Thanks. The more I see, the more I realise I should just leave the AI stuff out. AI and gaming were outlier possibilities anyway, though I’m way more interested in gaming than AI. Right there with you on AI ethics. I don’t like seeing them steal art and rip off artists, but they can be good at tracking down solutions on various forums. At least, they do it faster. But it sounds like running one might be outside my budget, so I’m more interested in running services, and light/classic gaming, since I have an Xbox (Series X).
Comment on Where to start with setting up my own server?
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
For distro I’d recommend God’s Chosen Stock Debian. You want prioritize smooth upgrade paths from one major version to another since the server should last a long ass time, and Debian is that. Debian has the eyes on it to make it chill and if there are things to do they’re caught and noted (and more often something is set up to just do it for you).
So no, distro doesn’t matter as long as you can get your software going. But you’re not going to beat the insane stability of Debian. Any OS based on it is just an echo, which may even involve custom kernels which add more work for the specific distro maintainers and may slow critical security updates.
I run no GUI but you can def have one. I just SSH in. I do everything in containers (Docker 1st and I’m moving to Podman - but Podman is too heavy a lift to start, Docker compose files are always right there, use em) and LXC containers run by Incus (it has a web gui as well!).
I’ve been looking at “games on whales” https://games-on-whales.github.io/ to stream games from a beefy server to weaker computers and tablets. Might be a good route for your games without having to directly game on the server.
I have a 4 core 7th gen Intel CPU and it seems fine with doing x265 transcoding on multiple streams, but I’ve never tried finding out how many 4K ones it can do at once. I have 32 GB of RAM (I bought cheapo laptop RAM before the true AI shitshow, praise be, stuck them in with a DIMM board cooked up by China). I had 16 before that, and it was fine. But I just kept adding services.
An LLM will eat your RAM, you’d want 32 GB to be able to run a 16 GB one. But a GPU will be much, much faster. LLMs are just matrix math - that’s why they’ll never be able to think for real - and GPUs are sicko good at that kinda math (cause screens are a matrix!). I don’t fuck with LLMs though, no ethics in that whole shitshow.
Good luck!
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
horus_son_of_isis@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
I’m running a simple COMAI instance on my desktop that recommends linux commands and does limited chat. it was easy. It spins the processor up to 50% to give a response and takes a couple of seconds depending on complexity. I run the other stuff on a dedicated server, but with nginx proxy manager, I can send the COMAI instance to a page on my domain even though it is on a different computer on my LAN.
kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
I second debian!
I initially had some trouble getting streamed games to use the integrated gpu while the server was headless. I’ve heard you can use a dummy plug into one of the hdmi ports, but I found that using “xrdp” as the remote desktop client works as well. I hope sharing this might save you the hassle evetually.
I third Debian. I was a Ubuntu server fanboy for the longest time. I kept getting scared by “but it uses old packages” message about Debian. But it’s way overblown. Also, if you are using Docker for hosting your services, system packages don’t matter.