from MissesAutumnRains@lemmy.blahaj.zone to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 04 Apr 21:29
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/40845714
Some context: my friend has an absolute monster of a machine at his place. He went from ‘I have an old computer for plex’ to like… a giant rack that we all had to make a special trip for to move as a group when he moved into his new place over like 10 years.
It always seemed kinda cool that he had this setup but kind of, I don’t know, overkill?
Anyway, I got to talking with him recently about how annoying it was to move books from my storage drive to my reader and he offered to set up a server for me to use. So I spent an afternoon setting up a book download-to-hosted pipeline, and then I realized my manga doesn’t really play well with Calibre-Web, so I added a Komga container. But then I wanted something to sort them so I could just dump all the files in the same place and just have them sent to where they needed to be, but I wanted to make sure that it could handle audiobooks, and video too, because Jellyfin sounds kinda cool and it would be nice to have an organized Anime archive somewhere.
I guess I just mean that I understand it now. My friend is being super generous at the moment, but he’s already sending me links for some starter hardware that I can build out once I can set aside a little more money for it. I’m so pumped to see what else is out there.
So uh… what are y’all’s setups like? :3
#selfhosted
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Welcome to the club. Enjoy the journey. Learn and explore.
Honestly, unless you are just hardcore with a lot of disposable income, or you do remote administration for a company from home, a rack full of enterprise equipment is a bit of overkill. Not throwing shade at all, and I drool on them too when I see selfhosters with them. Thing is, modern, consumer grade equipment with some minor modifications like a dual nic, larger HDD/SSD, etc will get you very far down the road. Now days, it doesn’t take a lot to get a lot out of your equipment.
Yeah I had that problem with all my tentacle porn. /s
His use-case also went up over time, too. I’m in no way qualified to explain, but he trains neural nets for his PhD and does some remote work stuff for some people on his team. As insane as that thing sounds, he’s one of the most frugal people I know and this is like the one thing he really splurges on, and as far as I can tell, he’s not quite using all of it but it’s close.
I definitely don’t see myself ever getting quite that crazy with it, but I definitely want a slice of that capability for myself. If just to host all my tentacle porn. 😔
There’s not much of it on lemmy yet, but smaller racks (10") have become popular in homelabs for some years now. Many people print encasings for their mini PCs etc. It’s /r/minilab on reddit, on lemmy there’s the not very active lemmy.world/c/minilab
I built one myself a year ago. I have a small pcengine APU Box for OpnSense firewall, two Lenovo tiny boxes as Proxmox hosts that run as a high available cluster, and a Mini PC with a JBOD as NAS.
Ooh, thanks for the tip and the link, I’ll join that community as well! As far as I can tell, just based on what my friend has taught and what I’ve read, these smaller racks are basically all I’d ever need. I’m just a weeb who likes to read… and maybe host a PDS. Possibly a Lemmy instance. And you know, it would be nice to handle my own password manager… (I promise I’ll stop).
I understand some of these things now! :D (Also, that is such a cool setup. That’s exactly what I wanna end up with!)
I have oddly enough downsized. I have a few rack mount dell power edge servers, and one is fairly beefy (dual Xeons, 180GB of ddr4, 24 bays for 2.5 inch drives) bu5 the power cost and noise.
Now I run a few small form factor lenovo PCs, with a standalone NAS, and a few Raspberry pis.
I run 30ish containers on one lenovo.
If i ever get a house, I’ll bring back the power edges.
Hahaha, my friend said the exact same thing. He was debating downsizing and then moved into a house. Once he got situated, he was like, “Fuck it. This is the server room now.” It worked out because it heats that side of the house during winter. 🤣
Between my desktop (i7-12700KF, 64GB of DDR4 3600MT/S, Copper modded EVGA RTX 3090, 1000W power supply), 2 Power Edge servers with 2 750W power supplies each, heartened my entire old apartment.
During the summer it sucked 😆
You don’t need much to self host and don’t let people online gatekeep or exclude you or intimidate you with complex racks. An old PC repurposed to a home server gets you started and is enough for a lot of stuff. You can always expand as needed in the future.
Here’s my setup:
Storage is on a NAS: synology 2 bay NAS with 8TB (media: photos, movies, TV shows, books, comics) and 2 TB HDD (Kopia backup snapshots). I don’t need RAID configurations. Important data is already 3-2-1 backed up and if an HDD fails then I’ll just replace it when I get to that point.
Server: Headless mini PC with Debian with a 12th gen intel, 16gb ram, 1tb NVME (mostly live data, shared folder, game saves, etc). I’m building a new machine and have yet to decide if I want to replace the server or use that as a gaming machine, but the has a Core 5 Ultra 125H processor and LPDDR5 RAM and is super power efficient and silent.
Docker containers:
actual (budgeting)
affine (note taking)
bentopdf (PDF editing)
beszel (server status monitoring)
dockge (Docker management)
guacamole (server remote desktop access)
immich (photo application, backup, gallery and Al tagging)
jellyfin (video and music server)
jotty (quick notes and task/shopping lists)
kavita (comic books and ebooks)
kopia (backups)
floccus (bookmark backup and sync across browsers)
mattermost (used solo for sharing text, links, files, etc to myself)
papra (document scanning and OCR)
opodsync (gpodder podcast sync backend)
prunemate (automated scheduled docker pruning)
samba (file sharing on the local netwrok)
syncthing (mostly used to keep retro/emulated games in sync across devices)
tiny tiny rss (RSS platform)
vpn-torrent-stack (conatining gbittorrent, prowlarr, flaresolverr, radarr, sonarr, all running through gluetun VPN on a VPN server)
watchtower (automatic docker updates)
Synology Cloud Sync sends the Kopia backup snapshots to my Backblaze online storage and also keeps a local folder synced with my Mailbox.org cloud drive.
Synology also handles the reverse proxy access.
My friend shook me of any notion that I needed all that much, haha. I made a joke about getting a room set up for this and he shamed me by showing my resource use versus his. 🤣
Realistically, I think the only thing I’d ever end up needing is a ton of hard drives. That’s like… the biggest physical thing I need and as someone else in the thread pointed out there are some pretty solid smaller racks for that. My “starter” setup is going to be my current laptop when I upgrade in a year or so.
Edit: Whoa, that sounds like an incredible setup! All that is running fine on 16gb of RAM? Man, I really just need to do more reading about this so I can get a better sense of how all this works.
My dashboard says that containers are using 50% of the ram. The server PC itself is using a bunch of ram on top of that because I ended up installing g Debian with the full KDE desktop emvironment. I ended up removing some resource hogs that I didn’t need (Element server, Linkwarden, etc).
The best way to get to grip with how this works is to start using it.
You don’t need all that much. Most of my stuff, including a whole bunch of containers, runs in about 8gb. It used to be closer to 24gb, but that’s because I ran a bunch of windows VMs.
You can start small on disk space, too. Maybe 512gb or so on an ssd, and see how much you actually consume. Even my entire media library, containing more than I reasonably consume, is about 6tb.
So jellyfin runs on the server but the movies are stored on the nas? Sorry I was interested in running a similar set up but I wasn’t sure if it could work that way.
Yup works great. The NAS drive auto mounts as an NTFS drive on the server with read/write access. All works smoothly.
How well does it handle streaming multiple devices in the same network?
It works fine with 2 simultaneous direct play streams. Haven’t tested beyond that.
I also run this way. NFS4 mount for the media Dir. Cache Dir on the local SSD. No problems streaming 2-3 devices. NAS is happy to serve other files at the same time.
Docker host is nothing special, old Mac mini running Ubuntu.
This is pretty much the same setup I have. 2 bay Synology NAS for storage, mini PC (8gb ram, currently at 48% usage) for applications. Also added an external SSD that I had kicking around.
I’m running:
And then using Synology packages for Drive and Photos.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
[Thread #212 for this comm, first seen 4th Apr 2026, 22:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I just run on two mini PCs.
One running OPNsense, fanless N5105, 4x 2.5Gb, it doesn’t need much disk or memory but at the time it was a negligible additional cost to go to 16GB and 500GB.
The other is running Proxmox, on a Ryzen 7 7840HS, 96GB RAM, 500GB SSD, and with two 5TB USB HDDs plugged in (rotated with a third that I keep at a friend’s place as a cheap but fit for purpose offsite backup).
It’s just them plus a managed 2.5Gb switch and a couple of wifi routers in AP-only mode. It costs very little to run power-wise and is more than enough grunt for my needs.
My home server is a 2014 Mac mini running Debian that I’ve kitted out with a 250gb NVME drive and a 1tb SATA SSD. It also has a 2tb HDD hooked up to one of the USB sockets.
It has a quad core i5 and 8gb RAM, so pretty low rent as far as these things go.
That system is currently hosting Nextcloud, Navidrome, Invidious, Jellyfin, Grimmory, Mealie, and Immich. I reckon that’s probably about the limit of what it can handle. It’ll only be used by my wife and I, so I don’t forsee it coming under massively heavy abuse.
I’ve been lucky, because the entire cost to me of that setup is £10 for the adapter to fit the NVME drive, and £13 for the external HDD caddy. The rest of it has been stuff my wife didn’t need, and the Mac itself was my dad’s old one that he gave me.
The point is, you really don’t need a hefty box to start with. Just use whatever you’ve got and see what you can get away with.
The unfortunate reality is ‘what I’ve got’ is a 6 year old laptop that represents 60% of my net worth. 😅 Hopefully soon that will change, but for now, I’m taking the free/borrowed friend’s setup.
My game plan in the future is just to turn this laptop and a couple hard drives, though. I think comments like yours and a couple others have convinced me I really don’t need to invest all that much to get started, or really finished with the setup.nif you’re running all that on 8gb of RAM, I think the only thing I’m missing is the storage.
The thing with that laptop though, is that you’re probably able to upgrade the storage and RAM if you need to. That’s valuable. I mean, hilariously expensive to do at this point, but possible none the less.
The way I see it, have a think about what you want to achieve, what self-hosted service is most important to you, and start with that. If you have 200gb of music and you’re sick of giving Spotify money, spin up a Navidrome container and a free Tailscale* account so you can stream your own music to your phone wherever you are. Then see how your laptop responds to that. If it falls over then perhaps you’ll need to have another look at your hardware, but honestly, it probably won’t.
As for the RAM, I used SSH to hook into my server yesterday so I could watch htop on it from another computer while I was importing hundreds of photos into Immich. All four CPU cores were maxed out at 100% and it sounded like a jet engine, but the RAM usage sat steady at around 5.5gb. And that’ll do for me. _ *Tailscale is magic, btw. A free account allows 100 devices, so if you’re running things just for yourself it means you can access everything wherever you are. For free. With basically no setup.
I’m fairly certain the RAM is soldered and capped, but it has 16gb, so more than I could reasonably touch anyway. It has a 500gb soldered SSD, but I know there’s a slot for another. The only reason I wanna ‘start’ by getting a rack and hard drives is because I watched my friend lose his mind one weekend while he migrated multiple terabytes of data and he has since repeatedly recommended keeping the storage separate and plug and play, haha.
I’m 100% down to give all this a shot, though. As soon as I upgrade, this laptop is immediately getting recycled into the first step server (and very probably the final step unless something drastic changes in my life).
You are on the right path. Most stuff people self host requires very little horsepower. Most of your CPU will be idle in the end. Things might get expensive if you want to add a lot of storage, but the good news is that can be added later as you need it. I think you'll be surprised just how much a modern-ish laptop can host.
I love the Dells I use. They're wonderful little workhorses, and I got a pretty good deal as they used to mine chia cryptocurrency.