Seven Raspberry Pi 4's and one Pi Zero, mounted on some tile "shelves" inside some IKEA furniture.
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Seven Raspberry Pi 4's and one Pi Zero, mounted on some tile "shelves" inside some IKEA furniture.
What do you do on that many pi's that could not be done easier on 1 x86 box?
They're fanless and low-power, which was the primary draw to going this route. I run a Kubernetes cluster on them, including a few personal websites (Nginx+Python+Django), PostgreSQL, Sonarr, Calibre, SSH (occasionally) and every once in a while, an OpenArena server :-)
I did a 4 node Pi4 kubernetes cluster for about 5 years. The learning experience was priceless. I think most notable was learning to do proper multiarch container builds to support arm and x86_64. That being said, about half a year ago I decided to try condensing it all into two n100 nuc-like clones and keep one pi as the controller. For me and my apps and use cases there was no going back. Performance gains were substantial and in this regard I think I was hobbling myself after the educational aspect plateaued.
Actually, as a web guy, I find the ARM architecture to be more than sufficient. Most of the stuff I build is memory heavy and CPU light, so the Pi is great for this stuff.
So nobody is going to ask about the rotary phone?
It's a GPO 706, which is a classic British bakelite phone from the '60s. I have it hooked up to a SIP trunk through an OBi 100. Right now it can receive calls but not make them because I haven't gotten around to sorting out a pulse-to-tone dialing converter yet.
was going through some old pictures and decided I'd post a retro setup. pretty sure I took this picture with my android g1....so 2008ish?
here is a pic of one of my first selfhost setups. I began selfhosting for music and have never stopped. this iteration was stuffed behind a bar that was built in to the basement at my old house
the old fashioned was custom built and was running some flavor of windows server. the one on the floor was the first Linux server I had run to do something useful...torrents and subsonic IIRC. I pieced that server together with random parts, mostly donated from old family PCs. two UPS units were on the bottom rack of that metro shelf to battery back the servers and the tomato router out of frame.
That monitor looks so sexy.
oh, she was. found her several years earlier in a trash pile at an office building I was working at.... with the protective plastic still stuck on the screen.
she met her doom against a concrete floor during a studio shuffle.... sad day.
lmao mine looks simple af compared with most people here.
Behold my server :
Hardware:
Rasberry pi 5 8GB
1TB raid between old drives ( one from PC the other a just a regular external WD hard drive ).
Services
Everything in containers, if you want to know more check this blogpost.
An old HP laptop with Debian hosting Klipper and Home Assistant. Waiting for an OTG cable so I could replace the laptop with a phone for less power and heat
Using phones with a continuous power supply might do nasty things to the battery.
Source: I finally figured out how to open a glass back phone with no tools.
Heat, then suction?
On a related note, I solved the battery issue with my wall mounted Fire tablet (for an HA dashboard) by connecting the power supply to a smart plug and setting up an automation to only give it the juice for about 3 hours per day, spread throughout the day
Below, a picture of my small rack, which is located in my home office. Due to the selected components, it is virtually silent and still bobs along at only 26 - 28° C.
The hardware is divided into two Proxmox clusters. The first consists of the three Lenovo M920qs shown here and is home to my publicly accessible services and VMs, the second consists of the two Beelink EQ12s and is responsible for the internal services or those accessible via VPN.
Not the greatest or best Homelab, but for me, it fulfils all my needs and at the same time keeps the electricity costs down to an unimaginable level.
I host the following services on the public Internet:
Internally, I also provide the following services:
Any chance on getting more info about the hardware specifics? From the sounds and looks of it this is almost exactly the scale of what I’d like and running pretty much the same things I’m thinking interested in.
You’re very welcome! I’ve provided a detailed overview of my entire setup on my blog, and following your request, I’ve updated it to reflect the latest changes.
You can check out the post here: https://blog.klein.ruhr/homelab/
You people are such nerds. Wish I could self-host too.
You can get a setup going on whatever personal computer until you throw ~$150 on a mini PC.
I know!. I watched a few videos but I'm affraid I lack some programming skills for now. Or it would requires that I have a few days off and be in great mood haha. I have a few computers that would probably work, what I would need is someone by my side to help me troubleshoot whatever wont work. You guys already made me switch to linux which I wouldnt even have considered a few years back lol. Super happy, but it's always a challenge when something stops working. For example, after the last kernel update, I spent hours trying to get bluetooth to work again, and in the end buying a new adapter was the only thing that worked. But one day I will self-host too!
What are those machines on the floor?
The meat and potato's of my homelab. It is just a Proxmox cluster hosting some things.
Most of it is pretty ordinary as I just have a bunch of Debian VMs hosting docker compose. Ansible for deployments and I am working on moving completely to NFS for storage.
The two notable things I have is a virtualized NAS running TrueNAS and a virtualized desktop running Linux Mint. The NAS has a pcie sata controller passed though with two SSDs and the desktop has a RX580 and the USB controller passed though. The tower seen in the back has both of those currently and what you can't see is my monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Here are the services I'm running:
Jellyfin
Nextcloud
Matrix
my website (it is not much at the moment)
I'm using busybox http
Graphana and Influxdb
monitoring. I will eventually move to something else.
The hardware is the follows:
Dell precision tower with a i7-6700k and a standard ATX power supply
Lenovo think center with a i5-8500
HP whatever its called with a i5-8500
Also the router and my AP (not in picture) is running OpenWRT with vlans