• 1 Post
  • 248 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: March 19th, 2024

help-circle


  • Its just a dock, so no.

    It works with most laptops running Linux, but its still just a dock. That gigabit port is just a usb-c/thunderbolt device, it is not a full machine. Same with the video, its just DP alt mode, there is no GPU in there.

    If you want a small form factor machine to use a server, look for a used tiny/mini/micro workstation.









  • Here are a few of my favorites, some of which are exposed, some are not:

    • Mealie - Recipe management. Import recipes by URL is my favorite feature, then I tweak and try it out (I have to be gluten free, so this makes it easy to track what worked for us).
    • Homepage - a homepage to put quick links to all of my stuff, neat and clean.
    • Grafana - for visualization of current data of my systems, paired with Prometheus.
    • Technitium DNS - for all of my DNS needs.
    • Jellyfin - for all my media, let’s me pick out what my kids can see/watch without me having to look over their shoulder, along with being a great looking solution for me.
    • Immich - photo and video management

    All of these (and more, this is just a dsmple of favorites) run on Proxmox. I mostly use LXC over docker, personal preference.

    Home Assistant is probably the single most useful for me, already mentioned, just about everything at home is automated/controlled through there.






  • Ah - yeah ive got trunk to each of the machines in my clusters, 9 vlans total, and of course I can add more whenever this way. I’m a bit of a glutton for naming and numbering structure too, so the purpose of the service determines which VLAN its on. Like Home Assistant has just about its own vlan, with sensors and misc tools in support of it all there. A different one for IoT devices by others (that I will never trust with internet access, so its initiate from another VLAN on the FW only, outbound can’t be initiated from any device on it, etc), one for work thats part of a site-to-site with work, with a few ports on the switch allocated that I can just plug in ad hoc, etc.

    Definitely helps to have the range to play it this way!


  • In my case, I don’t need the isolation of a VM, really I’m just looking to separate the service I’m running into something manageable and easy to move between hosts. I could do a VM for each, but I’d be adding overhead and power requirements without much benefit.

    And really that’d all it comes down to for me. Each service is its own LXC, from stuff most self-hosters use, to random one-offs I write. Managing it all stays in ansible for everything, and the structure is quite a bit simpler.

    When I do want to bring it elsewhere, I van package it up clean and toss that on a new LXC somewhere else quickly, like an 80 core monster with $16k in GPU thats already getting pushed hard, and knowing it will be of almost no impact to its main job while adding the service it needs.

    I do still have VMs, but that is to do things like dealing with windows. Especially specific versions, like a piece of software for some work stuff that requires XP or server 2008 specifically. Its pretty isolated though, not even allowed network access out. All my writes are to a thumb drive if I need to get something out of it (which is uniquely set as the thumb drive its allowed to see).

    So nothing that I couldn’t do a bunch of other ways, this is just the structure thats working best for me.


  • Tiny/mini/micro.

    You can grab a used box for under $200. Most I’ve picked up have been around $100-$125, then I drop in a new m.2 for the host, maybe add/change ram depending on what I got it with.

    Data lives on the NAS (really multiple for me, but besides the point here), and you’ll get waaaayyyyy more compute with a usff PC like that than you will with a pi or what a NAS can offer. They also run really light on power when you aren’t putting the CPU to work, so budget friendly in a bunch of ways.

    I’ve got a goal after a move my wife and I are planning to run the whole shebang on solar, with battery and a switch to utility power. I’ve got 10 of these little monsters now, after a recent addition, and its quite doable from my measurements of actual power usage.

    Which is a really long way of saying you may want to look at some tiny/mini/micro PCs.