19h ago

Anyone else here self-hosting on absolutely shit hardware?

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7 websites, Jellyfin for 6 people, Nextcloud, CRM for work, email server for 3 domains, NAS, and probably some stuff I've forgotten on a $4 computer from a tiny thrift store in BFE Kansas. I'd love to upgrade, but I'm always just filled with joy whenever I think of that little guy just chugging along.
- Hell yeah, keep chugging little guy 🤘
- Heck yeah
  Which CRM please?
  
  EspoCRM. I really like it for my purposes. I manage a CiviCRM instance for another job that needs more customization, but for basic needs, I find espo to be beautiful, simple, and performant.
- Interested in how it does jellyfin, decent GPU or something else?
  
  It does fine. It's an i5-6500 running CPU transcoding only. Handles 2-3 concurrent 1080p streams just fine. Sometimes there's a little buffering if there's transcoding going on. I try to keep my files at 1080p for storage reasons though. This thing's not going to handle 4k transcoding very well, but it does okay if you don't expect too much from it.

Just down load more ram capacity. It the button right under the down load more ram button.
- http://www.downloadmoreram.com/

People in this thread have very interesting ideas of what "shit hardware" is
- My cluster ranges from 4th gen to 8th gen Intel stuff. 8th gen is the newest I've ever had (until I built a 5800X3D PC).
  I've seen people claiming 9th gen is "ancient". Like...ok moneybags.
  
  My 9th gen intel is still not the bottleneck of my 120hz 4K/AI rig, not by a longshot.
- Yep any core i3 is fine even for desktop given an SSD and enough RAM. Once you delve into the core2 era, you start having problems because it lacks the compression and encryption instructions necessary for the day to day smoothness. In a server you might get away with core 2 duo as long as you don't use full disk encryption and get an SSD or at least use ram for caching. Though that would be kinda a bizarre setup on a computer with 512 MB of ram.

Maybe not shit, but exotic at that time, year 2012.
The first Raspberry Pi, model B 512 MB RAM, with an external 40 GB 3.5" HDD connected to USB 2.0.
It was running ARM Arch BTW.

Next, cheap, second hand mini desktop Asus Eee Box.
32 bit Intel Atom like N270, max. 1 GB RAM DDR2 I think.
Real metal under the plastic shell.
Could even run without active cooling (I broke a fan connector).
- What're you hosting on them?
  
  Mainly telemetry, like temperature inside, outside.
  Script to read a data and push it into a RRD, later PostreSQL.
  ligthttpd to serve static content, later PHP.
  Once it served as a bridge, between LAN and LTE USB modem.
- I have one of these that I use for Pi-hole. I bought it as soon as they were available. Didn't realise it was 2012, seemed earlier than that.
- This was my media server and kodi player for like 3 years..still have my Pi 1 lying around. Now I have a shitty Chinese desktop I built this year with i5 3rd. Gen with 8gb ram

I was for a while. Hosted a LOT of stuff on an i5-4690K overclocked to hell and back. It did its job great until I replaced it.
Now my servers don't lag anymore.
EDIT: CPU usage was almost always at max. I was just redlining that thing for ~3 years. Cooling was a beefy Noctua air cooler so it stayed at ~60 C. An absolute power house.
- 4690k was solid! Mine is retired, though. Now I selfhost on ARM
  
  I retired mine with a 12600K and I'm not sure what to do with it now.

4 gigs of RAM is enough to host many singular projects - your own backup server or VPN for instance. It's only if you want to do many things simultaneously that things get slow.
- It is amazing what you can do with so little. My server has nas, jellyfin, plex, ebook reader, recipe, vpn, notes, music server, backups, and serves 4 people. If it hits 4gb ram usage it is a rare day.

I'm sure a lot of people's self hosting journey started on junk hardware... "try it out", followed by "oh this is cool" followed by "omg I could do this, that and that" followed by dumping that hand-me-down garbage hardware you were using for something new and shiny specifically for the server.
My unRAID journey was this exactly. I now have a 12 hot/swap bay rack mounted case, with a Ryzan 9 multi core, ECC ram, but it started out with my 'old' PC with a few old/small HDDs

Somehow Jellyfin works ¯(ツ)/¯
- 1366x768 ?? WTF
  
  This was common in budget laptops 10 years ago. I had a Asus laptop with the same resolution and I have seen others with this resolution as well
  
  That's a whole 86x48 more than 1280x720!
  
  Some old netbook I guess, or unsupported hardware and a driver default. If all you need is ssh, the display resolution hardly matters.

Got all my docker containers on an i3-4130T. It's fine.
- I had quite a few docker containers going on a Raspberry Pi 4. Worked fine. Though it did have 8GB of RAM to be fair

I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.
The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.
It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn't subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn't going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn't justify its continued operation.
- Always wanted am x3, just such an oddball thing, I love this. I had a 965 x4

You can do quite a bit with 4GB RAM. A lot of people use VPSes with 4GB (or less) RAM for web hosting, small database servers, backups, etc. Big providers like DigitalOcean tend to have 1GB RAM in their lowest plans.

Enterprise level hardware costs a lot, is noisy and needs a dedicated server room, old laptops cost nothing.
- I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would've been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.
  Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no...
  I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.
  Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven't booted it. It's just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/

your hardware ain't shit until it's a first gen core2duo in a random Dell office PC and 2gb of memory that you specifically only use just because it's a cheaper way to get x86 when you can't use your raspberry pi.
Also they lie most of the time and it may technically run fine on more memory, especially if it's older when dimm capacities were a lot lower than they can be now. It just won't be "supported".

Maybe a more reasonable question: Is there anyone here self-hosting on non-shit hardware? 😅
- I'm happy with my little N100
- Me using Threadripper 7960X and R5 6600H for my servers: 🤭
- You can pry my gen8 hp microserver from my cold, dead hands.

Yup. Gateway E-475M. It has trouble transcoding some plex streams, but it keeps chugging along. $5 well spent.
- it can do it!
  ... just not today
  got a ripping and converting pc that ain't any better. it's all it does, so speed don't matter any. hb has queue, so nbd. i just let it go... and go... and go...

3x Intel NUC 6th gen i5 (2 cores) 32gb RAM. Proxmox cluster with ceph.
I just ignored the limitation and tried with a single sodim of 32gb once (out of a laptop) and it worked fine, but just backed to 2x16gb dimms since the limit was still 2core of CPU. Lol.
Running that cluster 7 or so years now since I bought them new.
I suggest only running off shit tier since three nodes gives redundancy and enough performance. I've run entire proof of concepts for clients off them. Dual domain controllers and FC Rd gateway broker session hosts fxlogic etc. Back when Ms only just bought that tech. Meanwhile my home "ARR" just plugs on in docker containers. Even my opnsense router is virtual running on them. Just get a proper managed switch and take in the internet onto a vlan into the guest vm on a separate virtual NIC.
Point is, it's still capable today.
- How is ceph working out for you btw? I'm looking into distributed storage solutions rn. My usecase is to have a single unified filesystem/index, but to store the contents of the files on different machines, possibly with redundancy. In particular, I want to be able to upload some files to the cluster and be able to see them (the directory structure and filenames) even when the underlying machine storing their content goes offline. Is that a valid usecase for ceph?
  
  I'm far from an expert sorry, but my experience is so far so good (literally wizard configured in proxmox set and forget) even during a single disk lost. Performance for vm disks was great.
  I can't see why regular file would be any different.
  I have 3 disks, one on each host, with ceph handling 2 copies (tolerant to 1 disk loss) distributed across them. That's practically what I think you're after.
  I'm not sure about seeing the file system while all the hosts are all offline, but if you've got any one system with a valid copy online you should be able to see. I do. But my emphasis is generally get the host back online.
  I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to do but a mix of ceph as storage remote plus something like syncthing on a endpoint to send stuff to it might work? Syncthing might just work without ceph.
  I also run zfs on an 8 disk nas that's my primary storage with shares for my docker to send stuff, and media server to get it off. That's just truenas scale. That way it handles data similarly. Zfs is also very good, but until scale came out, it wasn't really possible to have the "add a compute node to expand your storage pool" which is how I want my vm hosts. Zfs scale looks way harder than ceph.
  Not sure if any of that is helpful for your case but I recommend trying something if you've got spare hardware, and see how it goes on dummy data, then blow it away try something else. See how it acts when you take a machine offline. When you know what you want, do a final blow away and implement it with the way you learned to do it best.

I've got a i3-10100, 16gb ram, and an unused gtx 960. It's terrible but its amazing at the same time. I built it as a gaming pc then quit gaming.
- 10th gen is hardly "shit hardware".
- That's a pretty solid machine

I started my self hosting journey on a Dell all-in-one PC with 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, and Intel Pentium, running Proxmox, Nextcloud, and I think Home Assistant. I upgraded it eventually, now I'm on a build with Ryzen 3600, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, and 4x4 TB HDD
- My first server was a single-core Pentium - maybe even 486 - desktop I got from university surplus. That started a train of upgrading my server to the old desktop every 5-or-so years, which meant the server was typically 5-10 years old. The last system was pretty power-hungry, though, so the latest upgrade was an N100/16 GB/120 GB system SSD.
  I have hopes that the N100 will last 10 years, but I'm at the point where it wouldn't be awful to add a low-cost, low-power computer to my tech upgrade cycle. Old hardware is definitely a great way to start a self-hosting journey.

Me on a RPi4.

Aw yep, bought an old HP pro-lient something something with 2 old-ass intel xeons and 64GB ram for practically nothing. Thing's been great. It's a bit loud but runs anything I throw at it.
- Just keep an eye on the power usage, depending on how expensive electricity is in your area. I live in California which has very expensive electricity, and buying newer, more power efficient hardware works out cheaper than 10+ year old Xeons over the long run, even if you get the Xeon system for free.

2012 Mac Mini with a fucked NIC because I man handled it putting in a SSD. Those things are tight inside!
- Those things are tight inside!
  ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
  
  Had to buy a special two pronged tool to get her out!

I'm self-hosting in a 500GB HDD, 2 cores AMD A6, 8GB RAM thinkcentre (access for LAN only) that I got very cheap.
It could be better, I'm going to buy a new computer for personal use and I'm the only one in my family who uses the hosted services, so upgrades will come later 😴

Odd, I have a Celeron J3455 which according to Intel only supports 8GB, yet I run it with 16 GB
- Same here in a Synology DS918+. It seems like the official Intel support numbers can be a bit pessimistic (maybe the higher density sticks/chips just didn't exist back when the chip was certified?)

Why didn't you post this before I bought the RAM?!

Yep, mspencer dot net (what little of it is currently up, I suck at ops stuff) is 2012-vintage hardware, four boxes totaling 704 GB RAM, 8x10TB SAS disks, and a still-unused LTO-3 tape drive. I’ll upgrade further when I finally figure out how to make proper use of what I already have. Until then it’s all a fancy heated cat tree, more or less.

I met someone that was throwing out old memory modules. Literally boxes full of DDR, DDR2 modules. I got quite excited, hoping to upgrade my server’s memory. Yeah, DDR2 only goes up to 2GiB. So I am stuck with 2×2GiB. But I am only using 85% of that anyways, so it’s fine.

kind of.. a "AMD GX-420GI SOC: quad-core APU" the one with no L3 Cache, in an Thin Client and 8Gb Ram. old Laptop ssd for Storage (128GB) Nextcloud is usable but not fast.
edit: the Best thing: its 100% Fanless

All my stuff is running on a 6-year-old Synology D918+ that has a Celeron J3455 (4-core 1.5 GHz) but upgraded to 16 GB RAM.
Funny enough my router is far more powerful, it's a Core i3-8100T, but I was picking out of the ThinkCentre Tiny options and was paranoid about the performance needed on a 10 Gbit internet connection

I faced that only with different editions of Windows limiting it by itself.

The oldest hardware I'm still using is an Intel Core i5-6500 with 48GB of RAM running our Palworld server. I have an upgrade in the pipeline to help with the lag, because the CPU is constantly stressed, but it still will run game servers.

My i5 6600k will turn 10 years old this year. I'm fortunate because upgrading to 32 GB should keep it running for a while still.

My home Kubernetes cluster started out on a Core i7-920 with 8 GB of memory.
Upgraded to 16 GB memory
Upgraded to a Core i5-2400S
Upgraded to a Core i7-3770
Upgraded to 32 GB memory
Recently Upgraded to a Core i5-7600K
I think I'll stay with that for rather long...
I did however add 2 Intel NUCs (gen 6 and gen 8) to the cluster to have a distributed control plane and some distributed storage.

I used to self host some stuff on an old 2011 iMac. Worked fine, actually

I'm hosting a minio cluster on my brother-in-law's old gaming computer he spent $5k on in 2012 and 3 five year old mini-pcs with 1tb external drives plugged into them. Works fine.

Wow, it's been a long time since I had hardware that awful.
My old NAS was a Phenom II x4 from 2009, and I only retired it a year and a half ago when I upgraded my PC. But I put 8GB RAM into that since it was a 64-bit processor (could've put up to 32GB I think, since it had 4 DDR3 slots). My NAS currently runs a Ryzen 1700, but I still have that old Phenom in the closet in case that Ryzen dies, but I prefer the newer HW because it's lower power.
That said, I once built a web server on an Arduino which also supported websockets (max 4 connections). That was more of a POC than anything though.

Oldest I got is limited to 16GB (excluding rPis). My main desktop is limited to 32GB which is annoying, because I sometimes need more. But, I have a home server with 128GB of RAM that I can use when it's not doing other stuff. I once needed more than 128GB of RAM (to run optimizations on a large ONNX model, iirc), so had to spin up an EC2 instance with 512GB of RAM.

My NAS is on an embedded Xeon that at this point is close to a decade old and one of my proxmox boxes is on an Intel 6500t. I'm not really running anything on any really low spec machines anymore, though earlyish in the pandemic I was running boinc with the Open Pandemics project on 4 raspberry pis.

Plex server is running on my old Threadripper 1950X. Thing has been a champ. Due to rebuild it since I've got newer hardware to cycle into it but been dragging my heels on it. Not looking forward to it.
- Isn't ryzen not recommended for transcoding? Plus, I've read that power efficiency isn't great. Mostly regarding idle power consumption.
  
  Ryzen is not recommended for transcoding because the Radeon integrated GPU's encoding accelerator is not as fast as in intel iGPUs. But this does not come into play if you A) have 16 cores and B) don't even have an integrated GPU.
  And about idle power consumption: I don't think it's a point of interest if you are using a workstation class computer.

My first @home server was an old defective iMac G3 but it did the job (and then died for good) A while back, I got a RP3 and then a small thin client with some small AMD CPU. They (barely) got the job done.
I replaced them with an HP EliteDesk G2 micro with a i5-6500T. I don't know what to do with the extra power.
- What are you running on it?

I used to selfhost on a core 2 duo thinkpad R60i. It had a broken fan so I had to hide it into a storage room otherwise it would wake up people from sleep during the night making weird noises. It was pretty damn slow. Even opening proxmox UI in the remotely took time. KrISS feed worked pretty well tho.
I have since upgraded to... well, nothing. The fan is KO now and the laptop won't boot. It's a shame because not having access to radicale is making my life more difficult than it should be. I use CalDAV from disroot.org but it would be nice to share a calendar with my family too.

What hardware are you using where the cpu says you are limited to 4gb?
Even a 25 year old Pentium 4 supports 8GB.
- Might be using a laptop where the RAM is soldered to the board. I've got a Thinkpad X280 that's like that: no slots, just surface-mounted RAM.
  
  That's Lenovo's fault, not Intel.
- Maybe an Atom?
  
  Yep. Intel atom D525
  
  Maybe. But it would need to be an Atom from 15 years ago. Anything newer does 32 GB.
  Of course motherboards don't support it but that's not the cpu's fault.
- 8GB can be stuffy on certain programs
- My guess is an x86 32bit machine
- Negative, Pentium 4 was x86 and thus could only address 32 bits.
  64bit CPUs started hitting the mainstream in 2003, but 64bit Windows didn't take off until Win7 in 2009. (XP had it, but no one bothered switching from 32b XP to 64b XP just to use more memory and have early adoption issues. Vista had it, but no one had Vista).
  
  The Pentium 4 supported PAE and 36 bit PSE
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#%3A%7E%3Atext=This+article+needs+additional+citations%2Cmay+be+challenged+and+removed.&text=In+computing%2C+Physical+Address+Extension%2Cthe+operating+system+enables+PAE.
  It's kind of like how the 8086 was a 16 bit processor but could access 1 megabyte of ram (640k ram 384 k reserved for rom) . -Or the 286 which was 16 bit but could access 24 MB.
  But even without that the Prescott P4's supported 64 bits.

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