Selfhosted
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.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
view the rest of the comments
Don't look online, ask friends and family if someone has an old laptop you can get for free. Very likely someone does, especially if you are ok with a bad battery and/or a broken screen.
A RPi3 can work, but it being ARM based will cause various headaches when learning compared to something x86.
Yes, this is one of the few real valid arguments against something like a pi 3. Outside architecture issues they are fantastic to learn on.
@Eldritch @poVoq
The architecture may also be problem, when you want to use Containers (Docker, Podman). Some images are not available for all architectures.
The 3B has a 64bit ArmV8 CPU, there is a better support.
I have some Odroid devices with 32bit ArmV7 CPU, where often images are not available for.
https://wiki.geekworm.com/Raspberry/_Pi/_3/_Model/_B
Definitely, though that can also be an issue with older x86 cores. Or, hell newer ones with non heterogeneous cores. Though that at least is getting better on both architectures.
Hmm, this is just enough to give me pause. Thanks for the heads up. I'll have to think on this some more and maybe do a little more research.
Definitely take a look at what you're looking to host and what it supports. Support for raspberry Pi and their Debian based pi OS is surprisingly widespread and robust. Not always first-party top-level support robust, but surprisingly adequate for a $35, $50 SBC.
Worst case scenario is still a solid introduction to open source software. Downloading, compiling, installing, et cetera. Some of my earliest projects on the pi involved that. Using the camera module along with the video for Linux subsystem, which wasn't included or packaged under Raspian at the time at least. Go git project. Make, make install, and party
eBay has plenty of x86/x64 computers that don't technically support Windows 11. An old Lenovo desktop/sff with a 7th gen i7 could be a pretty cheap entry point. 8th Gen and up will be more expensive since they can still run windows 11
Hell my home server is a i7 4700. It's a solid experience, though it is missing a few nice to haves these days. I have three Linux desktops in the house, i7 6700. One dell one lenovo and one HP. The Dell and Lenovo I have no need or desire to replace them for the little amount of gaming, etc. I do. They have decent graphics cards since I do 3D modeling. RX 580 and NV 1050.
The HP, I don't know if there's legitimate hardware failing somewhere on it, or if it's just HP suckage. I have a little power HP Elite Book with an AMD processor and APU on it, and that thing is awesome. But this little business tower was struggling with Windows 10 before they killed it off. It's better with Linux, but it's still a shadow of the other two similarly-spect systems. Who knows.
When going for older hardware, though, my biggest recommendation is to don't get the low end. Go for something higher. A similarly specced i7 Perfectly offer a significant performance boost over the i5. If someone gave me an i3 I could find a use for it. But I would never buy one.
Can confirm this. I experienced this on my Pi3 recently with a VPN. I mean, it wasn’t the end of the world. Just that the specific docker container I wanted to use wasn’t compatible because of ARM so I had to go with a different one.
It could be bad for specific things that are more obscure. But I use my Pi for PiHole adblocking and VPN and that’s it. My other stuff lives on another machine and the Pi is set up for redundancy and it’s more reliable if power outages happen since power in means power on by default.
If you can get one for cheap and just want it for the same reason, could be alright.