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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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When building a home server, could a used/cheap PC do the job? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I've become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers ("bare metal" correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at "affordable" price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I bought a used m920q for this reason, still working on it, I'm at the docker-compose phase

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Those are beasts! My homelab has three of them in a Proxmox cluster. I love that for not a ton of extra money you can throw in a PCIe expansion slot and the power consumption for all three is less than my second hand Dell Tower server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Do you have any good resources I can look at to see if a cluster is something I should look into?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not really, but I can give you my reasons for doing so. Know that you'll need some shared storage (NFS, CIFS, etc) to take full advantage of the cluster.

Zero downtime for patching. Taking systems offline to update Proxmox sucks, especially if the upgrade fails for some reason. A cluster means I can evacuate one host, upgrade it, and move on to the next with no downtime for the hosted VMs.
Critical service resiliency. I have a couple of critical systems in my home lab that, if they unexpectedly go down, will make for a very bad day. For instance, my entire home network (and lab) is configured to use a PowerDNS cluster for DNS. I can put the master PowerDNS server on one host and the slave on a second host - if I have a hardware failure, I won't lose DNS. I have a similar setup for my Kubernetes cluster's worker nodes.
Experimentation. A cluster gives me a larger shared pool of CPU/Memory than my single host could offer. This means I can spin up new VMs, LXC containers, etc and just play with new software and services. Heck that's how I got started with my Kubernetes cluster - I had some spare capacity so I found a blog post that talked about Kubes on LXC containers and I spun it up.

I hope that helps give some reasons for doing a cluster, and apologies for not replying immediately. I'm happy to share more about my homelab/answer other questions about my setup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

That makes sense, thanks for sending that. My needs are far less critical or have a need to redundancy like that but just knowing that is an option is awesome