Why not rasberry pi with kubernetes?
I need
It’s just fun to play with, there is no “need”.
Yeah, I enjoyed my time with k3s setup at home as well, but right now I don’t really want nor need that 😄
I need a kubernetes cluster with high availability, load balancing and horizontal pod autoscaling, because that is something I want to learn. I don’t care that it’s just for wife’s home-made dog collars webshop.
This is the way
You can do it on a handful of Raspberry Pis rather than one, then.
Imagine, if you will, a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pis!
A man of culture, I see!
I don’t get this; a Pi isn’t even in the same conversation as an old rackmount server you can get for free. You couldn’t stuff half the compute, ram and storage into a Pi or a dozen Pis for 10X the cost of grabbing something off eBay for a hundred bucks.
That’s if the Rpi Foundation is deigning to let us peasants even buy them these days.
I have an old rackmount server I got for free. Dual Xeon X5650s, 192GB of RAM, four 8TB HDDs, and a pair of 250GB SSDs. I can only use it in the basement because it’s too loud to run anywhere else, but even then, it’s currently off because it trips its circuit breaker under heavy load.
A power strip full of Pis in a k3s cluster doesn’t do that. I used a 2GB model 4 for the control plane and 3Bs as the workers.
Why do you think you got it for free ;)
Eh, it was good when I got it. Who am I to turn down a free dual socket server though? :)
Useful in winter I suppose!
But I have a heat pump that is more efficient
If it trips circuit breakers it’s using a terrifying amount of power. Honestly with energy prices I am starting to think old stuff is actually becoming a bad value in some cases.
The problem is that server will probably use more electricity, it’ll be clunky to store, and it’s going to be loud as fuck.
Yeah that’s basically it for me. I have a collection of dev boards, old hardware and stuff other people were tossing out set up for a variety of purposes (Kubernetes clusters, two build farms, network boot, etc.). None of it is because I feel I “need” any of that for self hosting. In practice two old desktops with a bunch of drives would be perfectly capable of providing everything I need including redundancy. I have all that stuff because I’m learning and experimenting.
This struggle usually takes place over a weekend.
This guy selfhosts
i think the best choice is a cheap used pc or laptop, or server. Reduces electric waste. I also host my own server on a 19 year old Dell Insprion 1300
Reduces electric waste
A lot of older equipment actually wastes more electricity.
But it will cut down on electronic waste.
Not necessarily.
A i5-6500 has a TDP of 65W while a i5-13600K has a TDP of 150W.
If you get something modern that has the performance of a i5-6500 it will be a little bit more efficient. The key is that more performance uses more power.
13600K
If you buy a high watt CPU, that’s on you. Ryzen 7 also came out in 2022 and had many 65 watt cpus that could outperform an i5-6500.
What should you look for if you want closer to pi energy use, like under 20w
not necessarily
a lot of
Yeah, I expect there is a compromise somewhere but 10+ year old stuff which I can easily find on eBay probably just isn’t worth it for anything that is going to be on most/all of the time. Better to go for more modern lower end stuff to use less power. 250w will cost you like £50 a month to run
not always. especially laptops
not always a lot of
Think centre tiny here
Low consumption, two ddr4 slots, one 2.5" slot and one nvme slot! Lots of outside slots.
Costed less used than a new pi too. They have gotten too expensive IMO.
Pi has gotten crazy expensive.
Same mentality but HP Elitedesk Minis
lenovo thinkcentre m910q supremacy
Yesss I have a m910q as my main with (IIRC) a 6500T 4 cores.
And a m710 with the CD contraption for backup (the CD is just for fun, the PC is the backup) :-p
Yes, but also no. Older hardware is less power efficient, which is a cost in its own right, but also decreases backup runtime during power failure, and generates more noise and heat. It also lacks modern accelerated computing, like ai cores or hardware video encoders or decoders, if you are running those appd. Not to mention lack of nvme support, or a good NIC.
For me a good compromise is to recycle hardware upgrades every 4-5 years. A 19 year old computer? I would not bother.
Bro, I am just hosting a WordPress backup, an RSS reader, and a few Python scripts
Wordpress needs the latest GPU these days, didn’t you know? /s
I have a Lenovo M710q with a i3 7100T that uses 3W at idle. I’m not mining bitcoin, server is idle 23h a day if not more.
my 19 year old laptop runs the web server just fine, and only needs 450 mb ram even with many security modules. it produces minimal noise
Yeah what I’ve always done is use the previous gaming/workstation PC as a server.
I just finished moving my basic stuff over to newer old hardware that’s only 6-7 years old, to have lots of room to grow and add to it. It’s a 9700k (8c/8t) with 32GB of ram and even a GTX 1080 for the occasional video transcode. It’s obviously overkill right now, but I plan to make it last a very long time.
exactly, you can still do HA and LB on old gear, even K8s if you must
They take up so much space though.
This is why rack mounts were made. Hell, I’ve seen a lot of custom builds where people have mapped out the server on their wall and it takes up no floor space. Something like this: https://i.xno.dev/kG9Wx.jpg
Oh I love that!
A rack takes up as much space as a fridge though, and mounting things to the wall is risky. You better make sure you really got it into the stud in the wall. Also, don’t do that if you live in an earthquake zone.
Only full size racks. You don’t need to buy a full size rack. You can get very small racks these days that are smaller than a little chest cooler. And why are you under the impression that you have to mount it on the wall?
You shared a picture of a computer mounted on a wall.
Correct. If space is such a big problem for you that it’s unconscionable to use a 4U mini rack (which again, like what the fuck), then mounting hardware on the wall is a completely valid option. It’ll take up zero floor space.
That is very cool
I’ve found that a pi is good enough, computationally, but not reliability wise.
A lot of things like advanced light control goes through my host, so any lockups or crashes are bad. My pi held up for about 18 months before it began to play up. I’ve found a small NUC system has higher reliability for the same price and power usage.
Kubernetes is designed to improve reliability
That doesn’t help against hardware thermal runaway. The pi would overheat its own ram chips and hard lock up. A simple power cycle fixed it.
A mini PC is a good middle ground. Mostly for the video transcode and machine learning power.
That’s what Iam aiming for at the next hardware update. I don’t have the space for a server rack and a SFF desktop would also not fit into my home, so a miniPC it’ll be. I cannot wait to move to x86.
I’m not sure if I’m alone in this but I have a terrible aversion to transcoding. I know the loss of quality is probably not that huge (depending on the original codec) but I just can’t bring myself to get past it.
As a result I have a tiny arm based box with a 2tb SSD and I’m happy out.
You want to avoid it everywhere possible of course.
But when the GF tries to use Jellyfin on whatever random device that doesn’t have the codec support to play it, it is nice to have.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense in fairness.
See, I don’t pay for the electric bill to keep my collection of old enterprise equipment running because I need the performance. I keep them running because I have no resistance to the power of blinkenlights.
The only problem I’ve had with Raspberry Pi is that some apps want to write a lot of stuff to “disk”, and the default “disk” on a Pi is a MicroSD card which dies if you keep writing things to it. Sure, you can always plug something into a USB slot, but that adds a bit of friction to the whole process.
Oh, also, I wish it were easy to power a whole bunch of Pi units. Each one needing its own wall wart is a bit annoying, and I’ve had iffy results using weaker, less steady power supplies with multiple ports intended for things like phones.
I really recommend a HAT with SSD, totally worth the investment.
Yeah, but then you have to get a kind of case that can handle a Pi plus that hat. It’s a good idea, it’s just a bit more fiddly than just the typical booting from the SD card and doing everything that way.
Wouldn’t an SSD run into problems down the line with too many Writes?
@Tangent5280 @spongeborgcubepants I think the days of worrying about SSDs failing like that during its expected lifespan are over for all practical applications.
Theoretically, yes, but I suspect the manufacturing quality of SD cards is a lot lower than SSDs
Not within the computer’s lifetime. Consumer-grade SSDs are generally rated for 3000-5000 write cycles or more, and contain some kind of wear levelling mechanism to distribute write operations over the entire physical medium to reduce the chance of individual block failures. The first SSD I ever bought is still going strong as my server’s root filesystem.
I ended up just buying an industrial mSD card. Has yet to fail.
Most SD cards aren’t really suitable for the kind of workload an operating system generates (that being mostly random i/o). Make sure to get a reputable A2 (application class 2) rated card, they aren’t that expensive but perform way better.
Raspberry Pi themselves launched a card recently, I haven’t tried that one but it’s probably a good choice too.
I think the Raspberry Pi Linux releases mount things onto a ram drive, so the typical IO doesn’t touch the SD Card. But, if you run another OS (which sometimes is the easiest way to get other software running) it tends to just treat the SD Card like an HDD/SSD.
That’s definitely not true, Raspberry Pi OS works and acts like a normal Debian installation per default - with root mounted rw and all.
Other than that, there isn’t much “treating like an HDD/SSD” going on, it just writes to flash when an application requests it does. If the underlying storage is an eeprom, an sdcard nvme storage doesn’t really change anything here.
I’ve discovered that there are a lot of medium-tier software engineers who immediately will go straight to horizontal scaling (i.e: just throw hardware at it), and I’ve seen instances where very highly skilled engineers just write their code better, set things up on a bare metal server, cache things, etc. and manage with just a single badass server
Even just the choice of programming language makes a big difference. Running a JVM language or NodeJS, Python, Ruby etc., you can be bottlenecked by a Pi. Meanwhile, Rust or C/C++ will use barely a fraction of those resources.
Right? I just spin up another process on my home server. No need to get more hardware involved for something that’s inherently a software problem.
Yup, a pi is enough for me.
Well… 5 Pis and an ancient NUC running proxmox are enough for me. And a DS920+… and an old laptop running docker are enough for me.
With Linux any old computer from yesteryear can become a quick server. That’s what I do, just make sure you got backups.
My home server is literally made from garbage left over from other PCs. The motherboard is currently some piece of junk from a prefab PC with a custom power socket, so I got to make my own adapter from scratch.
Floor PCs FTW
Yup! When I built a gaming comphter last year my old desktop became my first dive into linux. Probably overkill, but ive been having a blast with it.
Nice!
So close. Started on raspberry pi. Went for a cluster with dpckrt swarm. Finished with a nas and a 10years old game computer as a mediacenter. (That the electricity bill whoch made me stop the cluster)
I had to buy a lenovo thinkcentre mini because was cheaper than a brandnew raspberry pi.
Same, in fact you can also went down in RPi models. Basically the more you know, the less you need, e.g. going from Plex to Kodi to minidlna…
