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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.





  • 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.






  • 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.