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Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

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Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#171

Post by kassner »

zer00eyz wrote: post #157
mkayokay wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can also recommend Lenovo ThinkCentre MiniPCs or similar brands. Those can often be found cheap when companies upgrade their Hardware. These machines are also power efficient when idling, use even less space than a laptop and the case fan is very quiet (which can be annoying with laptops under load). I'm currently running Syncthing, Forgejo, Pihole, Grafana, a DB, Jellyfin, etc... on a M910 with an i5 (6th or 7th G…

> M910 with an i5 These are great and the M920q is also nice. At 100 to 160 used these are a steal, just test the disks before you commit to long term projects with them (some have a fair bit of wear). Its newer cousins quickly climb in price to the $300+ range (still refurb/used) The bleeding edge of this form factor is the Minisforum MS-01. At almost 500 bucks for the no ram/storage part it's a big performance jump…

> M920q

I’m pissed at Lenovo for making the perfect machine for a home server, and then cheaping out by not adding the $0.50 M.2 connector on the back of the board. 2xM.2 + 1xSATA requires upgrading to “Tall” Intel NUCs if you want 3 discs.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#172

Post by kassner »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #119
kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

Why do you recommend removing the battery? Risk of fire? I would have thought any reasonably recent laptop would be fine to leave plugged in indefinitely. Not to mention many won't have an easily removable battery anyway

As said by others, mostly the fire risk. They can catch on fire, although rare, and a bad contact or flaky power source could make it go into many charge/discharge cycles in a short period of time. Batteries also degrade faster if it is too warm, cheap laptops often have terrible thermals and you could also shove it in a closet. A combination of those will increase the fire risk.

Also when using an old laptop, the battery could be pretty beaten up (too many cycles or prolonged exposure to heat) or it could have been replaced by a cheap non-compliant alternative, making it harder to trust wrt fire risk. And if you have to buy a brand-new one to reduce that risk, it immediately changes all the economic incentives to use an old laptop (if you are gonna spend money, might as well buy something more suitable).

> many won't have an easily removable battery

That’s true, although I’d guess majority can still have the battery disconnected once you get access to the motherboard.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#173

Post by kassner »

safety1st wrote: post #100
kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

I'm posting right now from a 13 year old Acer laptop running Linux Mint XFCE. I always feel bad about throwing away old tech so when the time came to buy a new laptop I hooked this one up to my living room TV via HDMI, bought a $25 Logitech K400+ wireless keyboard/trackpad combo, and it's still trucking along just fine. Surfs the web, handles YouTube, Netflix with no problems, I occasionally pop open VS Code or Thund…

> I bet Framework laptops would take this dynamic into overdrive

It’s in my (long-term) TODO list to build my own enclosure for a Framework motherboard, to make a portable server to carry around during long trips. Something compact that carries the punch of an i7. One day…

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#174

Post by philjohn »

kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

The best bang for buck at the moment seems to be tiny mini micro machines https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

Typically available regularly via ebay (or similar) as businesses rotate them out for new hardware.

The other week I picked up an i5 9400T Lenovo m720q with 16GB of memory for £100 delivered.

They practically sip power, although that's less true now I've shoved a 10Gb dual SFP NIC in there.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#175

Post by philjohn »

huuhee3 wrote: post #79
mkayokay wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can also recommend Lenovo ThinkCentre MiniPCs or similar brands. Those can often be found cheap when companies upgrade their Hardware. These machines are also power efficient when idling, use even less space than a laptop and the case fan is very quiet (which can be annoying with laptops under load). I'm currently running Syncthing, Forgejo, Pihole, Grafana, a DB, Jellyfin, etc... on a M910 with an i5 (6th or 7th G…

Yeah I would recommend this too. I've only used Dell Optiplex Micro series, no issues so far. They use external PSU similar to those in laptops, which helps with power efficiency. Something with 8th gen i5 can be had for about 100-150 USD from ebay, and that's more than powerful enough for nearly all self-hosting needs. Supports 32-64gb of RAM and two SSD.

The Optiplexes look nice, but I went with the Lenovo m720q's for the PCIe slot ... 10Gb dual SFP+ NICs are cheap as chips on eBay and when you can migrate VM's faster it's a nice quality of life improvement for migrating VM's between proxmox nodes.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#176

Post by kldg »

SBCs are great for public webservers and suited to save you quite a bit in energy costs. I've used a Raspbery Pi4B for about 5 years with around 10k human visitors (~5k bots) per year just fine. I'd like to try a RISC-V SBC as server, but maybe I have a few more years to wait.

I don't run into resource issues on the Pi4B, but resource paranoia (like range anxiety in EVs) keeps me on my toes about bandwidth use and encoding anyway. I did actually repurpose my former workstation and put it in a rackmount case a couple weeks ago to take over duties and take on some new ones, but it consumes so much electricity that it embarrasses me and I turned it off. Not sure what to do with it now; it is comically over-spec'd for a web server.

Most helpful thing to have is a good router; networking is a pain in the butt, and there's a lot to do when you host your own when you start serving flask servers or whatever. Mikrotik has made more things doable for me.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#177

Post by philjohn »

kassner wrote: post #171
zer00eyz wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> M910 with an i5 These are great and the M920q is also nice. At 100 to 160 used these are a steal, just test the disks before you commit to long term projects with them (some have a fair bit of wear). Its newer cousins quickly climb in price to the $300+ range (still refurb/used) The bleeding edge of this form factor is the Minisforum MS-01. At almost 500 bucks for the no ram/storage part it's a big performance jump…

> M920q I’m pissed at Lenovo for making the perfect machine for a home server, and then cheaping out by not adding the $0.50 M.2 connector on the back of the board. 2xM.2 + 1xSATA requires upgrading to “Tall” Intel NUCs if you want 3 discs.

If you want 2 m.2 slots you want the p330, same form factor as the m920q[1]

[1]https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/116583724775

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#178

Post by ravetcofx »

kldg wrote: post #176

SBCs are great for public webservers and suited to save you quite a bit in energy costs. I've used a Raspbery Pi4B for about 5 years with around 10k human visitors (~5k bots) per year just fine. I'd like to try a RISC-V SBC as server, but maybe I have a few more years to wait. I don't run into resource issues on the Pi4B, but resource paranoia (like range anxiety in EVs) keeps me on my toes about bandwidth use and en…

how are you tracking visitors and differentiating them with bots?

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#179

Post by LaurensBER »

nntwozz wrote: post #118
kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41150483 Where I live (250 apartment complex in Sweden) people throw old computers in the electronics trash room, I scavenge the room every day multiple times when I take my dog out for a walk like some character out of Mad Max. I mix and match components from various computers and drop debian on them then run docker containers for various purposes. I've given my pare…

I'm not sure if that a sign of the coming apocalypse.

I hope it reflects the fact that most people don't have a great understanding of IT and cyber security rather than a sign of a sick world ;)

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#180

Post by godelski »

kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

On topic, this is how I got into computing and Linux. I moved out as soon as I graduated high school and the only computer I had was an gen 1 mac mini and a tiny netbook with a blazing 1Ghz single core Intel atom (32bit). Even XP ran slow. Couldn't install vista nor the relatively new windows 7.

A friend told me about Linux. So I thought I had nothing to lose. What I didn't know is what I had to gain.

Ended up getting hooked. Grabbed computers out of the dumpster at my local community college and was able to piece together a few mildly decent machines. And even to this day I still recycle computers into random servers. Laptops and phones are usually great. They can't do everything but that's not the point. You'd be surprised what a 10 yo phone can still do.

I'm not trying to brag, but do want people to know that it's very possible to do a lot in absolutely nothing. I was living paycheck to paycheck at the time. It's not a situation I want anyone to go through, but there is a lot more free hardware out there than you think. People throw out a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that isn't even broken! Everything I learned on was at least 5 years old at the time. You don't need shiny things and truth is that you don't get a lot of advantages from them until you get past the noob stage. It's hard, but most things start hard. The most important part is just learning how to turn it into play.

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