Submitted 1 year ago by LazerDickMcCheese@sh.itjust.works to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I have an early 2000s PC (pre-SATA) with 512MB RAM (I’d love to tell you about the CPU, but its under a cooler that isn’t going anywhere) that’s been sitting in closets for about 15 years. Assuming I’m willing to buy into it, can something like that reasonably host the following simultaneously on a 40GB boot drive:
Nextcloud Actual Photoprism KitchenOwl SearXNG Katvia Paperless-ngx
Or should I just get new hardware? Regardless, I’d like to do something with this trusty ol business server.
Why do you hate yourself? You’d be better off hosting on an old cell phone.
I know, I know…but it’s good, faithful hardware and I want it to go to a good use.
If it’s really early 2000s, you might want to put it on eBay. There are retro gamers out there that could use it as good Windows 9x era gaming PC. You could give that HW a new life in someone’s retro setup.
It’s great HW for occasional gaming, but it’s very inefficient for 24/7 operation. You want to be somewhere after 2015-ish for something that is supposed to run constantly.
You could simply gut it, keep the case and power supply, and put modern components in it.
Don’t, it’s horribly inefficient.
Won't be able to do much, and even if you can do some stuff you have to keep on mind that the energy efficiency would be poor enough that you'd still be better off with a cheap pi from a cost perspective.
Really good point. Is a Pi recommendable for selfhosting?
It’s OK, but I’d suggest:
Atom > arm64 > arm32
Look for a NUC - they’re designed for desktop use, so they have more poke than a Pi. The N6005 CPU is a good choice, the N5105 is ok. These are x64, so you’ll have the widest range of packages. 4GB will do, if its upgradeable later. NUCs usually take SODIMMs, which you can pick up on ebay for peanuts.
Old hardware is awesome to reuse most of the time but it’s not nearly as efficient as our hardware today.
It’s probably good to just properly recycle the old gear and spend $200 on a mini-PC from Amazon that has three times the power all while using less electricity.
I usually completely tear down old equipment into is raw materials, the best I can. It’s less likely to be shipped off to another country for uncontrolled destruction and I get more money back for the materials.
that has three times the power
More like 30
Slap dos on it and go old school gaming
Yep do old school gaming on it.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| LTS | Long Term Support software version |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
[Thread #30 for this sub, first seen 12th Aug 2023, 11:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’m not sure you could even run pihole on 512MB RAM.
My first server was quite a bit tougher than that and it had some serious issues when I started asking it to do a lot at once. You might be able to get it going, but I suspect you might not be too happy with the performance you get out of it.
It's a bit shocking how much hardware you can get for how cheap. Even an Intel Atom box available for less than a hundred bucks that has no fan would likely run circles around that thing. One thing I'd definitely suggest is no matter what, an SSD if you're planning to run multiple platforms.
My plan is to keep the bare minimum on the boot drive required to get these services running. This is probably a Linux crowd, but I don’t speak the language and would rather keep it all in Windows if I can help it
Just a heads up that you might find it easier to learn a bit of the lingo than to try to translate all the entry-level stuff from linux to windows.
If you do figure it out though, you should document the process and put it up somewhere.
In addition to all the other points made here:
If you intend to run Windows on it the RAM issue will be even more important as Windows is a fair bit more resource-intensive just to get the base OS running.
It’s worth taking the time to learn enough Linux to use it for these types of projects, it will pay dividends in efficiency and flexibility.
You might not even be able to install modern OS on it as many are starting to drop support for old hardware, I know the linux kernel did some pruning recently.
I would never say no to using older hardware. Yeah, it’ll be like punishing yourself. But you learn a shit ton.
I recently started self hosting. I started on a PC with the same specs as you’ve said. Booting was an issue. And tons of stuff always broke. But i learnt a lot. And then there was a time, when i genuinely thought i could do better and switched an old laptop with decent specs.
Pi’s are very expensive and too dang low on supply.
So always make do with what you have. If it’s your first home lab, then yeah go ahead. In a few months switch
Pi is not the only SoC, merely the best-known.
I’d earn anyone thinking of buying a Pi for a home server: ARM is widely supported, but you might regret investing in arm32. Atom is a safer choice.
Yeah. But it’s too damn risky to buy the non-popular ones. Especially in my region…
It might be nice to use to learn, but you probably won’t be able to handle that much.
If you’re not using it for anything, you could wipe it and throw a server on it? I guess it depends on what you consider fun
It’s currently running RedHat, I just don’t have any ideas for what to do with it. Running a server for anything more than NAS is new to me
disable all other server software there, and only start your own lemmy instance
PeachMan@lemmy.one 1 year ago
That’s an antique. The list of stuff you want to run probably needs several gigabytes of RAM. I think Nextcloud alone needs 512MB. I’d recommend newer hardware, you can find stuff on ebay for under $100 that would be a LOT more powerful than what you have. www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p44…
skankhunt42@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
This is what I’d do OP.
I’m a huge fan of the lenovo thinkcentre m92p tinys. Basically the same thing as the dells for ~$150CAD. 3 of them (plus a couple PIs) run my homelab with lots of room to grow.
HellAwaits@lemm.ee 1 year ago
link is dead
PeachMan@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Try this
LazerDickMcCheese@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yeah, that’s kinda what I was afraid of. Thanks for looking out, that link was a 404 by the way