Why not rasberry pi with kubernetes?
I think any mini-pc/old laptop is better, and probably cheaper than a raspberry pi nowadays
I would have disagreed with you when Pis were like $50 and chaining 3 Pis together with a hard drive was a fun project to do self hosting.
Now to get to the beefiest raspberry pi, it’s $120. And in the range, yeah, for price and reliability, use a mini-pc/laptop.
I think the pi zero might have a place, don’t have one but at least it is actually cheap. Used an old laptop before, now running stuff on my PC which I feel was a bit of a mistake in a way but it started as one process and more appeared over time.
At some point would like to move it into a VM tbh, then I could copy the VM to a mini PC at a later date. Or easily copy it when reinstalling the OS on my main PC. VM for convenience and separating it from my general PC usage.
Pi zero 2 runs my home automation smoothly and few of it’s sisters are in a desk drawer in case of equipment failure. It has quite enough oomph to run Home Assistant with zigbee hat.
Yeah honestly i can’t get anything done with a raspberry. Maybe i host too many services ?
Nah, they are underpowered for their current price. When you could get your hand on a raspberry pi 3 for 35€ 10 years ago it was a bargain. But now it’s not the case.
Honestly Raspberry Pis are pretty underpowered as hosts for more than a handful of super basic services, and given they consume 20-30w at minimum you’re easily getting into used office desktop territory where you can get a ton more performance right out of the gate.
The real value in the raspberry pi is in the GPIO and the cohesive ecosystem of accessories to plug into said GPIO. You can do so many cool automations and controls using just an RPi (especially if combined with something that can’t be accomplished more cheaply and easily with an ESP32) but as a server host they’re pretty crap in comparison to a decade old business PC off of eBay
I’ve got 3x RPi 4/5 with external drives and other USB running ~10 containers at 4-6W each. How did you make them draw 20W?
I’ve found that a pi is good enough, computationally, but not reliability wise.
A lot of things like advanced light control goes through my host, so any lockups or crashes are bad. My pi held up for about 18 months before it began to play up. I’ve found a small NUC system has higher reliability for the same price and power usage.
Kubernetes is designed to improve reliability
That doesn’t help against hardware thermal runaway. The pi would overheat its own ram chips and hard lock up. A simple power cycle fixed it.
See, I don’t pay for the electric bill to keep my collection of old enterprise equipment running because I need the performance. I keep them running because I have no resistance to the power of blinkenlights.
I had to buy a lenovo thinkcentre mini because was cheaper than a brandnew raspberry pi.
The only problem I’ve had with Raspberry Pi is that some apps want to write a lot of stuff to “disk”, and the default “disk” on a Pi is a MicroSD card which dies if you keep writing things to it. Sure, you can always plug something into a USB slot, but that adds a bit of friction to the whole process.
Oh, also, I wish it were easy to power a whole bunch of Pi units. Each one needing its own wall wart is a bit annoying, and I’ve had iffy results using weaker, less steady power supplies with multiple ports intended for things like phones.
I ended up just buying an industrial mSD card. Has yet to fail.
I really recommend a HAT with SSD, totally worth the investment.
Yeah, but then you have to get a kind of case that can handle a Pi plus that hat. It’s a good idea, it’s just a bit more fiddly than just the typical booting from the SD card and doing everything that way.
Wouldn’t an SSD run into problems down the line with too many Writes?
@Tangent5280 @spongeborgcubepants I think the days of worrying about SSDs failing like that during its expected lifespan are over for all practical applications.
In my experience, that concern is way outdated.
Theoretically, yes, but I suspect the manufacturing quality of SD cards is a lot lower than SSDs
The amount of writes required to kill an SSD aren’t going to be seen in the real world on a timescale of less than 10 years unless you’re really doing something wild that you shouldn’t be.
An SD card might fail after it’s full capacity being written a handful of times, SSDs can survive that several hundred times over. Seriously look up the terrabytes written specs for various storage mediums and calculate out the daily amount of writes. Oftentimes with SSDs you’d have to literally write a terrabytes of data a week to actually see a problem
Not within the computer’s lifetime. Consumer-grade SSDs are generally rated for 3000-5000 write cycles or more, and contain some kind of wear levelling mechanism to distribute write operations over the entire physical medium to reduce the chance of individual block failures. The first SSD I ever bought is still going strong as my server’s root filesystem.
Most SD cards aren’t really suitable for the kind of workload an operating system generates (that being mostly random i/o). Make sure to get a reputable A2 (application class 2) rated card, they aren’t that expensive but perform way better.
Raspberry Pi themselves launched a card recently, I haven’t tried that one but it’s probably a good choice too.
I think the Raspberry Pi Linux releases mount things onto a ram drive, so the typical IO doesn’t touch the SD Card. But, if you run another OS (which sometimes is the easiest way to get other software running) it tends to just treat the SD Card like an HDD/SSD.
That’s definitely not true, Raspberry Pi OS works and acts like a normal Debian installation per default - with root mounted rw and all.
Other than that, there isn’t much “treating like an HDD/SSD” going on, it just writes to flash when an application requests it does. If the underlying storage is an eeprom, an sdcard nvme storage doesn’t really change anything here.
So close. Started on raspberry pi. Went for a cluster with dpckrt swarm. Finished with a nas and a 10years old game computer as a mediacenter. (That the electricity bill whoch made me stop the cluster)
Same, in fact you can also went down in RPi models. Basically the more you know, the less you need, e.g. going from Plex to Kodi to minidlna…
I have literally been on this exact journey. Mind you I’m on NixOS across two boxes so not quite a raspi… Perhaps my downsizing is not yet complete
Or you learn proxmox and running everything as a VM
Just learn docker
Docker is so bad. I don’t think a lot of you young bloods understand that. The system is so incredibly fragmented. Tools like Portainer are great, but they’re a super pain in the ass to use with tools/software that include a dockerfile vs a compose file. There’s no interoperability between the two which makes it insurmountably time-consuming and stupid to deal with certain projects because they’re made for a specific build environment which is just antithetical to good computing.
Like right now, I have Portainer up. I want to test out Coolify. I check out templates? Damn, not there. Now I gotta add my own template manually. Ok, cool. Half way done. Oops. It expects a docker-compose.yml. The Coolify repository only has a Dockerfile. Damn, now I have to make a custom template. Oh well, not a big deal. Plop in the Dockerfile from the repository, and click “deploy.” OOPS! ERROR: “failed to deploy a stack: service “soketi” has neither an image nor a build context specified: invalid compose project.” Well fuck… Ok, whatever. Not the biggest of deals. Let me search for an image of “soketi” using dockerhub. Well fuck. There are 3 images which haven’t been updated in several years. Awesome. Which one do I need? The echo-server? The network-watcher? PWS?
Like, do you see the issue here? There’s nothing about docker that’s straightforward at all. It fails in so many aspects it’s insane that its so popular.
Docker got popular because of dockerfiles. It really sucks at service management though which is why people run Kubernetes in production, not Docker.
Maybe I’m an idiot (high possibility) but I couldn’t even get the instance of homebridge docker to work. However, it had zero problems running on hypervisor. You aren’t alone.
I’m coming to appreciate Hyper-V more and more to be honest. It’s a very mature virtualization environment. The only issue I have with it is the inability to do GPU-passthrough. Once they figure that one out, I probably won’t bother with anything else.
Absolutely the best way to learn though. The number of places I’ve walked into that had no clue about containers or even a vpc and thought Google drive was an API is too damn high.
I have actually had to write something that used the Google drive API for a friend’s company once and it was… Unpleasant. Counterintuitive. Woefully inconsistent. My solution worked but it sucked and I am a bit ashamed of it
thought Google drive was an API is too damn high.
horror
I have been in for a couple months now, Proxmox cluster with two machines.
- Self built pc that was my daily driver for a while, rtx 3080ti 32gb ram, ryzen 7 3700x, runs the heavy stuff like a Mac VM, LLM stuff, game servers
- Rando open box mini pc I picked up on a whim from Bestbuy, Intel 300 (didn’t even know these existed…) with igpu, 32gb of ram, hosts my dhcp/dns main traefik instance and all the light services like dozzle and such.
Works out nicely as I crash the first one too often and the DHCP going down was unacceptable, wish I got a slightly better cpu for the minipc but meh, maybe I can upgrade it later.
To be fair, also love the mini pc’s and having a larger NAS. For me the PoE capabilities of the Pi’s are definitely the reason I use them
The HAT-ability of RPi makes them enough for me. You can add sata ports, PCIe, and more with a simple HAT.
any recommendations on hats for sata?
Been running one from Radxa for a while. Just make sure to check the power requirements of your drives.
a pie is neat. thats it. does it have enough ram for hosting & running all your containers? no.
