I did this a few years ago with a stack of pi 4s connected to a four port PoE switch. One was an openWRT router, one was a plex server connected to some spinning discs via usb, and I had another you could plug an hdmi cable into and use to view the media. I eventually found out I could host the whole thing on a single pi, but it was still a fun project. Could probably do it all on a pi 5 with an nvme hat no problem. Might look into that when I get the spare tinkering money.

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If your main goal is a monero node/mining, start with AMD 3000 series processors, 3700x is a good place to start, and build a used system. If it’s just a node, any SoC will work with enough storage. A few months of a VPS could cost the same as buying your own hardware, that and you own the hardware and data instead of some corporation.

Everything runs in a docker container, so you will probably want to wrap your head around that first thing. Most people start with portainer or dockge for easy docker management and learning with a gui, although learning everything through the command line has its merits as well.

I would get a raspberry pi or an old NUC and just dive right into figuring out how to run the monero node. I believe the monero project maintains docker images. The monero communities are super helpful and nice, and so are the self hosted communities, if you hit a snag or don’t understand something.

If you use WireGuard for local access, I don’t think you need to open any port on your firewall, unless you are sharing your plex with other people that do not have access via WireGuard. But I know just enough to get me in trouble, so I’m sure I’ll be corrected on this.

Reliability of connection to the drives, especially during unscheduled power cycles. USB is known for random drops, or not picking the drive up before all your other services have started, and can cause the need for extra troubleshooting. Can run fine… or it could not. This is in reference to storage drives, not OS drives.

Trunas with Tailscale/headscale/NetBird as far as software and security. As far as hardware, you want storage that is not attached via usb. Either an off the shelf nas solution or a diy nas would work. There are a few YouTubers that touched on this, hardware haven and raidowl I think.

The newer Omada routers are pretty good, and their software is getting better. Personally I use Opnsense on a Chinese fanless router from eBay. Paid for an n100, got an i3-1113 with dual channel memory does everything I need no issue, and it has helped me learn ALOT. However if I had the $200 just laying around today, I would stick with Omada just for simplicity.

Jeff Geerling did a video on them, got me super interested and thinking on how to implement and use with family.

Proxmox is based on kvm/qemu, and is very resource conservative. There is virtually no impact on performance due to the hypervisor, even on older processors. Scheduling on the cpu and hypervisor makes running multiple VMs at the same time trivial as well. RAM and I/O bandwidth are the two things that can affect performance. Running out of RAM due to too many VMs will grind you to a halt, but so would running too many applications or containers on bare metal. Running everything off of one spinning sata disk will make it impossible, but again, same downfall on bare metal.

Those minimal impacts to performance are a minor nuisance compared to the ability to run experiments and learn on sandboxed VMs. Now that TrueNAS has better virtualization support, it has caught my eye as a better homelab solution, but I will always have a proxmox server running somewhere in my stack just due to the versatility it gives me.

Thought they were synonymous. Thank you for making the distinction.

Line interactive basically means the battery will always be feeding the devices on UPS. Make sure you don’t go over the listed wattage. I learned the hard way and bought an under spec Tripplite, the battery kept dying. I now have a UPS specced out for my router and the Verizon box outside, not anything else on my rack. You should be fine, just saying in the future when you add devices, keep that in mind.

Just my opinions here:

• I have essential services running on a separate computer, 8gb pi4 right now. Stuff like NetBoot.xyz, homepage, etc, lightweight and resource low but need to be always up. That way if your main server needs to go down, you still have those services running.

• I have bought second hand enterprise equipment for most of the hardware I have. Basically anything with ddr4 and pcie 3 or above will crush most things you would like to do. Grabbing an intel with quick sync will help with Jellyfin, but you can add a graphics card for transcoding if you want, a quadro p2000 or higher will be fine. Building is a viable option as well, but you may spend more for less powerful but more efficient hardware.

• software is probably the most controversial. I went with proxmox on my main server, giving me the ability to run whatever I want whenever I want. It’s not perfect, but gets the job done and has helped me learn A LOT. But flip a coin or roll a dice on what software to run as a newbie, it will all be a learning curve, and everyone will tell you why what they use is superior.

Whatever you do, you’re not wrong. Run things that tickle your fancy and move at your pace. You’ll mess up, step back and punt a lot. Remember to backup essential data before you wipe. Have fun, and good luck on your travels.

Waiting on a merge it looks like

It has been. I started in this because I liked picking up kick ass enterprise hardware really cheap and playing around with what it can do. Used enterprise hardware is so damn expensive now, it’s cheaper and easier to do everything with consumer products and use the rx6700 in my gaming rig. Just don’t want that running llms and always on.

Picked up an AMD instinct mi25 to try and do just that. Can get easy-diffusion working after some cussing and voodoo. Cannot get rocm to do ANY llm of any kind, feels like a waste of video ram

Also have a tesla p4 that runs most text-to-image models rather well, but have been unsuccessful at any llm either, even oobabooga can’t seem to run on it.

Have given up because the software stack keeps advancing and leaving my hardware behind. I don’t have $3000 for an a100 or $1300 for an mi100 sooo… until the models can run on older/less powerful hardware, I’m probably sitting out of this game. Even though I’d love to be elbow deep in this one.

Apple: bricks phone with unapproved part. Samsung: “hold my beer”

“You used a non-Ford approved part. For your safety, we have disassembled your vehicle and reported you to the consumer protection police. You have lost your license and the full balance of your loan/lease is due in 24 hours.”

MY TOWN IS IN THE NEWS!!!

Any old Dell desktop/workstation/server should reach those specs. Poweredge rX30 and up, precision XX20/30 and up or optiplex (don’t know or understand that product line). Most of them are being rescued from the landfill. Might have to spend a crap ton over your budget, like 5-10x over, but you will get those specs.

Look at an r430 barebones, no cpu/ram and build from there using spec sheets from Dell on what it takes. I was able to get one for $400 3 years back, even came with 16gb of ram and a single 10 core Xeon e5-v3.

Also, what are you doing that need these kinds of specs? Running more than 10 VMs at once? Cloud gaming? Form follows function.

“67 hemi cuda!”