7 websites, Jellyfin for 6 people, Nextcloud, CRM for work, email server for 3 domains, NAS, and probably some stuff I’ve forgotten on a $4 computer from a tiny thrift store in BFE Kansas. I’d love to upgrade, but I’m always just filled with joy whenever I think of that little guy just chugging along.
Heck yeah
Which CRM please?
EspoCRM. I really like it for my purposes. I manage a CiviCRM instance for another job that needs more customization, but for basic needs, I find espo to be beautiful, simple, and performant.
Sweeeeet thank you! Demo looks great. Now to figure out whether an uber n00ber can self host it in a jiffy or not. 🙏
Hell yeah, keep chugging little guy 🤘
Interested in how it does jellyfin, decent GPU or something else?
It does fine. It’s an i5-6500 running CPU transcoding only. Handles 2-3 concurrent 1080p streams just fine. Sometimes there’s a little buffering if there’s transcoding going on. I try to keep my files at 1080p for storage reasons though. This thing’s not going to handle 4k transcoding very well, but it does okay if you don’t expect too much from it.
I’m skeptical that you are doing much video transcoding anyway. 1080p is supported on must devices now, and h264 is best buddies with 1080p content - a codec supported even on washing machines. Audio may be transcoded more often.
Most of my content is h265 and av1 so I assume they are also facing a similar issue. I usually use the jellyfin app on PC or laptop so not an issue but my family members usually use the old TV which doesn’t support it.
AV1 is definitely a showstopper a lot of the time indeed. H265 I would expect to see more on 2k or 4k content (though native support is really high anyway). My experience so far has been seeing transcoding done only becuase the resolution is unsupported when I try watching 4k videos on an older 1080p only chromecast.
What do you mean by showstopper? I only encode my shows into AV1/opus and I never had any transcoding happening on any of my devices.
It’s well supported on any recent Browser compared to x264/x265… specially 10bit encodes. And software decoding is nearly present on any recent device.
Dunno about 4k though, I haven’t the necessary screen resolution to play any 4k content… But for 1080p, AV1 is the way to go IMO.
- Free open/source
- Any browser supported
- Better compression
- Same objective quality with lower bitrate
- A lot of cool open source project arround AV1
It has it’s own quirks for sure (like every codec) but it’s far from a bad codec. I’m not a specialist on the subject but after a few months of testing/comparing/encoding… I settled with AV1 because it was comparative better than x264/x265.
Showstopper in the sense that it may not play natively and require transcoding. While x264 has pretty much universal support, AV1 does not… at least not on some of my devices. I agree that it is a good encoder and the way forward but its not the best when using older devices. My experience has been with Chromecast with Google TV. Looks like google only added AV1 support in their newest Google TV Streamer (late 2024 device).
Not a huge amount of transcoding happening, but some for old Chromecasts and some for low bandwidth like when I was out of the country a few weeks ago watching from a heavily throttled cellular connection. Most of my collection is h264, but I’ve got a few h265 files here and there. I am by no means recommending my setup as ideal, but it works okay.
Absolutely, whatever works for you. I think its awesome to use the cheapest hardware possible to do these things. Being able to use a media server without transcoding capabilities? Brilliant. I actually thought you’d probably be able to get away with no transcoding at all since 1080p has native support on most devices and so does h264. In the rare cases, you could transcode beforehand (like with a script whenever a file is added) so you’d have an appropriate format on hand when needed.
4 gigs of RAM is enough to host many singular projects - your own backup server or VPN for instance. It’s only if you want to do many things simultaneously that things get slow.
deleted by creator
I’m sure a lot of people’s self hosting journey started on junk hardware… “try it out”, followed by “oh this is cool” followed by “omg I could do this, that and that” followed by dumping that hand-me-down garbage hardware you were using for something new and shiny specifically for the server.
My unRAID journey was this exactly. I now have a 12 hot/swap bay rack mounted case, with a Ryzan 9 multi core, ECC ram, but it started out with my ‘old’ PC with a few old/small HDDs
I was for a while. Hosted a LOT of stuff on an i5-4690K overclocked to hell and back. It did its job great until I replaced it.
Now my servers don’t lag anymore.
4690k was solid! Mine is retired, though. Now I selfhost on ARM
People in this thread have very interesting ideas of what “shit hardware” is
My cluster ranges from 4th gen to 8th gen Intel stuff. 8th gen is the newest I’ve ever had (until I built a 5800X3D PC).
I’ve seen people claiming 9th gen is “ancient”. Like…ok moneybags.
My 9th gen intel is still not the bottleneck of my 120hz 4K/AI rig, not by a longshot.
I used to selfhost on a core 2 duo thinkpad R60i. It had a broken fan so I had to hide it into a storage room otherwise it would wake up people from sleep during the night making weird noises. It was pretty damn slow. Even opening proxmox UI in the remotely took time. KrISS feed worked pretty well tho.
I have since upgraded to… well, nothing. The fan is KO now and the laptop won’t boot. It’s a shame because not having access to radicale is making my life more difficult than it should be. I use CalDAV from disroot.org but it would be nice to share a calendar with my family too.
Just down load more ram capacity. It the button right under the down load more ram button.
Maybe not shit, but exotic at that time, year 2012.
The first Raspberry Pi, model B 512 MB RAM, with an external 40 GB 3.5" HDD connected to USB 2.0.It was running ARM Arch BTW.
Next, cheap, second hand mini desktop Asus Eee Box.
32 bit Intel Atom like N270, max. 1 GB RAM DDR2 I think.
Real metal under the plastic shell.
Could ever run without active cooling (I broke a fan connector).This was my media server and kodi player for like 3 years…still have my Pi 1 lying around. Now I have a shitty Chinese desktop I built this year with i5 3rd. Gen with 8gb ram
What’re you hosting on them?
Mainly telemetry, like temperature inside, outside.
Script to read a data and push it into a RRD, later PostreSQL.
ligthttpd to serve static content, later PHP.Once it served as a bridge, between LAN and LTE USB modem.
I have one of these that I use for Pi-hole. I bought it as soon as they were available. Didn’t realise it was 2012, seemed earlier than that.
My home server runs on an old desktop PC, bought at a discounter. But as we have bought several identical ones, we have both parts to upgrade them (RAM!) as well as organ donors for everything else.
Me on a RPi4.
Why didn’t you post this before I bought the RAM?!
Got all my docker containers on an i3-4130T. It’s fine.
I had quite a few docker containers going on a Raspberry Pi 4. Worked fine. Though it did have 8GB of RAM to be fair
2012 Mac Mini with a fucked NIC because I man handled it putting in a SSD. Those things are tight inside!
Those things are tight inside!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Had to buy a special two pronged tool to get her out!
Lol, I used to have an 08 Mac mini and that required a razor blade and putty knives to open. I got pretty good at it after separately upgrading the RAM adding an SSD and swapping out the cpu for the most powerful option that Apple didn’t even offer
When I used to work at the “Fruit Stand” I never had to repair those white back Mini’s thankfully, but I do remember the putty knives being around. The unibody iMac was the worse, had to pizza cutter the whole LCD off the frame to replace anything, then glue it back on!
Lol by the time I actually needed to upgrade from that mini, all the fruit stand stuff wasn’t really upgradable anymore. It was really frustrating, so I jumped ship to Windows.
Those iMac screens seemed so fiddley to remove just to get access to the drives. Why won’t they just bolt them in instead of using glue! (I know why, but I still don’t like it)
I’ve got a i3-10100, 16gb ram, and an unused gtx 960. It’s terrible but its amazing at the same time. I built it as a gaming pc then quit gaming.
That’s a pretty solid machine
10th gen is hardly “shit hardware”.
What hardware are you using where the cpu says you are limited to 4gb?
Even a 25 year old Pentium 4 supports 8GB.
Negative, Pentium 4 was x86 and thus could only address 32 bits.
64bit CPUs started hitting the mainstream in 2003, but 64bit Windows didn’t take off until Win7 in 2009. (XP had it, but no one bothered switching from 32b XP to 64b XP just to use more memory and have early adoption issues. Vista had it, but no one had Vista).
The Pentium 4 supported PAE and 36 bit PSE
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
It’s kind of like how the 8086 was a 16 bit processor but could access 1 megabyte of ram (640k ram 384 k reserved for rom) . -Or the 286 which was 16 bit but could access 24 MB.
But even without that the Prescott P4’s supported 64 bits.
While technically true, the P4 did support PAE, in reality you couldn’t really make use of it on consumer hardware for most of its lifetime. No ordinary socket 478 mainboard with DDR1 memory supported more than 4 GB of RAM. With socket 775 more RAM was possible, but that socket is “only” ~20 years old.
Besides that, there were other even newer systems that supported only 4 GB of RAM, like some Intel Atom mainboards with a single DDR2 socket. Same with Via C3 mainboards.
Oh sure. But as I said, that’s the motherboard’s fault, not the cpu.
Then I don’t understand what your point is. A CPU on its own without a system isn’t of any use. Since there were no motherboards allowing you to use that much RAM, the point about the CPU supporting it is moot as far as I am concerned.
All of that was introduced in 2004. When you said “25 years ago” I assumed you meant the original P4 from 2000.
Maybe an Atom?
Yep. Intel atom D525
Have you looked into using zram?
My guess is an x86 32bit machine
Might be using a laptop where the RAM is soldered to the board. I’ve got a Thinkpad X280 that’s like that: no slots, just surface-mounted RAM.
That’s Lenovo’s fault, not Intel.
Intel atom D525
Oh wow, I just saw the comment about it being an ancient Atom. Yeah, fair enough!
