21
votes
Linux mini computers
Do any of you have mini computers in your home?
My roommate recently bought a plex server and has stated self hosting. I also wanted to get a mini computer to do my own self hosting but was wondering if there were any Linux based computers on the market.
Linux can be installed on almost anything. A good raspberry pi 4 would most certainly be a great tool for you to start with. There are tons of tutorials for the RPI to check out :)
One of the biggest obstacles for self hosting at home or garage isn't Linux but the fact that most ISPs lock you behind a CG-NAT or something, your machine's IP isn't even accessible from the outside cloud. How do you get around that?
That depends. For most people, your modem/router has a public IP (though it may change at any time). In this case, you can set up port forwarding on your router to forward traffic to given port back to your server. But you want to be really careful with this unless/until you know what you're doing.
An even better option would be to set up some kind of VPN into your network (eg. Wireguard).
Either of those can be combined with a dynamic DNS service (eg. no-ip.com) that can get updated when your public IP changes.
If you're dealing with a carrier grade NAT, where even your modem doesn't have a public IP, it's a bit trickier. You'd probably have to figure out some kind of reverse tunnel to some external endpoint that you can then connect in through.
Tailscale is worth trying out if you find yourself in that situation. Their "MagicDNS" thing is pretty clever.
Get a cheap VPS with unlimited bandwidth and set up dnsmasq and WireGuard. Easy to do and you need very little compute power - I’ve been using ExtraVM for years with a sale price on a machine that I got when they expanded to a new data center. I pay quarterly, have multiple IPv4s, and have had very little downtime.
+1 to this. DigitalOcean provides droplets from $4 a month. It is significantly simpler than having to port forward, ensure you have a static IP, call your ISP, etc.
There's a couple of ways to do it.
In my previous experience, ISPs aren't using NAT, but they are using dynamic IP leasing instead. The easiest way to get around that is a dynamic DNS service, though that will cost you a little money.
Even if they are giving you a rotating IP address or NAT, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are doing the same on IPv6.
The easiest way to get around most trickery is to use VPN. Hamachi/VPN.net is a commercial product, but it's free for up to 5 computers, and it pretty trivial to set up. There are open source options as well, but they tend to need more knowledge and configuration.
For dynamic DNS a good free option is duckdns.org that is quite popular. Very simple to use and have a lot of simple options for keeping your dynamic IP up-to-date.
I haven't tried it, but Tailscale sounds like a nice way to do home networking when you either want to connect to computers you have at home, or you have computers in multiple locations.
(It's based on Wireguard.)
I have no idea. I fear self hosting from home because I am sure I am not up to snuff on security stuff. I have a Hetzner account that costs me 4 euro a month and at least there no one can get into my home network!
I have a few rpi but cannot for the life of me find any new ones in stock, most I’ve seen are being sold as a kit usually over $80.
I do love my rpi though, I have one running several containers for automating some of my home projects, they have some bottleneck here and there but they still work for most of my projects!
The Raspberry Pi foundation have been having supply chain issues for years, but things are supposed to be getting better very soon.
Personally I ended up getting a kit for my last Pi-buy earlier this year because I needed a PSU and an SD card and so on anyway.
The scalper prices on Amazon have dropped to less than double list price. They may soon exist at actual list prices. It’s been a long time.
Better to support Adafruit or some other small retailer rather than Amazon, but it’s useful to check Amazon to see what the scalpers are doing with them.
In the UK, Pimoroni have had occasional stock at list prices for a while now. I signed up to their "email me when X is back in stock" for a RPi4/4GB earlier this year and didn't even have to wait a week. I did have to jump on the email very fast though, it was showing out of stock by the time I completed the purchase and reloaded the page!
There was one that came out recently that really caught my eye, the Beepberry. It was created by the creator of the Pebble and it's Rasberry Pi Zero W in a Blackberry phone form factor, with an actual Blackberry keyboard. Looked amazing and I really wanted to get one but I had no real use for it around the house. When I checked back on the preorder page a few days ago, it said it was sold out :(.
Thanks for sharing! That looks so cool.
Really miss the classic blackberry sometimes. And having physical buttons!
Yeah I miss physical keyboards sometimes
My favourite phones were the ones that had the slide out keyboards. I could text so fast with those.
Ooh yes, those were always so cool. When Blackberry brought out the Priv a while ago, I was very tempted to get it just for the slide out keyboard it had.
I would've preferred a keyboard that slides out lengthwise. I never liked the tiny button board.
I know a lot of the Home Automation folks pick up Lenovo tiny workstations that they flash Linux on. As @FrillsofTilde mentioned, you can throw Linux on pretty much anything.
I've taken up a recent hobby of acquiring old computers and seeing how modern I can go with a Linux install.
For example, I've been able to load up FreeBSD 7.4 (no X-Windows) on an old Compaq Pentium with relative ease. In fact, I should have a 286 being shipped today that I plan to tinker around with, although I doubt I'll be anywhere near as successful getting a "modern" Linux OS installed.
ServeTheHome's Project TinyMiniMicro is an excellent starting point for anybody looking to get into buying these small form factor PCs for a homelab. HP Mini, Dell Optiplex Micro, and Lenovo Tiny are all covered with great detail on buying used too! Really solid x86 performance with little power usage and, of course, the small form factor.
STH/Patrick are great and part of where I got my inspiration for using these tiny machines!
As others have said, Linux will run on anything - it started on an IBM PC with an Intel 80386, after all, and still supports the 80486. Raspberry Pis are difficult to come by, because of supply chain issues, and while there are competitors, they have poor OS support (ARM-based machines need to have the operating system kernel recompiled for each kind of machine, and the Pi-clone manufacturers aren't very good at keeping those available).
Your best bet is to search for used corporate computers. Big corporations will buy thousands of computers in big job lots, and dispose of their old machines in a similar way. There are businesses that buy up these old machines, refurbish them, and sell them on. US$100 will get you something more than adequate for self-hosting with Linux. There's a form factor called the 'Mini PC', which includes Intel NUCs and 1-litre PCs, which are tiny little machines, with laptop CPUs, that are very power efficient and also very cheap to buy. Those are the machines I'd be looking out for.
That's what I thought of when I read this post. A mini pc ticks all the boxes. They're great, I used one as a Plex server for a few years and now Jellyfin. Good with Windows on it, great with Linux.
I had some laptop RAM and an SSD lying around so I bought a mini office PC, installed Ubuntu, and installed Pihole, PiVPN, and a Valheim server. Was a fun little project.
A lot of folks will go for a old used laptop here as well. Comes with built-in battery backup, has a screen and keyboard for debugging with minimal hassle, and they're pretty small.
Not personally something I use, but I can see the appeal.
I got an old Lenovo AIO for free from a coworker a few years back. It's incredibly low spec (a crap AMD E2 dual core and 4 gigs of RAM), but it was free and does great running a home server for torrents, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, and an e-book/comic server.
Plus, it works great as a secondary monitor for my desktop to boot. It certainly beats the AIO ending up in a landfill or gathering dust in a storage unit, and it performs better than an RPi at the least.
Only thing that would get me to move on is if I decide to shuck the external USB hard drives I have for storage on it, which would necessitate moving to something with the case space for two 3.5" HDDs-- but I have my old mini desktop from 8-9 years ago that would work perfectly for that, if I decide to go for it.
Even used PCs from friends/family/self will do in a pinch, especially if they're free.
As other users have said, you can run Linux on pretty much anything.
For what you are looking for, you can pick up a mini PC on eBay for sub $100.
Raspberry Pi 4 is not bad if you can find a good price on it. If you go that route definitely do the Raspberry Pi OS install at it is the most cohesive.
I'm a 16 year Linux vet(which is nothing, really) so if you have any questions I will be glad to help!
I don't buy machines specifically made for Linux as I don't really see that being necessary. There can be little things to watch out for here and there in regards to hardware, but for the most part Linux will run on the majority of hardware, and miniPCs are particularly a good fit.
I use an older HP G1 "tiny" to self-host a search engine, ereader, music/video server (like Plex) using Unraid and it works great. I use a very old low-power slow-in-Windows Dell Micro PC as a print server for my laser printer and it's perfect and sips next to no energy.
I've also run Kubuntu, diet-pi x86, and all sorts of Linux-based operating systems on them without a problem. Raspberry Pis can be another good route to go if you can find them and want to tinker a bit more, but because of supply issues those can be overpriced for the performance you get at this point, whereas Tiny/Mini/Micro PCs are everywhere in the used market, and you can get a lot of power for very little cost.
I’m curious, what do you use the self hosted search engine for?
As a proxy search so I'm not performing searches directly on any particular account/site. I don't think I'm getting a huge privacy benefit currently because it's still my IP making the requests, but SearXNG allows you to pull from multiple engines for searches and aggregate them all in one set of results. At least the searches will not be associated with my Google account directly, though Google may do that on the backend anyway. I can always disable Google as an engine and only allow other more privacy-focused engines to supply results instead, so I at least like having that level of control.
Mostly it was an experiment that I've stuck with- until I figure out if other options (testing Kagi also) or just going back to Google are the right thing for me.
Currently running Linux on a dirt cheap Intel SBC from Amazon. Works like a charm.
Since you mention PLEX, you might consider a NAS as well since I assume you'll need storage. Something like a Synology runs Linux, and you can install anything you want on it, including Docker.
Docker would be a useful thing to get into once you figure out the basics of linux. To elaborate on why you'd want to try out docker, here is my setup.
I have a NAS for storage, some (linux) docker servers, and a series of services running using docker. Portainer is used to manage containers.
The docker services (using templates from linuxserver.io, but others work once you get used to docker). This way configuration and important files are all stored centrally on the NAS (through NFS), so there is only one storage you need to back up.
These can all be on one machine, or split into multiple docker servers. If you want to host something lightweight like Heimdall (a dashboard webpage) you can put it on a low power PC or the NAS, but if you find something like Plex or Obico requires more power, you can run docker on your main PC (even Windows) and still connect it's storage to your NAS.
Doing this in docker keeps the running environments separate, so if something breaks or behaves badly, it's easy to reset or replace it and keep a clean base install. During the learning of linux you can create a lot of mess while trying things out, so being able to do a clean reset and still have remaining services running is a nice bonus.
Raspberry Pi is pretty common and does a good job. If you actually want to self host things, it can lack fast IO as you only have USB and an SD card. For normal things like a web server its fine.
I use a few of them in my apartment and they do their job well. However for a Plex server especially with transcoding in 4k it can be pretty disappointing. I have a separate home server built from used parts (2200g, 32 GB ram) + a patched raid card and a lot of hdds. So far from being a mini pc. Could be worth it though.
Depends on the use case. :)
I don't specifically have special servers or anything. I do have a NAS though. An older Synology one. Has about 10 TB of storage (which I need to upgrade soon) and it's where I keep all my music and movies/shows. There's also a Synology package for Plex so I can use that to stream content from the NAS to my PC or TV.
I’m running Linux Mint on a 2007 Mac mini for my media station. Was great for awhile until all streaming services started requiring non-linux browsers for DRM reasons. Still great for DVDs and CDs tho (I’m old shut up)
ASUS PN50 Mini PC Barebone with AMD Ryzen 7 4700U Eight-core Mobile Processor, up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, Dual Storage Design, WiFi 6, Bluetooth, USB-C with VESA Mount
Have a couple set up with PopOS running as a little Kubernetes lab. They rock.
Raspberry Pi 1 Model B running Raspbian as a lightweight LAMP server (it's slow as a dog). A couple of Protectli Vaults running OPNSense and OpenBSD (much speedier).
I got 5 raspberry pi 4b's running MicroK8s in my homelab, Another three raspberry pi's as octoprint instances, and a spare older Pi thats just collecting dust right now.
Currently using a Beekink Ser5 with LMDE on it. It is flawless. I can also run quite a few steam games very well on it. I'd highly recommend it.
This! I repurposed 3 Dell 9020 SFF's for a 2 node proxmox cluster and a OpenMediaVault NAS. Proxmox runs a 5 node docker swarm along with a few other VM's. It's been running for 2 years or so, all three machines are maxed out at this point, but I should be good for another year before I need to upgrade to something newer.
My old computer (lenovo c260) is a server now and has been for like 6 months or so
I have a few small Intel NUCs. One of which is running Xerolinux as a media PC.