Hi!
I have an old gaming pc (i5 9400F) with 16gb of ram that has been acting as my home server with proxmox. It’s quite large and quite loud and very overpowered for what I’m using it for (home assistant, Minecraft server, some lxc containers) and a mini pc (amd 5800h with 16gb ram).
I want to sell my gaming pc, place the HDD into a NAS (and samba share my plex library), and potentially grab a low powered N100 minipc to pick up the lxc containers and home assistant that my gaming pc is running.
New to self hosting so wondering if this is a good setup or if there are any glaring issues you see with this. What is your setup?
The n100 will make you sad eventually as your self-hosting addiction soars.
An older i5 with onboard gpu or an nvidia card will make you happier and not pull THAT much wattage.
Your Minecraft server will thank you.
I currently have a mini pc with amd 5800h. My thought was an n100 pc would take care of Pihole, Homarr, and other low cpu demand services. Minecraft server would go on my 5800h mini
Not a bad idea, but I’ll warn you that the addiction for homelabs is strong.
Oh believe me I know. Hence getting more mini pcs and wanting a NAS. 10 vms is not enough!
You are going to want a single larger server and docker
Much easier maintenance
If you’re crazy, you’ll go with Kubernetes . I personally recommend it., I love it.
But I also work in it every day, so there’s a convenience there, but the complexity is off the charts .
I don’t like the idea of a single large server. If a node fails, everything goes tits up. If I have multiple nodes and one fails, my other services have zero downtime.
Convince me otherwise - I don’t work in this industry I teach boomers how to use MS Word haha.
Ahhhh now you’re talking kubernetes.
I mean you can do it with 2 machines and docker compose, but yeah.
If you have a docker compose, you can just bring it to a new machine with the storage medium and hit “go” and it’ll go.
That’ll probably be enough for a home setup and have a 1 hr downtime in a failure.
If you want “always hot” kubernetes is basically “multi-node docker on cocaine “
Damn, that addiction is strong lol.
I’m happy to help where I can but it’s a FUCKTON of knowledge and setup to go far enough to kubernetes it.
Docker-compose is 100x easier and gets you 95% of what you need.
I’ve always had issues with docker, especially when running it on a proxmox vm. I get weird network issues where when docker runs, the whole vm is cut off from network access (but my docker containers have internet). I also have problems with updates. Maybe it’s the whole virtual-ception of it all, a vm running docker running an application.
So far I’ve been getting by with running containers for every service (or VMs when I needed a gui since command line for certain things is tough.
Depends on what you’re doing.
If you want a low-power setup, get a shell with a backplane for 4 drives and an n100 board.
If you want to host games, get an AMD APU on a mini-itx and do the same.
Maybe a 20-40W difference, but the AMD is going to outperform the n100 like a hot knife through butter.
N100 ain’t it.
Maybe i3-N305… or a mini PC with AMD H-series chip (or similar) configured TDP-down if you are concerned about power usage or fan noise.
Seems fine. I have an affordable NAS that mostly serves files and has a few containers, and a second server using one the Lenovo Tiny machines that has many more services and a lot more RAM. And it works well.
