5 ms·

Recently Raspberry Pi got so expensive. I'd rather buy second-hand Thin Desktops off ebays. I ordered Lenovo ThinkCentre m720q in spring and they serve me well.

Recently Raspberry Pi got so expensive. I'd rather buy second-hand Thin Desktops off ebays. I ordered Lenovo ThinkCentre m720q in spring and they serve me well. $300 with x86. I can add however much RAM or hard drive I'd like (32G RAM + 2*1T SSD).

erulabs 4y ago
Our platform started as a "Bring your own computer!" - and AMD64 was much more popular then than ARM64 (for our users). Unfortunately, just saying "bring your own computer" is a technical barrier for lots of people (even sysadmins who just don't feel like doing work at home) - which is why we built a sort of "all-in-one" box
- chazeon 4y ago
  I see, kubesail right? Interesting. I’ll look into that.
- em-bee 4y ago
  i certainly appreciate that a suitable hardware model is available for sale, but i would want to be able to run the system on my own hardware too. booting from USB and running install is not to much work. the problem for me would be to spend the time to find a suitable device to run this on. if i happen to have one, great, but if not i'd probably rather buy yours than so my own research. personally, what i am looking for is a portable version of this, that runs on a battery so i can use it tethered through my phone, or even with its own sim card. for home use i would prefer the ability to put at least two regular 2.5" disks because those SSDs are still expensive at large sizes
jahewson 4y ago
This is because of the chip shortage. It’s really a shame.
- jayknight 4y ago
  https://rpilocator.com/ https://rpilocator.com/ will show you where rpis are for sale, I was able to get one from adafruit a few days ago by following their Twitter account because when they come available they go fast
xedeon 4y ago
I too was thinking of building a Pi4 cluster but I just couldn't justify the inflated price. I just ended up buying several HP Elitedesk from eBay that had NVME storage, OOB management and plenty of ram. There's a whole movement on these 1L pcs: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
- spockz 4y ago
  I’m always at a loss at home. At work we treat everything as cattle. Nodes get provisioned at boot, we have gazillions of them, and they are all managed. (On a different physical lan, mind you.) redundancy of state is provided on the software level by the database (s). At home getting a similarly redundant setup is time, space, and energy consuming. Moreover, most of the home tooling does not have distributed data built in so we need to have a distributed fs or nfs. This brings a whole next level of maintenance and heartache that I simply do not want at home. Consequently, I run one machine and make backups of the config and hope I can restore it when things go south. Does anyone have better ideas?
  - midasz 4y ago
    Everything I run on my home server is through docker (compose). The data directories are mounted via NFS on my NAS - that data gets backed up to Amazon Glacier (in case my house burns down or something) + an external HDD plugged into the NAS. This already solves a lot of issues imo. If something goes down it's not the end of the world. If the machine dies all I have to do is mount the NFS shares and run the compose files.
  - jnovek 4y ago
    I’m a lazy sysadim at home, here’s what I do. I run proxmox on my server at home and provision with VM images, like we did in the ancient times. I take regular backups of any extra storage I attach. I can restore any individual box in an hour or two. It’s no high-availability but it’s good enough for home. I also have an image for docker-compose like the sibling comment and run anything that “just works” in docker that way. Someday I might write some lazy terraform to better separate the concerns of VMs and infrastructure, but it’s not a priority. Proxmox is, in the scheme of things, pretty easy to use. If you can manage instances and images on a VPS you’re most of the way there. Edit: I also have half a dozen shell scripts that do some basic setup things. These would be replaced by terraform if I ever get around to that.
numpad0 4y ago
Is there some tips or example Bash script that you should to cut down power usage? I have an ITX board with mobile i5 that is perfect for this purpose, but the power draw seems a bit high for something that only have to be fast as a Pi, though reliability wise the thing do seem better.

erulabs 4y ago

Our platform started as a "Bring your own computer!" - and AMD64 was much more popular then than ARM64 (for our users). Unfortunately, just saying "bring your own computer" is a technical barrier for lots of people (even sysadmins who just don't feel like doing work at home) - which is why we built a sort of "all-in-one" box

chazeon 4y ago
I see, kubesail right? Interesting. I’ll look into that.
em-bee 4y ago
i certainly appreciate that a suitable hardware model is available for sale, but i would want to be able to run the system on my own hardware too. booting from USB and running install is not to much work. the problem for me would be to spend the time to find a suitable device to run this on. if i happen to have one, great, but if not i'd probably rather buy yours than so my own research. personally, what i am looking for is a portable version of this, that runs on a battery so i can use it tethered through my phone, or even with its own sim card. for home use i would prefer the ability to put at least two regular 2.5" disks because those SSDs are still expensive at large sizes

jahewson 4y ago

This is because of the chip shortage. It’s really a shame.

jayknight 4y ago
https://rpilocator.com/ https://rpilocator.com/ will show you where rpis are for sale, I was able to get one from adafruit a few days ago by following their Twitter account because when they come available they go fast

xedeon 4y ago

I too was thinking of building a Pi4 cluster but I just couldn't justify the inflated price. I just ended up buying several HP Elitedesk from eBay that had NVME storage, OOB management and plenty of ram. There's a whole movement on these 1L pcs: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

spockz 4y ago
I’m always at a loss at home. At work we treat everything as cattle. Nodes get provisioned at boot, we have gazillions of them, and they are all managed. (On a different physical lan, mind you.) redundancy of state is provided on the software level by the database (s). At home getting a similarly redundant setup is time, space, and energy consuming. Moreover, most of the home tooling does not have distributed data built in so we need to have a distributed fs or nfs. This brings a whole next level of maintenance and heartache that I simply do not want at home. Consequently, I run one machine and make backups of the config and hope I can restore it when things go south. Does anyone have better ideas?
- midasz 4y ago
  Everything I run on my home server is through docker (compose). The data directories are mounted via NFS on my NAS - that data gets backed up to Amazon Glacier (in case my house burns down or something) + an external HDD plugged into the NAS. This already solves a lot of issues imo. If something goes down it's not the end of the world. If the machine dies all I have to do is mount the NFS shares and run the compose files.
- jnovek 4y ago
  I’m a lazy sysadim at home, here’s what I do. I run proxmox on my server at home and provision with VM images, like we did in the ancient times. I take regular backups of any extra storage I attach. I can restore any individual box in an hour or two. It’s no high-availability but it’s good enough for home. I also have an image for docker-compose like the sibling comment and run anything that “just works” in docker that way. Someday I might write some lazy terraform to better separate the concerns of VMs and infrastructure, but it’s not a priority. Proxmox is, in the scheme of things, pretty easy to use. If you can manage instances and images on a VPS you’re most of the way there. Edit: I also have half a dozen shell scripts that do some basic setup things. These would be replaced by terraform if I ever get around to that.

numpad0 4y ago

Is there some tips or example Bash script that you should to cut down power usage? I have an ITX board with mobile i5 that is perfect for this purpose, but the power draw seems a bit high for something that only have to be fast as a Pi, though reliability wise the thing do seem better.