djdarren

The thing with that laptop though, is that you’re probably able to upgrade the storage and RAM if you need to. That’s valuable. I mean, hilariously expensive to do at this point, but possible none the less.

The way I see it, have a think about what you want to achieve, what self-hosted service is most important to you, and start with that. If you have 200gb of music and you’re sick of giving Spotify money, spin up a Navidrome container and a free Tailscale* account so you can stream your own music to your phone wherever you are. Then see how your laptop responds to that. If it falls over then perhaps you’ll need to have another look at your hardware, but honestly, it probably won’t.

As for the RAM, I used SSH to hook into my server yesterday so I could watch htop on it from another computer while I was importing hundreds of photos into Immich. All four CPU cores were maxed out at 100% and it sounded like a jet engine, but the RAM usage sat steady at around 5.5gb. And that’ll do for me. _ *Tailscale is magic, btw. A free account allows 100 devices, so if you’re running things just for yourself it means you can access everything wherever you are. For free. With basically no setup.

My home server is a 2014 Mac mini running Debian that I’ve kitted out with a 250gb NVME drive and a 1tb SATA SSD. It also has a 2tb HDD hooked up to one of the USB sockets.

It has a quad core i5 and 8gb RAM, so pretty low rent as far as these things go.

That system is currently hosting Nextcloud, Navidrome, Invidious, Jellyfin, Grimmory, Mealie, and Immich. I reckon that’s probably about the limit of what it can handle. It’ll only be used by my wife and I, so I don’t forsee it coming under massively heavy abuse.

I’ve been lucky, because the entire cost to me of that setup is £10 for the adapter to fit the NVME drive, and £13 for the external HDD caddy. The rest of it has been stuff my wife didn’t need, and the Mac itself was my dad’s old one that he gave me.

The point is, you really don’t need a hefty box to start with. Just use whatever you’ve got and see what you can get away with.

This Jeff Geerling video from a couple of weeks back was an eye-opener.

Just because you might be able to find a cheap G5 Xserve server that runs at 200W when idle, doesn’t mean you should.

AI scrapers only know this outdated information

While I have experienced this (quite a lot), it’s much easier to spend five minutes figuring this out with an AI than it is to spend an hour trying to work that out by searching forums for answers.

I especially wish more man pages had common examples.

A thousand times this. It’s all well and good telling us what each option does, but if we don’t know how to form the command around the various arguments and paths, then it’s all fairly useless.

I know It’ll be a controversial take on here; but while I don’t like the use of AI for most things, I’ve found LLMs to be immensely valuable when it comes to learning how to Linux, and as an extension, how to self host.

I understand the limitations, but it’s so much more straightforward to tell an LLM what I’m trying to achieve then follow those instructions, than it is to try and poke about from site to site trying to piece together the information. Particularly if you don’t know what it is you need to search for in the first place.

Obviously you have to exercise some caution, but it makes so much more sense to me to confirm instructions provided by an LLM than it is to try and figure out where to even start. And let’s be honest, not all forum users are as forgiving to complete noobs.

Hmm, I might look into that for getting YT on Apple TV without having to tolerate All Of The Adverts. Currently I manually download using yt-dlp and put them in a Jellyfin folder.

I wish I still had my top spec 2015 MacBook Pro, because I’d love to see how well Debian runs on it.

Best of luck to you!

Yeah, I saw something about that after I’d gone to the trouble of getting it up and running. Might have another go at Calibre Web, though I had trouble getting it to sync with my Kobo, where Booklore was pretty straightforward.

The RAM is upgradable on the 2018 mini, though the storage isn’t. The ability to upgrade the RAM is a big part of why those ones have kept their value.

I actually use a 2014 mini as my general purpose home server.

The interesting thing about that model is that they were offered with a Fusion drive: so basically, some have a small SSD for installing the OS on, with a larger spinning HDD for everything else. If you do pick one up and it doesn’t have the adapter for an M.2 drive, you can buy them on eBay for less than £10.

So mine now has a 250GB M.2 SSD and a 1TB SATA SSD. When I installed Debian, I put /root on the M.2 and /home on the SATA, which works perfectly. The OS can have as much space as it needs without eating into the space my stuff needs. And I have an external 1Tb HDD connected too.

But yeah, as mentioned elsewhere, the wifi can be a pain on those Macs. Personally, I didn’t bother with it as it’s hooked up with Gigabit ethernet anyway.

edit to add: Mine is an 8GB model and I honestly haven’t found myself wishing it had more (for what I use mine, that is).

Mine runs Jellyfin, Navidrome, Mealie (a recipes app), pihole, and Booklore, and doesn’t give me any trouble.

And I bet you call it Graphics Image Manipulation Program every time you use Graphics Image Manipulation Program, right?

I’ve got Monzo working with my Garmin. I use Graphene, so it’s literally my only option for payments considering Curve failed my ID check and refuse to reply to my emails trying to sort it out.

My work PC and gaming PC are Kubuntu, my media server is Debian, and my Home Assistant server is macOS, because it’s an M1 mini. So yeah, kinda. I thought about putting the server on Kubuntu, but in the end figured I’d go for as stable as possible.

Don’t use Ubuntu. It’s just a suckier version of Debian. It used to be user-friendly Debian, but now Debian is more user-friendly than it.

As a reasonably new Linux user, who’s merrily used Kubuntu for the past year, what makes Ubuntu sucky? Aside from dabbling in Asahi and a little bit of Arch, just to see why everyone loves it (I don’t think my use-case is advanced enough to really tell the difference), my only real experience with Linux has been Mint and Kubuntu, both of which have been fine for me.

This isn’t a bad-faith query, btw, I’m genuinely interested in what the actual differences are between Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.

Huh, hadn’t thought of that.

Pretty much.

It reads the clipboard, adds the URL to a yt-dlp script, downloads the video, then switches to my YouTube Jellyfin folder and copies the download across. But instead of opening a terminal in that folder and copy/pasting the script from a .txt file I used to use, it’s just one click. Three if you count clicking the share button in Freetube and then clicking the ‘copy link’ button.

My approach is a python app that’s literally just a button I press after I copy a YT URL from FreeTube. I click the button and it gets yt-dlp to download the video in the highest quality into my Jellyfin folder so I can watch it on my Apple TV.

I did start looking into TubeSync, but I wasn’t all that familiar with Docker at the time, so got quite lost with it. In the end I quite like browsing FreeTube, and only downloading the stuff that catches my interest. Means I don’t spend ages idly scrolling a feed.