Techies of mastodon, what hardware under £50 would you recommend if I wanted to host home assistant and a pi hole instance on it?

Happy to grab something off eBay, my current pi keeps corrupting SD cards.

#Tech #selfhosting

@thecrawford Many people are happy using "Tiny Mini Micro" systems, which are generally HP or Lenovo 'thin client' desktop machines repurposed as servers. There are thousands available and the hardware is well-supported by Linux distros.

@neil it's an ancient pi3 but yeah perhaps worth looking into. Considering the price of all PC components at the moment!

@neil I've got some DDR3 that I just took out my pc to upgrade to DDR4, so I might sell that and buy a new car!

@thecrawford @neil If it's any help, I tend to use my Pi3s with just the FAT (/boot/firmware) partition on the SD card, and cmdline.txt pointing to a USB stick that holds the root filesystem. It only needs the FAT partition to boot. Maybe that won't corrupt?

@thecrawford you can get old second-hand dell optiplexes (and other desktops), some of which even support coreboot/libreboot for that price (I got an optiplex 5050 SFF for £30 and ported to coreboot to it, which would be more than powerful enough for that)

@thecrawford sometimes sellers forget to increase prices to account for RAM price increases so you can also sometimes get RAM cheaply this way

@thecrawford Not sure what revision of Pi you have but if it's a 3B or above it should support booting from a USB stick or drive.

But as others have mentioned, a quality SD card marked for Endurance along with a decent quality power supply should be quite reliable.

@thecrawford have you tried a good quality PSU for the Pi you’ve already got? The power requirements for those devices keep going up and up, and even a 2.5A supply can struggle at times.

@thecrawford Dell Wyse 3040! Super tiny computers, better than raspberry pis, super low energy footprint and usually cheap (I bought a few for <25 EUR each).

I love to use them as VPN servers, but they're really handy for a lot of projects. Only real limitation: soldered storage (usually 8 GB flash), but for my use cases that's plenty.

@wurzelmann oh that's an interesting shout, how are they at running containers? Say I wanted to run a pihole and something else (I'll need home assistant os for the apps annoyingly)

@thecrawford never tried containers on them tbh... I have a spare one here, should I set one up and test it?

@wurzelmann ah don't worry about it, don't go to any effort for me!

I've remembered I have an old micro pc lying around but it has a stupid 32bit efi so it's tricky to find anything that boots properly on it, I might have to try Debian

@thecrawford don't worry about it, I have to reset it anyway, will do that tomorrow.

My plan: stock Debian, Docker CE and see how many container it can handle and report back to you, if you want.

Any specific containers I should test, aside from home assistant and pihole?

@thecrawford okay, tested with Debian trixie, installed Docker CE and am running home assistant and pihole.

load average: around 0,3-0.5
RAM: 740M/2G

I just started the containers and let them run for a few minutes, but it seems, the little guy has no trouble at all.

@thecrawford okay system load in idle with the two containers running is more like 0,15-0,20, plenty of resources left here. 🙂

@thecrawford I plugged an old SSD in an external case in my Pi which ran nicely. If you have a spare SSD, just get an adapter I suggest.