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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

by 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.
- pletnes 4y ago
  I have 3 computers and stuff my files in onedrive and github + various less important cloud services. I can just log on to onedrive on a new machine if one of them dies. I have 2 aging thinkpads that work «well enough» for most uses, including the kids’ homework (which is on google something). Since I have multiple, I can tolerate one dying.
Jolter 4y ago
I couldn’t use one of those in my home, they’re simply too noisy.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  This. I got an HP Elitedesk g4 (i5-8500) a while ago, enticed by the small size but desktop-tier performance, and support for dual NVME + SATA drives. I figured it would be great for my needs as a transportable PC, instead of a laptop; it was much cheaper. Boy, do I hate it. It has this whiny fan noise than never stops. And if the CPU needs to do the least bit of work, the fan ramps up even more. Otherwise, it's a nice little computer. Also, the newer generations – I think starting with gen 6, which look different – seem quieter. They probably realized that having a fan rattle around isn't great.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

by xedeon 4y ago

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.
pletnes 4y ago
I have 3 computers and stuff my files in onedrive and github + various less important cloud services. I can just log on to onedrive on a new machine if one of them dies. I have 2 aging thinkpads that work «well enough» for most uses, including the kids’ homework (which is on google something). Since I have multiple, I can tolerate one dying.

Jolter 4y ago

I couldn’t use one of those in my home, they’re simply too noisy.

vladvasiliu 4y ago
This. I got an HP Elitedesk g4 (i5-8500) a while ago, enticed by the small size but desktop-tier performance, and support for dual NVME + SATA drives. I figured it would be great for my needs as a transportable PC, instead of a laptop; it was much cheaper. Boy, do I hate it. It has this whiny fan noise than never stops. And if the CPU needs to do the least bit of work, the fan ramps up even more. Otherwise, it's a nice little computer. Also, the newer generations – I think starting with gen 6, which look different – seem quieter. They probably realized that having a fan rattle around isn't great.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]