8 ms·

I run wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy for this sort of thing. I use the docker container, and it's great. "Just

I run wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy for this sort of thing. I use the docker container, and it's great. "Just works". Also, unrelated, I just decided I don't like the sentiment of "PiMyProjectName" branding. I know most projects don't just run on a Pi, and that the intent is to say "you can self-host thing", but at this point if you want to run a home server sort of thing, just buy some cheap 100-200 dollar minipc thing. That's how much you'd pay for a Pi now anyway, and it comes with such great features as: * just establishing an ssh connection doesn't take multiple seconds * the ethernet doesn't go over a usb hub * it doesn't run on an sd card that is going to fail within a year I'm pretty dismissive of ARM chips for homelab stuff at this point. There's super cheap minipcs with "real" processors that will just destroy even an expensive ARM board. Pi's shine with their ability to run both a real/full Linux and also do gpio type stuff that otherwise is usually an arduino board. I don't have anything against low-level programming but damn is it just a lot more fun to do in python. I love the Rpi zero w 2 products for this, just enough juice to run wifi and a python loop, plus the gpio pins. Too bad they've been sold out for literally years.

MallocVoidstar 3y ago
I bought a used Lenovo mini-pc for ~$40 and it is significantly more capable/reliable than the Pi 3 it replaced. If I need non-server stuff (I2C, GPIO) I stick to microcontrollers now.
regularfry 3y ago
Teeny tiny detail: > just establishing an ssh connection doesn't take multiple seconds That's almost certainly power saving on the WiFi. Annoying but fixable. Seems to be on by default, and a `/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off` line in rc.local should fix it.
lxgr 3y ago
> I run wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy for this sort of thing. I use the docker container, and it's great. "Just works". This looks great, thank you! My current home router(s) fortunately support Wireguard natively, but I'll look into this if I'm ever again forced to use a shitty CPE. > I'm pretty dismissive of ARM chips for homelab stuff at this point. There's super cheap minipcs with "real" processors [...] What makes an ARM SoC a "non-real processor"? I'm typing this on a laptop with an ARM CPU, and it's the fastest hardware I've ever worked on.
- askiiart 3y ago
  Sure, some stuff doesn't run on ARM, but a lot does. Plus, you can get decent ARM processors for cheap, whereas for the same price the best you'd get would be a Celeron.
  - sgtnoodle 3y ago
    The "decent ARM processors for cheap" seem comparable to a Celeron performance-wise, don't they?
jmole 3y ago
I’ve been curious about the performance gap here – you can open htop on a pi 4 and see that CPU utilization is relatively low, ~33% out of 400%, something like that, and yet some operations seem like they take 5-6x longer than they ought to on a “normal” computer. Is it all down to the file system? Is the CPU just in interrupt overload all the time? I wish I had a better understanding of the issue here.
- znpy 3y ago
  What do you expect from a computer that’s completely powered with less than 10W?
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  CPU load metrics are averages, typically over e.g. a second. Many operations take less time than that. If something takes 300ms on a Pi and 50ms on a PC, the Pi is six times slower in observed latency but will still only show <33% CPU utilization when averaged over a second. Some of the metrics are over even longer periods of time. The Linux load average metrics are 1 minute, 5 minute and 15 minute. You can have your ssh handshake take 20 full seconds with a CPU core at 100% and still see a 0.33 load average. And having three more cores available does nothing even when the system is busy if the application is single-threaded. The small boards also typically have much slower I/O and less memory. On a PC with 16GB of RAM running as a server, usually the whole OS will end up cached in memory. A Raspberry Pi with less RAM is more likely to have to evict from the page cache, and then read it back from a slow SD card.
yonatan8070 3y ago
The Pis shine primarily in terms of power consumption, under load, a mini PC could cosume 50W, where a Pi (and other ARM boards) will do an absolute maximum of 15W. And if you have multiple devices that run 24/7, that could be a significant saving
- Lendal 3y ago
  Just have to pay attention and be picky while shopping for the mini pc. Yes most of them are way over 15W but you can find them under 15W. My Quieter3Q for instance is fanless & runs on a Celeron in just 15W. I love it, but one annoyance is, it does not come back on by itself after a power interruption.
  - paol 3y ago
    > it does not come back on by itself after a power interruption. Most BIOSes have an option for that. Did you check?
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  Additionally, my home Pi4 sits in a metal case that acts as a heat sink so I don't have to use a fan at all. That translates to: - additional energy savings - more or less eliminated need to clean out dust or eventually replace a fan - no fan noise, a massive boon if you live in a small apartment and don't have a closet or basement you can toss the server into for noise insulation I suppose if I did serious number crunching on my home server, I'd need something beefier... but I've been running a VPN, a Minecraft server, a streaming media server, and a DNS server on my Pi4 for more than 3 years now. Only during media scans do I feel any slowness.
  - sedatk 3y ago
    There are fanless mini PCs too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831087
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The trouble there is if you're actually compute bound, the Pi's performance is also a lot worse, and if you're not, you should be comparing the idle power consumption. There are plenty of PCs that idle at under 10W. PCs also support arbitrary amounts of memory, so you can often avoid needing multiple devices by using virtualization.
victor106 3y ago
> I'm pretty dismissive of ARM chips for homelab stuff at this point What about Mac Mini? The latest version runs on M2
- Lendal 3y ago
  The Mac Mini is pretty tempting, but I wanted something even lower-power. 15W is possible for Celeron mini pcs. They are around. I ended up getting a Quieter3Q which is a Celeron-based 15W, fanless and cheaper than a Mac Mini.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The cheapest M2 Mini is $600. That's generally overkill for personal servers. They also have an unknown reliability record, and the older Mac Minis had a tendency to eat storage devices by limiting "fan noise" until temperatures were at the upper threshold of the spec. In the new ones the storage is permanently attached, which is... worrying. One of the better options if you don't need a lot of internal storage is old laptops. They're cheap, low power, have a built-in monitor and keyboard and you don't need a separate UPS (who cares if the internal battery "only" lasts an hour).
codetrotter 3y ago
> it doesn't run on an sd card that is going to fail within a year The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 has variants with eMMC, which is better than using an SD-card. Additionally, there are adapters to use NVMe drives and you can boot from them. I’ve done so with a few RPi CM4, to varying degrees of luck. One of them works perfectly, another one did not. Currently waiting for more of the same adapter I used for the first one and hopefully this will allow the additional ones to work as well as the first one is doing.
sgtnoodle 3y ago
The Pi 4's Ethernet is pci-e now, and its USB3 ports are as well. The USB2 ports are still terribly inefficient. About 8 years ago, I switched my home server from a pi to an Intel baytrail based system. I put it all together myself in a cube shaped case. It is passively cooled and runs off a 12V 2A power brick. I filled the space for the PSU with two 3.5" hard drive hot swap bays. I keep one drive in and synchronized to my desktop over the network, and pop another one in when it's time to make a cold backup. It's served me very well.
bombcar 3y ago
If you need Pi like but not specifically a Pi check out the Rock5B: https://www.sevarg.net/2023/01/01/battle-of-the-boards-2023/ https://www.sevarg.net/2023/01/01/battle-of-the-boards-2023/
- joshbaptiste 3y ago
  Alternative SBCs I've been looking at are the Orange PI 5, Khadas VIM1S, NanoPi R6S https://hackerboards.com/ https://hackerboards.com/
  - slowmotiony 3y ago
    The VIM1S seems almost perfect for home use, too bad it's only got a 100mbit network interface. The Nanopi R6S is more interesting but the price is crazy, it's over 200 euro on Amazon. Then again, the raspberry pi is also over 150 euro, i wish these SBCs would not be so damn expensive.
  - all2 3y ago
    You might also take a look at https://ameridroid.com https://ameridroid.com. They have a bunch of boards. The brand I'm a fan of is ODroid.
txdv 3y ago
Yeah, I agree, I am a geek though and wanted a linux machine with arm so I could do some assembly hacking on it (nothing serious). Just the general geek factor I think makes a lot of people buy it. I use the Argon case with ssd over usb, since the sd cards failed like after 2 weeks. For me it is perfect, I get to host all my minimal things (vpn, ssh over it, host photos, videos, run a few services) and it is like super energy efficient, although that efficiency is more of an ego boost than actual use. I think there are a lot of atom mini pcs which have normal ethernet and m2 connectors that are a better alternative.
manmal 3y ago
Indeed. You can build a power saving PC with eg a used Fujitsu D3401 board and a used Skylake or Kaby Lake CPU, or just get a used Esprimo P756/757 tower (E90+ for lower idle power) for 100 bucks or less. Those should idle at ca 15W (without spinning HDDs). And you can put in 4+ SATA HDDs, which is way more reliable than using an USB enclosure. Works great as an Ubuntu/ZFS server or with unRAID. Beats any Synology NAS in almost every metric.
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  > just get a used Esprimo P756/757 tower (E90+ for lower idle power) for 100 bucks or less Are these still readily available somewhere? All I can find are a tiny handful of $300+ listings and RAM upgrade spam.
  - manmal 3y ago
    I bought a P765 tower last week for EUR 90 (incl shipping) off a German eBay listing (commercial, so I can even deduct VAT). Not sure about other parts of the world, sorry!
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
What is conveniently overlooked in these neverending^1 HN comments that dismiss RPi as "inferior" is that (a) RPi is a brand, (b) people are familiar with and trust the brand and (c) when everyone is doing their projects on the same hardware it avoids compatibility disclaimers like "This is project is tested on X. It may or may not work on Y." It obviates consideration of "hardware compatibility". With the RPi people know exactly what hardware to buy. Even if the hardware is overpriced or underpowered, synergies are created when everyone is using the same hardware. IMHO, one cannot discount the value of that, but these comments downgrading the RPi aways do. Of course there are better choices for hardware than the RPi, and perhaps without the supply issues, but good luck getting everyone to buy the same thing so that projects do not have to account for "hardware compatibilty". 1. Eleven years and counting
- regularfry 3y ago
  It's more that all the instructions you'll find assume raspberry pi os as it is the hardware. If there was more diversity of OS in everyday use you might see more fragmentation.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    One of the other aspects of the RPi I think deserves more credit is the ability to easily boot into a variety of OS. Ideally I prefer to boot from USB or the network, but SDCard is still better than nothing. For some strange reason people try to use an SDCard in r/w mode after boot, treatng it like primary storage. IME, that is a recipe for failure. I prefer to boot to RAM. Then I might mount external storage device if I need it, but certainly not an SDCard. Now, maybe the setup I choose is more difficult on one OS than on another. This is where RPi shines, IMO. As a project creator, I can use an OS I choose from among a variety that have been ported to the RPi, including non-popular ones, and I know every RPi user can easily run it because it's been already been pre-installed on SDCard; the RPi is not OS-specific. No pre-installtion of OS! (This pre-installation practice enabled Microsoft to stifle competition and hold back progress in computing for decades.) Prior to RPi, many SBC only had GNU/Linux as an OS choice because that's what's popular. For example, prior to the RPi port running Plan9 required careful hardware purchasing choices. Choosing RPi, a well-known brand, is arguably much easier.

MallocVoidstar 3y ago

I bought a used Lenovo mini-pc for ~$40 and it is significantly more capable/reliable than the Pi 3 it replaced. If I need non-server stuff (I2C, GPIO) I stick to microcontrollers now.

regularfry 3y ago

Teeny tiny detail: > just establishing an ssh connection doesn't take multiple seconds That's almost certainly power saving on the WiFi. Annoying but fixable. Seems to be on by default, and a `/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off` line in rc.local should fix it.

lxgr 3y ago

> I run wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy for this sort of thing. I use the docker container, and it's great. "Just works". This looks great, thank you! My current home router(s) fortunately support Wireguard natively, but I'll look into this if I'm ever again forced to use a shitty CPE. > I'm pretty dismissive of ARM chips for homelab stuff at this point. There's super cheap minipcs with "real" processors [...] What makes an ARM SoC a "non-real processor"? I'm typing this on a laptop with an ARM CPU, and it's the fastest hardware I've ever worked on.

askiiart 3y ago
Sure, some stuff doesn't run on ARM, but a lot does. Plus, you can get decent ARM processors for cheap, whereas for the same price the best you'd get would be a Celeron.
- sgtnoodle 3y ago
  The "decent ARM processors for cheap" seem comparable to a Celeron performance-wise, don't they?

jmole 3y ago

I’ve been curious about the performance gap here – you can open htop on a pi 4 and see that CPU utilization is relatively low, ~33% out of 400%, something like that, and yet some operations seem like they take 5-6x longer than they ought to on a “normal” computer. Is it all down to the file system? Is the CPU just in interrupt overload all the time? I wish I had a better understanding of the issue here.

znpy 3y ago
What do you expect from a computer that’s completely powered with less than 10W?
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
CPU load metrics are averages, typically over e.g. a second. Many operations take less time than that. If something takes 300ms on a Pi and 50ms on a PC, the Pi is six times slower in observed latency but will still only show <33% CPU utilization when averaged over a second. Some of the metrics are over even longer periods of time. The Linux load average metrics are 1 minute, 5 minute and 15 minute. You can have your ssh handshake take 20 full seconds with a CPU core at 100% and still see a 0.33 load average. And having three more cores available does nothing even when the system is busy if the application is single-threaded. The small boards also typically have much slower I/O and less memory. On a PC with 16GB of RAM running as a server, usually the whole OS will end up cached in memory. A Raspberry Pi with less RAM is more likely to have to evict from the page cache, and then read it back from a slow SD card.

yonatan8070 3y ago

The Pis shine primarily in terms of power consumption, under load, a mini PC could cosume 50W, where a Pi (and other ARM boards) will do an absolute maximum of 15W. And if you have multiple devices that run 24/7, that could be a significant saving

Lendal 3y ago
Just have to pay attention and be picky while shopping for the mini pc. Yes most of them are way over 15W but you can find them under 15W. My Quieter3Q for instance is fanless & runs on a Celeron in just 15W. I love it, but one annoyance is, it does not come back on by itself after a power interruption.
- paol 3y ago
  > it does not come back on by itself after a power interruption. Most BIOSes have an option for that. Did you check?
vanilla_nut 3y ago
Additionally, my home Pi4 sits in a metal case that acts as a heat sink so I don't have to use a fan at all. That translates to: - additional energy savings - more or less eliminated need to clean out dust or eventually replace a fan - no fan noise, a massive boon if you live in a small apartment and don't have a closet or basement you can toss the server into for noise insulation I suppose if I did serious number crunching on my home server, I'd need something beefier... but I've been running a VPN, a Minecraft server, a streaming media server, and a DNS server on my Pi4 for more than 3 years now. Only during media scans do I feel any slowness.
- sedatk 3y ago
  There are fanless mini PCs too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831087
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The trouble there is if you're actually compute bound, the Pi's performance is also a lot worse, and if you're not, you should be comparing the idle power consumption. There are plenty of PCs that idle at under 10W. PCs also support arbitrary amounts of memory, so you can often avoid needing multiple devices by using virtualization.

victor106 3y ago

> I'm pretty dismissive of ARM chips for homelab stuff at this point What about Mac Mini? The latest version runs on M2

Lendal 3y ago
The Mac Mini is pretty tempting, but I wanted something even lower-power. 15W is possible for Celeron mini pcs. They are around. I ended up getting a Quieter3Q which is a Celeron-based 15W, fanless and cheaper than a Mac Mini.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The cheapest M2 Mini is $600. That's generally overkill for personal servers. They also have an unknown reliability record, and the older Mac Minis had a tendency to eat storage devices by limiting "fan noise" until temperatures were at the upper threshold of the spec. In the new ones the storage is permanently attached, which is... worrying. One of the better options if you don't need a lot of internal storage is old laptops. They're cheap, low power, have a built-in monitor and keyboard and you don't need a separate UPS (who cares if the internal battery "only" lasts an hour).

codetrotter 3y ago

> it doesn't run on an sd card that is going to fail within a year The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 has variants with eMMC, which is better than using an SD-card. Additionally, there are adapters to use NVMe drives and you can boot from them. I’ve done so with a few RPi CM4, to varying degrees of luck. One of them works perfectly, another one did not. Currently waiting for more of the same adapter I used for the first one and hopefully this will allow the additional ones to work as well as the first one is doing.

sgtnoodle 3y ago

The Pi 4's Ethernet is pci-e now, and its USB3 ports are as well. The USB2 ports are still terribly inefficient. About 8 years ago, I switched my home server from a pi to an Intel baytrail based system. I put it all together myself in a cube shaped case. It is passively cooled and runs off a 12V 2A power brick. I filled the space for the PSU with two 3.5" hard drive hot swap bays. I keep one drive in and synchronized to my desktop over the network, and pop another one in when it's time to make a cold backup. It's served me very well.

bombcar 3y ago

If you need Pi like but not specifically a Pi check out the Rock5B: https://www.sevarg.net/2023/01/01/battle-of-the-boards-2023/ https://www.sevarg.net/2023/01/01/battle-of-the-boards-2023/

joshbaptiste 3y ago
Alternative SBCs I've been looking at are the Orange PI 5, Khadas VIM1S, NanoPi R6S https://hackerboards.com/ https://hackerboards.com/
- slowmotiony 3y ago
  The VIM1S seems almost perfect for home use, too bad it's only got a 100mbit network interface. The Nanopi R6S is more interesting but the price is crazy, it's over 200 euro on Amazon. Then again, the raspberry pi is also over 150 euro, i wish these SBCs would not be so damn expensive.
- all2 3y ago
  You might also take a look at https://ameridroid.com https://ameridroid.com. They have a bunch of boards. The brand I'm a fan of is ODroid.

txdv 3y ago

Yeah, I agree, I am a geek though and wanted a linux machine with arm so I could do some assembly hacking on it (nothing serious). Just the general geek factor I think makes a lot of people buy it. I use the Argon case with ssd over usb, since the sd cards failed like after 2 weeks. For me it is perfect, I get to host all my minimal things (vpn, ssh over it, host photos, videos, run a few services) and it is like super energy efficient, although that efficiency is more of an ego boost than actual use. I think there are a lot of atom mini pcs which have normal ethernet and m2 connectors that are a better alternative.

manmal 3y ago

Indeed. You can build a power saving PC with eg a used Fujitsu D3401 board and a used Skylake or Kaby Lake CPU, or just get a used Esprimo P756/757 tower (E90+ for lower idle power) for 100 bucks or less. Those should idle at ca 15W (without spinning HDDs). And you can put in 4+ SATA HDDs, which is way more reliable than using an USB enclosure. Works great as an Ubuntu/ZFS server or with unRAID. Beats any Synology NAS in almost every metric.

0xcde4c3db 3y ago
> just get a used Esprimo P756/757 tower (E90+ for lower idle power) for 100 bucks or less Are these still readily available somewhere? All I can find are a tiny handful of $300+ listings and RAM upgrade spam.
- manmal 3y ago
  I bought a P765 tower last week for EUR 90 (incl shipping) off a German eBay listing (commercial, so I can even deduct VAT). Not sure about other parts of the world, sorry!

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

What is conveniently overlooked in these neverending^1 HN comments that dismiss RPi as "inferior" is that (a) RPi is a brand, (b) people are familiar with and trust the brand and (c) when everyone is doing their projects on the same hardware it avoids compatibility disclaimers like "This is project is tested on X. It may or may not work on Y." It obviates consideration of "hardware compatibility". With the RPi people know exactly what hardware to buy. Even if the hardware is overpriced or underpowered, synergies are created when everyone is using the same hardware. IMHO, one cannot discount the value of that, but these comments downgrading the RPi aways do. Of course there are better choices for hardware than the RPi, and perhaps without the supply issues, but good luck getting everyone to buy the same thing so that projects do not have to account for "hardware compatibilty". 1. Eleven years and counting

regularfry 3y ago
It's more that all the instructions you'll find assume raspberry pi os as it is the hardware. If there was more diversity of OS in everyday use you might see more fragmentation.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  One of the other aspects of the RPi I think deserves more credit is the ability to easily boot into a variety of OS. Ideally I prefer to boot from USB or the network, but SDCard is still better than nothing. For some strange reason people try to use an SDCard in r/w mode after boot, treatng it like primary storage. IME, that is a recipe for failure. I prefer to boot to RAM. Then I might mount external storage device if I need it, but certainly not an SDCard. Now, maybe the setup I choose is more difficult on one OS than on another. This is where RPi shines, IMO. As a project creator, I can use an OS I choose from among a variety that have been ported to the RPi, including non-popular ones, and I know every RPi user can easily run it because it's been already been pre-installed on SDCard; the RPi is not OS-specific. No pre-installtion of OS! (This pre-installation practice enabled Microsoft to stifle competition and hold back progress in computing for decades.) Prior to RPi, many SBC only had GNU/Linux as an OS choice because that's what's popular. For example, prior to the RPi port running Plan9 required careful hardware purchasing choices. Choosing RPi, a well-known brand, is arguably much easier.