cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24823173
Hi folks, looking for a bit of steer to get off the ground with self hosting. My goals to start with are pretty straight forward:
- I want to set up Home Assistant to move my smart devices off the cloud and fully contained within the walls of my home.
- I want to set up my own little Pixelfed server for my family’s use, along with some other federated socials.
From what I was looking at, I think my easiest route to doing both of these things is with a Home Assistant Yellow (built-in Zigbee and Thread system) with a Raspberry Pi 4.
I’ve never done anything like this before but I’m interested in learning. If anyone more experienced has any insight or direction, I’d really appreciate it! Cheers!
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No reason to bother with a Pi unless you need the GPIO for something. You can do more with a Lenovo Tiny or SFF Dell.
Can you get those as cheaply though? Can understand getting something other than a pi as you don’t need the GPIO but are there any good alternatives that are cheaper? If not may as well go for the pi
It’s been a long time since Pi’s were competitive on price.
You can get a used Lenovo Thinkcentre for $50 on eBay. A modern pi is going to cost you that much for just the board, then you still need to buy a case, power supply, SD card, and then figure out some solution for storage…
Is it fair to compare new to used though? Also how about power consumption, if it’s on for 5 years each watt costs £13, so for something that will be on a long time power is actually quite an important consideration
as i see it you can get an n100 mini pc with a 6w tdp for as much as a 8-16gb rasberry pi 5 kit
Typically how close is the TDP of the CPU to the full system power draw? Can see a few refurbished on ebay that don’t look too bad
looks like the total power draw of an n100 mini pc is 8-27 watts total, while the pi is 4-9 watts but it has a faster cpu, better video decode, vastly better gpu and better compatibility, being x86.
Ultimately the decision is up to you, but i think that outwheighs the higher power costs.
The slightly lower power draw pi5 vs a Tiny will eventually make up for the higher initial cost, but you can save more by turning off lights when you leave a room or skipping a round at the bar.
In my opinion, the wider software compatibility, better processing power, and expansible RAM and storage options far outweigh the eventual theoretical savings.
That said, if you need the super small SBC form factor or GPIO pins, definitely go for a pi. They absolutely have their use cases. I have 4 or 5 of the 3B and 3B+, and have used them on-and-off for a variety of tasks over the years.
Or for that matter full sized is also pretty good.
If not a Pi, try to go for those (used)mini PCs, they will allow you a bit more power than a Pi and cost just about the same. Then get docker on it and you’re all set for easy deployments.
And look up homelab youtubers, they have some good tutorials for beginners. thats where i started. Jim’s garage would be my recommendation, especially his older videos about hardware, security and networking basics. You will need to learn these to keep things secure.
The Pi needs to stop being used and recommended for everything under the sun. Even its power consumption isn’t competitive.
It was :(
My pi 4 is right on the cusp. 3 B+ was the best when it came to no dongles and power. Now its taking about the same power as a mini PC and you have to by the enclosure, fans/heatsink/dongles/etc…etc… I suppose you can still buy the old pis but man I miss when that was the form factor they were going for.
I bring over my 3/4 for hacking projects all the time. But I cant justify the 5 without looking at getting a mini pc for 10$ more and it comes with a hard drive ment to last longer than an SD.
This. Go pick up something like a used Lenovo Tiny. You’ll get way more power and flexibility
Thank you both, got similar advice on the original post on going more mini pc route! Can’t say I’ve done much research on them, but will certainly take a look using the Lenovo Tiny as a bench!
I use optiplexes because you can change out internals. Also cheap’
Thanks, will give it a look!
I think mine run 20-40 dollars in electricity a year. I run maybe 20 containers on them.
You got quite good answers already, here and in the other thread.
My suggestion is to not start with pixelfed but something else (simple stuff like dokuwiki, you can use it to document your stuff while you’re at it) to get an understanding of the whole process (running the service itself, making it available to the internet after hardening your infrastructure a bit etc).
Also, if you’re not settled for how to do it exactly, give Docker a try. There’s a reason it’s popular among selfhosters!
Docker is way easier
Yeah I’ve been doing some reading and have seen Docker mentioned a good bit. I think I just needed some goals to start with, I’m sure I’ll take a roundabout route to get there and all some new goals once I have those two done!
When you say “hardening my infrastructure” you mean suring up the security, yeah? Also something I need to add to the list to learn about!
Yes! Mostly having a plan on how to make your service reachable in the internet while keeping the rest of your local stuff shutdown.
Many people recommend cloudflare, but I don’t think it’s necessary. If you get a public IP from your ISP, it’s relatively easy with dyndns. Personally, I have a virtual machine running nginx as a reverse proxy and configured the router to forward port 80 and 443 to that machine.
Cool! Good to know! Will definitely be back to this post to follow up once I make some prog!
Try to stay away from exposing applications via proxy or port forwarding. Learn how to use Tailscale and use applications via VPN instead. It installs on any pretty much any device, so it’s not difficult to keep everyone behind the walls and not leave any backdoors for the barbarians.
Thanks! Any trusted resource you’d recommend (text or vid) to learn more on the topic?
Awesome Open Source youtube channel isn’t bad. He’s fairly good at explaining a lot of the concepts. I wouldn’t say I’d use everything he recommends but he gives you enough info to make some judgement calls.
I’d also highly recommend the Selfhosted podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting. Alex, the main host is with Tailscale these days, but don’t let that put you off, he’s been doing the podcast (and recommending Tailscale) since long before he started working with them. I imagine there’s a YT channel for the show, but I’ve only ever listened to the podcast.
Also, 2.5 Admins from Late Night Linux group of podcasts has Jim Salter and Alan Jude, both long time sysadmins and developers that have a lot to talk about that’s of interest to self-hosters and professionals alike.
I’d also highly recommend getting boned up on basic Docker usage, and would point you towards starting right from the beginning to use docker compose with local bind mounts, and ignore these one-line docker commands to start containers. There are helper apps like Lazydocker to assist using Docker from the command line. While you can use GUI apps like Portainer, honestly you’ll just end up more confused than pasting stuff into a compose file and watching it with Lazydocker.
And feel free to ping me if you get confused, I’ve helped a few people sort out what they want to accomplish and point them the least-effort direction, or at least what I consider such.
Holy moley!! Seriously, really appreciate all those resources and the time it must have taken to write that!! Super excited to get stuck into this so will absolutely be making my way through all of these!!
