Homelab & Selfhosting Thread - One Day it will be a Home Datacenter, you just gotta believe!

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Is it worth the Power Bill?


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True, but ultimately it's your metal, you control practically everything about it.

Coincidentally enough I found the Raspberry Pi 4 I bought during Covid that went unused and started to migrate from the AWS Lightsail instance :) Wasted a day mucking around with a DietPi distro that was still on a 32 bit architecture which led to a lot of crashes (stuff like Code Server didn't officially support 32 bit OSes) and felt retarded when I found out that the 64 bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS was released a few months ago, so I've just started using it today and it has been much more stable... so far!

Currently running a 40TB setup composed of 8tb drives in a snapraid+mergerfs array with two extra drives providing parity tied to an archivebox instance and several scripts to archive stuff regularly. Works well and if a drive fails it only takes 12 hours to get the array back online with less than a day's data loss, which has happened once in a decade due to everything only being spun up a few hours a day at most.

If anyone knows a better mediawiki archiving solution than mwoffliner let me know. It fucking sucks and one malformed page will crash the whole task. I want dumps of ED and other weird culture wikis before they're gone.

Trivial ghetto YouTube archiving solution I like : make a hidden public playlist on your account and run a ten-minute cronjob to save said playlist with ytdlp. Makes it easy to grab videos remotely without actually exposing any services by just throwing them on the playlist.

Maybe this list might help:

 
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Wendell with another great home server vid.


That Seeed box is really cool.

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And for 599 bux, I think it's a pretty good deal.
 
I have quickly realised that credential managememt is gunna drive me insane, even with my small userbase, so my project at the moment is identity management.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a Foss IdAM solution? It seems so convuluted and searching has been a pain in the ass because all the propriatary solutions seem to be especially on point with their SEO and marketing...

Partly I want to get the experience of even setting up a small one, even though its just overkill.
If you're still looking for one, either authelia with some ldap, or authentik (which is my preferred one)
 
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I am thinking of getting a old PC or Laptop from a relative or even buying some old soon-to-be-scrapped machine just to make a simple home server. All I really want to do with it is to have a SSH so I can bypass network internet blocks by redirecting the connections to first pass through my home server (like a ghetto VPN) and something for me to torrent with.

I was looking at just using Ubuntu Server for it since I only want the most basic of basic stuff.

I would love to have a huge backup machine to keep dozens of terabytes of data on but simply can't afford that sort of hobby spending at the moment.
 
And for 599 bux, I think it's a pretty good deal.

So it’s a NUC, basically. Not a terrible idea. I’m using an 11th gen nuc with the same specs along with a Terranas setup for hosting plex and other such things. It’s overkill for my needs but the form factor is irresistible 😌

Currently running 6x18tb drives for Plex, that’s my main focus.
 

And for 599 bux, I think it's a pretty good deal.
There’s actually a way better deal available right now if you’re in the market for a mini server.

Go check out the Minisforum website. They have their mini server, the NAD9, on sale for $650.

It’s got a 12th gen i9 (14c/20t) with a 96 EU Iris XE chipset. They are shipping with 32gb of ram and a half TB gen4 NVME drive and it has two 2.5” drive bays. It’s an insane deal if you’re looking for a high core server with a super low power draw.

Just snagged one and it’s insane for the price.
 
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Does anyone run a server in an area that gets a lot of lightning storms? I want to grab some WD Red drives to put in RAID 10 on NAS (might just run a full server for other stuff rather than getting dedicated NAS hardware) and I'm curious if anyone has any advice beyond "unplug it, dummy!"
 
Yeah I had solar put in because my power bills would routinely exceed AUD$1k (2 month period) and it did basically halve the power bills. It cost about AUD$6k to install a 5 kW system, which is a bit expensive for over here (installs usually are half that) but I opted for fancier panels and a consumption meter which drove the price up a bit.

If your power usage is constant and really high then you'll break even pretty quickly. I did a quick calculation just now and given my system is about 2 years old now and I have a retard sized homelab that requires dedicated AC, it has paid for itself.

Not sure how you'll go if you're in the US given solar is probably more expensive there (it's subisidised here), you probably get less sunshine than I do and power is really expensive in Australia
Depends on where you live. Utah is great for solar, lots of sun, little obstructions. My old man's power bill has been cut way down even thru all these rate hikes.
Wendell with another great home server vid.


That Seeed box is really cool.

View attachment 4958132

And for 599 bux, I think it's a pretty good deal.
This is personally what i'd want, something to back up my Anime Blu-Rays, nothing fancy or high octane, just something that would let me have peace of mind knowing that all that data is backed up for the future. And then add Tape storage because why not lol.
 
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Does anyone run a server in an area that gets a lot of lightning storms? I want to grab some WD Red drives to put in RAID 10 on NAS (might just run a full server for other stuff rather than getting dedicated NAS hardware) and I'm curious if anyone has any advice beyond "unplug it, dummy!"
A quality UPS will include voltage regulation, IMO that's what you're looking for.
 
A quality UPS will include voltage regulation, IMO that's what you're looking for.
This. Regulation at the UPS will protect your server from damage from moderate voltage spikes or a noisy power supply.

Depending on how raw the weather is, once that surge protection is used up it's like kevlar, you gotta replace it.

It should also be able to signal to the server for a clean shutdown before the battery power is exhausted (You'll usually get a good 10-20 minutes of battery life before this happens). NUT has good vendor support and it's what I use. https://networkupstools.org/
 
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This is personally what i'd want, something to back up my Anime Blu-Rays, nothing fancy or high octane, just something that would let me have peace of mind knowing that all that data is backed up for the future. And then add Tape storage because why not lol.
Yesterday I backed up every Huggbees video onto my homeserver. Because I find them kinda funny. And because I can.
 
Yesterday I backed up every Huggbees video onto my homeserver. Because I find them kinda funny. And because I can.
That's the dream man, nigh infinite file space just to store shit just for the lulz. Yes I do want every last gif of hank hill asking what a Jpeg is.
 
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I have a Dell Optiplex 690 I got for free at my local recycling center. (<3 5eva grandma, wish you were still there. the newfag sucks and doesn't let us in the back anymore for "liability" reasons aka reselling all the good shit online and letting the russian gold scrapper steal all the gold IBM/Cyrix cpu's) Featuring two Xeon 5080 cpu's and 64gb of ECC ram running Free(tranny)BSD Underpowered? sure, way too little performance per watt? certainly. But its main purpose is to compile software for the litany of random systems I have. SPARC64, PPC, x86, ARM etc. And locally X-forwarding applications that have no business running on the target system Alongside being my faithful media/ftp/irc server for the last 10 years. I've been contemplating upgrading to an ARM workstation. As long as smarter people can finally get GPU's working properly on them to combine what I'll speak about next paragraph.

With that said that my old desktop build was being punished running machine learning algos. As I found out Nvidia tesla k80's are stupendously cheap on ebay (snap them up they're $80) and you can either pick from a dual gpu model with 12gb per chip or the single gpu model for 24gb of vram. Running two separate schizophrenic LLM's at the same time is fun. So is pounding out stable-diffusion renders. ATM I'm looking to experiment with AgentLLM to see if it can auto install and admin an IRC/FTP server without human intervention. I'm incredibly excited to see how it fucks up and if it can handle such a task. Unfortunately my 10 year old psu popped and I'm waiting to scrounge a new psu.
 
As I found out Nvidia tesla k80's are stupendously cheap on ebay (snap them up they're $80) and you can either pick from a dual gpu model with 12gb per chip or the single gpu model for 24gb of vram. Running two separate schizophrenic LLM's at the same time is fun. So is pounding out stable-diffusion renders.
You forgot the cost of the PSU adapters, and the custom fan assembly. Plus the Pcie slot mount on some particularly greasy auctions. You are looking more at $100-150 after all of that. You would be better off with a 1080 at that point. I assume VRAM is king though on the k80s, even though the memory is slower. Plus with a proper side mounted blower fan assembly on that tesla, you are probably going to be taking up 4 slots a card. Unless you are going long on the fans in the front. I bought a P40 24GB last year and the thing had the performance of 90% of a 3060 for $250 with no tensor cores. Teslas are a rip off. Just grab a 3060 12GB and call it a day.
 
You forgot the cost of the PSU adapters, and the custom fan assembly. Plus the Pcie slot mount on some particularly greasy auctions. You are looking more at $100-150 after all of that. You would be better off with a 1080 at that point. I assume VRAM is king though on the k80s, even though the memory is slower. Plus with a proper side mounted blower fan assembly on that tesla, you are probably going to be taking up 4 slots a card. Unless you are going long on the fans in the front. I bought a P40 24GB last year and the thing had the performance of 90% of a 3060 for $250 with no tensor cores. Teslas are a rip off. Just grab a 3060 12GB and call it a day.
I ripped apart a junk hairdryer and took the fan out, ripped up some cardboard and taped it together on the back of the card.. internally. Case is wide open. The fan's hooked up to molex. Temps are fine haven't had issues yet.
Your right about the power supply. I didn't think about that. I just used a modular and hooked it up to the pcie slot.
The VRAM is killer. That's why they intrigued me. I started running those programs on my vega64. Before tapping out the 8gb. I'd rather wait for a response than pay.
I realize after typing that, I should pay with a picture of it.
 

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I ripped apart a junk hairdryer and took the fan out, ripped up some cardboard and taped it together on the back of the card.. internally. Case is wide open. The fan's hooked up to molex. Temps are fine haven't had issues yet.
Your right about the power supply. I didn't think about that. I just used a modular and hooked it up to the pcie slot.
The VRAM is killer. That's why they intrigued me. I started running those programs on my vega64. Before tapping out the 8gb. I'd rather wait for a response than pay.
I realize after typing that, I should pay with a picture of it.
That's a nuts setup, never would have thought of that. I've never had a problem training Hypernetworks or Lora's with 10GB RAM. If you want more last gen VRAM that's fine, just know you are trading throughput and speed for it.
 
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