I did this a few years ago with a stack of pi 4s connected to a four port PoE switch. One was an openWRT router, one was a plex server connected to some spinning discs via usb, and I had another you could plug an hdmi cable into and use to view the media. I eventually found out I could host the whole thing on a single pi, but it was still a fun project. Could probably do it all on a pi 5 with an nvme hat no problem. Might look into that when I get the spare tinkering money.

If your main goal is a monero node/mining, start with AMD 3000 series processors, 3700x is a good place to start, and build a used system. If it’s just a node, any SoC will work with enough storage. A few months of a VPS could cost the same as buying your own hardware, that and you own the hardware and data instead of some corporation.

Everything runs in a docker container, so you will probably want to wrap your head around that first thing. Most people start with portainer or dockge for easy docker management and learning with a gui, although learning everything through the command line has its merits as well.

I would get a raspberry pi or an old NUC and just dive right into figuring out how to run the monero node. I believe the monero project maintains docker images. The monero communities are super helpful and nice, and so are the self hosted communities, if you hit a snag or don’t understand something.

If you use WireGuard for local access, I don’t think you need to open any port on your firewall, unless you are sharing your plex with other people that do not have access via WireGuard. But I know just enough to get me in trouble, so I’m sure I’ll be corrected on this.

Reliability of connection to the drives, especially during unscheduled power cycles. USB is known for random drops, or not picking the drive up before all your other services have started, and can cause the need for extra troubleshooting. Can run fine… or it could not. This is in reference to storage drives, not OS drives.

Trunas with Tailscale/headscale/NetBird as far as software and security. As far as hardware, you want storage that is not attached via usb. Either an off the shelf nas solution or a diy nas would work. There are a few YouTubers that touched on this, hardware haven and raidowl I think.

The newer Omada routers are pretty good, and their software is getting better. Personally I use Opnsense on a Chinese fanless router from eBay. Paid for an n100, got an i3-1113 with dual channel memory does everything I need no issue, and it has helped me learn ALOT. However if I had the $200 just laying around today, I would stick with Omada just for simplicity.

Jeff Geerling did a video on them, got me super interested and thinking on how to implement and use with family.

Proxmox is based on kvm/qemu, and is very resource conservative. There is virtually no impact on performance due to the hypervisor, even on older processors. Scheduling on the cpu and hypervisor makes running multiple VMs at the same time trivial as well. RAM and I/O bandwidth are the two things that can affect performance. Running out of RAM due to too many VMs will grind you to a halt, but so would running too many applications or containers on bare metal. Running everything off of one spinning sata disk will make it impossible, but again, same downfall on bare metal.

Those minimal impacts to performance are a minor nuisance compared to the ability to run experiments and learn on sandboxed VMs. Now that TrueNAS has better virtualization support, it has caught my eye as a better homelab solution, but I will always have a proxmox server running somewhere in my stack just due to the versatility it gives me.

Just my opinions here:

• I have essential services running on a separate computer, 8gb pi4 right now. Stuff like NetBoot.xyz, homepage, etc, lightweight and resource low but need to be always up. That way if your main server needs to go down, you still have those services running.

• I have bought second hand enterprise equipment for most of the hardware I have. Basically anything with ddr4 and pcie 3 or above will crush most things you would like to do. Grabbing an intel with quick sync will help with Jellyfin, but you can add a graphics card for transcoding if you want, a quadro p2000 or higher will be fine. Building is a viable option as well, but you may spend more for less powerful but more efficient hardware.

• software is probably the most controversial. I went with proxmox on my main server, giving me the ability to run whatever I want whenever I want. It’s not perfect, but gets the job done and has helped me learn A LOT. But flip a coin or roll a dice on what software to run as a newbie, it will all be a learning curve, and everyone will tell you why what they use is superior.

Whatever you do, you’re not wrong. Run things that tickle your fancy and move at your pace. You’ll mess up, step back and punt a lot. Remember to backup essential data before you wipe. Have fun, and good luck on your travels.

Waiting on a merge it looks like

It has been. I started in this because I liked picking up kick ass enterprise hardware really cheap and playing around with what it can do. Used enterprise hardware is so damn expensive now, it’s cheaper and easier to do everything with consumer products and use the rx6700 in my gaming rig. Just don’t want that running llms and always on.

Picked up an AMD instinct mi25 to try and do just that. Can get easy-diffusion working after some cussing and voodoo. Cannot get rocm to do ANY llm of any kind, feels like a waste of video ram

Also have a tesla p4 that runs most text-to-image models rather well, but have been unsuccessful at any llm either, even oobabooga can’t seem to run on it.

Have given up because the software stack keeps advancing and leaving my hardware behind. I don’t have $3000 for an a100 or $1300 for an mi100 sooo… until the models can run on older/less powerful hardware, I’m probably sitting out of this game. Even though I’d love to be elbow deep in this one.

Any old Dell desktop/workstation/server should reach those specs. Poweredge rX30 and up, precision XX20/30 and up or optiplex (don’t know or understand that product line). Most of them are being rescued from the landfill. Might have to spend a crap ton over your budget, like 5-10x over, but you will get those specs.

Look at an r430 barebones, no cpu/ram and build from there using spec sheets from Dell on what it takes. I was able to get one for $400 3 years back, even came with 16gb of ram and a single 10 core Xeon e5-v3.

Also, what are you doing that need these kinds of specs? Running more than 10 VMs at once? Cloud gaming? Form follows function.

“67 hemi cuda!”

Only downside is Reolink encodes in hvec. Frigate handles it fine, but be aware that viewing may be an issue. I’d still buy more Reolink cameras though.

Already have a 3-2-1 backup of the config folders and compose files, and I have backups of the VM if anything goes south. Making sure my logic train was on the right path.

Webpage loads are slow, especially images, netboot is a bit slow. I’m sure it’s i/o bottleneck and that everything is running in docker containers. I could probably optimize things a bit better, I just don’t have that kind of time for these projects, and getting an old dell micro would be faster than what I have. but they don’t run on PoE+ that I know of.

I have a cluster of four running all off a single switch, incredibly convenient.

I have three Raspberry Pi 4 4gb and 1 Pi 4 8gb at my disposal, and I still have moments where the thing I need to do will hiccup, or be slower than usual. The Pi 5 has been said to be two times as fast, which is plenty for me. just with the price all in of over $100, curious if anyone else has a better option/opinion

Power over Ethernet. Sorry, read it over three time for spelling, didn’t catch that I never gave the acronym meaning.

Tabby and xpipe is what I moved to after I was locked out of my Termius account. Tabby is what I use mostly now, there is a server you can run that lets you sync your profiles.

Tabby has a server that lets you synch your profiles.

Create the folder you want them in. Add that root folder to Radarr. Batch edit the root folder of all movies to the new folder. Click on move the files for me. Sit back for a few hours while it does the rest. When the process is done, then you come back and click that x.

It’s one of many ways to do this.

Jeff Geerling made the comparison in a video recently. Did not get to finish it yet, but he brought up pros and cons of both, and there are use cases for both ARM and x86. I still use mine even though I have an old dell tower as an x86 server, mainly for netboot.xyz and pivpn, because I can run it with poe. As long as the switch has power those services will be available.

I use a handbrake container and a watch folder. Just move what you want converted to the watch folder and handbrake does the rest.

Just buy used and modify yourself with the tech you want. Send a message that this shit is unacceptable and we are willing to live in a less technologically enhanced world if it means no subscriptions. We keep buying it, they will continue to think this is how you “extract profit” from consumers.

Recently went through this. Needed a quick and dirty knowledge repository for work. Ended up running bookstack, wiki.js and dokuwik in docker containers, building the same wiki in each and then messed around with it. Landed on bookstack and wiki.js, bookstack because I liked the end user UI and wiki.js because of the backend. I think most my co-workers use the bookstack one.

Electronics are black magic as far as I’m concerned, I just like slapping them together and trying to make them play nice.

Don’t know man. I have a 10gb nic that makes different noises depending on if it’s passed through to opnsense or Debian.

Sounds like coil whine.

Second for Netdata for the temps and load info, portainer for docker monitoring. Netdata gives you more real time info than even glances. Portainer is an easy way to look at logs and such, I don’t use it to manage, prefer command line for that. Netdata we’ll give you some docker info, but not logs.

The room you run it in WILL get hot, make sure it’s adequately ventilated.

I don’t know that it would be worth the power usage. If it’s all you got, then it’s overkill in my opinion, but should work fine. If you are buying, x30 poweredges are getting cheaper, their precision towers in that gen and above would work, and would be more powerful using less power. E5-v4 processors are also getting cheaper, which you can throw into most of the x30 poweredges. And they run ddr4 ram.

But if the 710 is what you got, then it should accomplish what you are looking at doing just fine in my opinion.

I notice in yours you dropped the - APP_URL=https://bookstack.example.com that linuxserver and solidnerd have in their compose files. I will comment that out and see if that helps my issues. would redirect to a 404 page every time.

Tried bookstack first, but setting it up with docker was giving me issues and didn’t want to try bare metal/VM yet. It’s on my list to fiddle with though, thank you.

This was the first one I set up. I enjoy it, but I need to see if someone who only knows how to use gmail can operate it.

I will spin one of those up. Thank you for the suggestion.

Saw everything on awesome-selfhosted, just wasn’t sure which out of the plethora of options out there was the easiest for the end user.

Have never been able to get into playlists. I don’t have time to sit down and scroll through my thousands of movies to pick individual ones out for a certain mood. I did that with music back in the 00s, but I had a considerably larger amount of free time on my hands back then. Should probably look into them a bit more.

It’s missing from many players. Infuse is missing it too, which I have to use because Plex on tvOS is TERRIBLE. How does everyone look at movies then? Scroll through them alphabetically? I miss the play random button too, they took that away a year or two ago.