Any built a self-hosted compute server before? I’m debating making one. I am a big fan of laptops and don’t have a PC. I also don’t play video games so I would mostly be using the PC for code projects which lead me to the idea of a self hosted compute server

im just using a raspberry pi as my server pc is wayyy too loud and overkill for what im hosting. if you do decide to make a proper one, make sure it is as silent as possible or at best maybe you even have a seperate room to put it in. having that tiny noise when working in office/sleeping will make you mad.

in the end it's best to just ssh/remote into it from your laptop

I hate raspberries...

The sad thing is that other arm main boards with *way* better hardware often take years to get proper kernel support.

But the NUC / mini market now includes AMD - which is imho the sweet spot, X86 architecture, enough power for everything - yet small in size and efficient.

@IntrusionCM jup. my phone is probably even more powerful then my raspberry. anyhow it looks cute and for me, it does the job. thinking of, one could use a rooted phone with termux and lineage os or som

@joewilliams007

Imho that's nothing what a server is for, but sure.

If I would do it, I'd mostly go into the direction of a small mini itx case.

CPU wise it doesn't really matter. Throw an AMD 5 at it, it's more than enough hertz power.

As I love databases, RAM needs to be high, at least 32 GiB.

1 TiB NVMEs are dirt cheap nowadays....

ITX case should have 4 front slots for putting harddisks in.

Adding 2 spinning harddrives, enough storage for ages to come. I think there are 20 TiB hard drives now... So even in RAID that's abundant storage.

TrueNAS scale would be a nice OS for that.

ZFS, Webserver UI, Docker for free.

Given ZFS, one could even throw more RAM at it.

Consumer Mainboards in the higher range allow 64 GiB plus.

Otherwise...

Just go shopping at the reseller market.

Was pleasantly surprised how dirt cheap some shops sell refurbished old server grade hardware... 3-4 year old stuff might not be as power efficient, but getting a 2 HE rack with mobo / cpu etc. for less than 1 K cause it was in use is sweet.

@IntrusionCM depends what one wants to host. if its for a business ofcourse a raspy is a joke lol. for your own personal micro servers its great

@joewilliams007 what’s your setup for your server PC? I am mostly looking to train ML models on my server. I’m sick of google colab lol

@IntrusionCM any recommendations for "nuc"?

@iiii what's the use case?

@IntrusionCM no idea yet. Some sort of personal file sync service, seed box and maybe a small personal Minecraft server for shits and giggles. Maybe also a few web crawlers/scrapers.

Basically something somewhat of a pet server. Nothing too serious.

@iiii

If on budget...

Topton NAS N1 - AliXpress.

China ware, look on AliXpress.

https://aliexpress.com/item/...

Offers imho for a small price a lot of possibilities.

Similar ones exist from Gigabyte / MSI / ... Not much customization possible, but if you need a small hybrid of NAS and server for small budget, good choice.

Synology / QNAS have small solutions - though proprietary solution, I think Synology could be hacked.

TrueNas has the mini series - a configurable store was available If I remember correctly.

You need to ask for a quote though I think. I like Truenas Scale as an OS, sadly I had no server from them yet. But I wouldn't expect a clusterfuck from them - they're too long in business and have a too good reputation.

That should cover the NAS side.

If you just wanna computing power, look for Mini ITX configurators. NUCs are Intel only I think.

I would recommend staying away from Intel Atom stuff... Otherwise look what you need. More USB ports? Graphic Processor? ...

A NUC / Mini ITX has most of the time not much place - doing a NAS with it will be hard. Most can fit only an NVME / M2. So storage is limited.

@DeepHotel well my server pc used to be a server at the place my dad works in. it has 32gig ram, intel i7 and a graphics card i put in myself. nothing too fancy though. it also has many slots for and quick change for harddrives

@IntrusionCM wait, is that a NAS or a PC?

@iiii the Topton? Both.

It depends on what OS you install and how your configuration looks.

It could be preconfigured without RAM and storage. Or you choose to add RAM and storage to liking.

That's what I like about it - and other Mini ITX server. Given the abundance of hertz power in even embedded CPUs plus the video capabilities of integrated GPUs, there's only a line to be drawn at what OS and case you choose.

A NAS OS like TrueNAS has a Web UI, cases have a hot swap front for multiple drives - plus Docker. So no gaming, more storage, maybe video encoding over Docker.

If you want more a mini gaming server, Windows (though I really hate that).

If you want more an all-round media / storage / remote development test bay - go for Linux like Kodi / Debian / ...

Make it your own. The Topton is imho - like similar offerings from Gigabyte / MSI / Zyxel - a good hybrid, it offers less customability like for many harddrives…. But has all the connectivity, hertz power and integrated GPU for desktop / media to server applications.

@IntrusionCM so basically it's just a PC in a fancy case?

@iiii Yes

Bit longer explanation cause imho there should be a small warning: building mini cases isn't easy. Fine motor skills and patience are required.

Sometimes you have less than half a finger of place between components... Tools required TM. Slow and patient is the key to building it together.

So these preconfigured cases can be a true blessing.

@IntrusionCM okay, thanks for teh recommendation