for Immich of course.
The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.
For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!
So… and this is probably debatable, the point of a dedicated seed box is that there are a metric-shitton of other seed boxes on the local network (at the datacenter).
I’d argue the point of self hosting is to be able to set it up however you please. It sounds like you know what to do to be safe.
I use Mulvad for general VPN duty, though I can’t personally speak to its torrent support/speed I do see many recommend it in combination with a wireguard supporting container image. Spin a few up and let us know which ones you like and why.
I will definitely document it when I reach a decision about it all. That will hopefully help lots of people too later on, but at least i’ve already decided on the client and everything is configured there so that’s half the battle. I just wonder about recommendations around here, and absolutey i would self host it all!
Sbcs are neat and raspi is still cool imo, i guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too and the recent releases with 6, 8, 12, cores are enticing to a group of people. Really depends on what you want to do, right tool for the right job etc
I guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too
People always knew x86s existed. I think the main culprit is the price gap between them and Pis is decreasing. Pis used to be around $35, which has skyrocketed to 3-5x MSRP, plus they were unavailable for a long time. Now the Pi’s performance to price ratio isn’t justifiable to most, so people pay a little more for the x86 but get so much more capability.
I recently migrated most of my homelab to Proxmox running on a pair of x86 boxes. I did it because I was cutting the streaming cord, and wanted to build a beefy Plex capability for myself. I also wanted to virtualise my router/firewall with OPNsense.
Once I mastered Proxmox, and truly came to appreciate both the clean separation of services and the rapid prototyping capability it gave me, I migrated a lot of my homelab over.
But, I still use RasPis for a few purposes: Frigate server, second Pi-hole instance, backup Wireguard server. I even have one dedicated to hosting temperature sensors, reed switches, and webcams for our pet lizard’s enclosure.
Same feeling, except that rather than lizard enclosure, I am waiting to see how long that Pi will last in the heat and dust of a chicken coop while serving the sole purpose of a “do we have eggs?” And/or “WTF happened/WTF did the chickens do?” Web stream
I am by no means an expert, but my current solution is a spare raspberry pi running a docker container with qBitTorrent+VPN that sits plugged into my router. I like to think of it as my first step towards getting my shit together to building a full ARR stack
PS.: if you’re new to this and muddling through, I am happy to send you my notes and the docker compose file. The only thing I had to do outside of that was to mount a network folder so that it was downloading straight into my server and not locally on the Pi
Definitely does the job… I have a Plex server that a lot of family and quite a few friends use. It used to be that every time someone had a request, I would walk over to my desktop, find a torrent, wait for it to finish, copy it over the LAN to my NAS running Plex, and there might be days between me remembering to fulfill their requests. Now I get a message, and immediately from my cellphone pull up the qBitTorrent web UI, paste whatever they asked into the built-in search, click add, and reply “will be in Plex in 10-15 minutes”.
Now I want a fully automated ARR stack with one of those tools that allows people to make their own requests and it have it autopirate… So instead of them sending me request messages, I will be opening my Plex to watch TV, see something I never heard of on the “recently added”, and then guess who requested that and text them “hey was that you? Thanks for the new movie/TV show, I love it”
Got so carried away I didn’t answer your actual question. Yes, good speeds but then again the sucker is hooked up to gigabit fiber. But also, my speed is usually not the bottleneck anyway, I think
Haha i actually like that you got carried away. You have a nice system :) i definitely want to have something similar. With gigabit fiber yeah you will hit whatever cap is on the pi board then and its still plenty
Nothing changed, the hardware is the same as before. Your little pi servers are still doing the exact same work they did before. The only variables are prices on SBCs vs used small factor x86s, and the short, short attention span of terminally online hobbyists.
Use whatever you like, no need to race after others’ subjective (and often hyperbolic) judgment.
I missed this sentiment. Just bought my first RPI (5) and it’s a neat little toy. I have some pretty specific requirements I’ll have to work toward but I like tinkering with it. The size, price and low power consumption beat any of the mini PCs I found. Then again I’m probably out of the loop
Its 5 devices too so with mullvad id get 10 devices… would be nice that i have another vpn that can do lots of devices maybe 50… but airvpn looks banger for torrenting :) (id need only one pc in airvpn)
Love airvpn, it unfortunately trips captchas a lot, and some sites outright block you. If you’re seeing this up on a router, make a wifi network that’s unprotected just for the sake of convenience.
But torrenting and everything critical, rocksteady.
I do use Obsidian and you can use what you want to sync between devices by activating plugins. I’ve used many différent notetaking app and Obsidian make my day! obsidian.md
What happened is that people realized what I’ve been saying since ever - that the RPi and others are a money grab because of all the required accessories while a MiniPC will get you way more power, stable hardware , case, power supply and everything in between for the same price (if you go for second hand). Here is are examples of such posts: lemmy.world/comment/5357961 , lemmy.world/comment/4696545
For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
Either way, Pis have their use cases however in my opinion it was an overhyped product that sits on the middle of a market:
They tried to make the Arduino easy by adding an operating system and high level programming languages such as Python. It never made much sense, why would you want to have GPIOs directly on a “computer”? not reasonable at all. Nowadays we’re seeing a raise of the ESP32 devices that have 30-40 GPIOs and Wifi for 2$ each. Cheap, easy to develop and deploy and eating away on the Pi’s market.
Another typical use case for a Pi is some low power server, but while it is great in theory then it lacks the CPU performance required for the container-based absurdities people want to run and the I/O sucks. USB wasn’t ever a good way to connect to storage, let alone a USB/network shared bus like we had in the past. The new PCIe is questionable (look at the NanoPi M4v2 from 2018) and requires… more adapters;
Price-wise it doesn’t make much sense as well because a second hand x86 will be 10x faster at the same price point… and way more stable with more expansion.
Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox
Proxmox isn’t a new thing, in fact it is a pile of crap and questionable open-source that people still run because they haven’t discovered LXC/LXD yet. Read more here: lemmy.world/comment/6507871. FYI you can run LXD on your Pis and get both containers and virtual machines with it in the same way Proxmox people do with x86.
The irony of this comment is that people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD in the same way they used to when I said that Pis were a money grab and x86 MiniPCs were way better.
I would agree to a certain point. If you get a 10th gen CPU it is power efficient and there are a lot of gamers and whatnot selling those. Also there are a lot of MiniPCs that come with mobile “T” CPU that are very decent at idle.
But idle still would run much more than 15w. There a very good compilation google sheets for the most efficient X86 cpus, but once you start factoring hdds and ssds, it’s only natural to go higher (20w-30w) at least. That’s at least double than rpis
I don’t (specially DDR3-era stuff) because old server hardware is way more expensive, won’t be of any particular advantage and older hardware, compared to new stuff, will use a LOT of power.
Instead use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll probably be more than enough for homelabs. You can a good 9-10th gen Intel CPU and motherboard that is perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. Modern hardware = less power consumption, cheaper, more performance.
If you go really low end, let’s say i5-6500, this will probably cost around 80€ second hand with RAM. You can use www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ to compare CPUs the server hardware you can get with modern hardware if you’re interested.
Most DDR3-era server hardware comes with RAID controllers/cards and other things that nobody uses anymore, people have moved on the software RAID be it BRTFS or ZFS and you will want to do the same. Servers make a lot of noise - impractical for a home - and a CPU from that era will be around 150-200W, you can get a recent i5 with more performance that runs around 50W.
Another thing to consider: you’re trying to build a NAS get a basic motherboard with 4 SATA ports and then add a PCI to 5 SATA port card and it will be much cheaper than whatever server hardware. BTRFS as your filesystem and its RAID if needed. Now you may be thinking something like “I want a faster CPU in order to have fast SMB”, just don’t - your gigabit network will saturate before an i5-6500 or any mechanical drive does and when this happens you’ll be at something like 10-20% CPU usage. Just don’t waste your money.
Thank you, really appreciate your advice. I was just struggling to install Proxmox on a new machine, and you made me take a step back. The kernel is messed up, do I really want this? Why am I jumping through hoops for this when Debian has zero issues installing? I’ll be trying the container software you mentioned instead.
I’ve done the same thing as the person you replied to is suggesting for around 10 years now. It works very well for a home user because parts etc are readily available. Most hypervisors will run on x86/amd64 hardware without issue. Check out something other than proxmox. LXC is one suggestion. If you’re going to stick with Debian look into SAMBA with BIND to ensure ease of sharing and cross platform integration.
Another reason to not get an old server is power, noise and thermals. They’re designed to live in an air conditioned room. Anyone who works in server rooms for any length of time will tell you to wear ear protection.
people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD
From reading your comments I understand why. It’s in your delivery. You’re abrasive and you don’t explain why. You’re also telling people not to use something they know, to use something they don’t know, and not explaining how that would be beneficial. As far as I can see, you’ve only explained how LXD, when setup correctly, can do what Proxmox does.
You’re essentially telling people to use something that is at best a side grade for reasons, and being salty about it.
I wrote dozens of posts replying to every single question people had about LXD/Incus. Gave out printscreens, explained how it works, what it does, described useful features and pointed out multiple issues of Proxmox. I can show you what roads you can take and why but you must do the work yourself.
The same applies to the MiniPC vs Raspberry discussion as my price, performance and feature breakdowns and proved countless times that for a large number of use cases a MiniPC is better. Unsurprisingly this is the first of such breakdowns that got upvotes, and do you know why? Because a known youtuber in this space recently came out with a video saying the exact same things I’ve been saying and now it became “acceptable” to criticize the Raspberry Pi money grab.
to use something they don’t know, and not explaining how that would be beneficial you’ve only explained how LXD, when setup correctly, can do what Proxmox does.
Even if that were true, what’s was the issue then? Isn’t it obvious that a true open-source solution that is available on Debian’s repos from a fresh install is better than a half proprietary solution that asks you to buy a license at any turn? Use your common sense.
Besides my comments aren’t a marketing campaign there’s no “LXD will make you rich today and solve all your family drama” as soon as you complete our three step formula:
apt install lxd
lxd init
lxc launch debian debian-container
The advantage of using LXD/Incus are on the details, not on a flashy and shinny feature. It’s about running a clean Debian system, a non twisted and mangled kernel that will conflict with everything and not run stuff like OVPN properly, it’s about the license, the tools, not depending on a company, not having to wait 3x the time before your cluster is online. It’s about having a decent API for once and so many others.
Most people say they don’t want to be put in the same situation they were put about the the CentOS/RedHat licensing change, but then they proceeded to replace CentOS with Ubuntu and still use Proxmox. All questionable open-source that is as likely to fuck you over as RedHat did.
So eventually there will be a video from some youtuber stating that LXD/Incus is much better than Proxmox and people will flock to it without questioning anything. :)
I use annas archive for ebooks but I organize those with calibre, not audiobookshelf because I have a somewhat peculiar organization scheme that relies on calibres custom columns and export feature.
My audiobooks I get from abtorrents but I heard great things about myanonamouse
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