So… and this is probably debatable, the point of a dedicated seed box is that there are a metric-shitton of other seed boxes on the local network (at the datacenter).
I’d argue the point of self hosting is to be able to set it up however you please. It sounds like you know what to do to be safe.
I use Mulvad for general VPN duty, though I can’t personally speak to its torrent support/speed I do see many recommend it in combination with a wireguard supporting container image. Spin a few up and let us know which ones you like and why.
I will definitely document it when I reach a decision about it all. That will hopefully help lots of people too later on, but at least i’ve already decided on the client and everything is configured there so that’s half the battle. I just wonder about recommendations around here, and absolutey i would self host it all!
I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.
Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding --- so it presumably won't draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I'm guessing it's ballpark accurate.
Works flawlessly for Immich of course.
The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.
For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!
They are still good, arm is awesome. i have Pi4 as OpenMediaVault and docker/homeassistant, etc. Friend gave me a Pi2 surprisingly OMV6 installs on it (even though it ia technically not supported), that one became a PiHole. My 13 year old iomega arm NAS just got converted to a debian minidlna server. Uses 20% of the 256MB RAM.
I got lost with setting up a nice inbox downloader to store all my emails on a HDD attached to my RPI4, but haven't quite mastered the SMTP server part or found the right software to run on it. It's currently powered off waiting for a reflash of the SD Card so I can try again. The end goal for mine is to set up fetchmail and have it grab from my inboxes then imap capabilities so I can read it in Thunderbird. (Don't talk to me about webmail, I know it's the way but I'm older than Star Wars (Original one) and am stuck in my ways. Now get off of my lawn!
Seriously though, I have tinkered with it before as an AdguardHome Server, but somehow, my latency increased so I dropped that. Most of it's life was spent hosting Home Assistant on it until I moved that to the umm...more controversial Proxmox VM method. I'm also on the fence about setting up the Raspberry Pi Nextcloud on it. (Maybe).
Here is a good resource for 36 different things you could possibly do with yours.
SBC (specifically RPis) got more expensive. x86 got more powerful, more importantly more efficient, and cheaper. Also X86 has more software built for it than ARM.
There are a few X86 SBCs now though.
If you already have SBCs and they're doing what you need, I see no reason to switch.
One of the keys to selecting the solution from the provided answers is if you need this to be publicly trusted.
I use an internal openssl ca root, created intermediate ca for each active directory domain or Forest. Also, I wanted to create internal PKI smart cards with yubikeys and his c1150 cards. For you know, fun.
I didn't care that other hosts don't trust my stuff because all my hosts are configured with root ca, and I only use VPN for access.
You want external trust, must do some of the other suggestions. Setting up internal CA is a chore with understanding AIA, CDP points, line of sight to PKI urls for renovation checking, more...
Jeff Geerling made the comparison in a video recently. Did not get to finish it yet, but he brought up pros and cons of both, and there are use cases for both ARM and x86. I still use mine even though I have an old dell tower as an x86 server, mainly for netboot.xyz and pivpn, because I can run it with poe. As long as the switch has power those services will be available.
This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it's really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.
If you're just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.
You're quite right about the Pi 5 power efficiency, an Alder Lake N100 / i3 will smoke it in ops / watt given the right board, but the context was 'a several year old used desktop' which the Pi will handily beat.
Depends on what it's doing. The Pi5 has lower idle power usage but if it's under constant load it's actually very inefficient. Keep in mind that the Pi5 has a 25W max TDP, almost as high as the N100.
The reason that the N100 is seems less efficient in Jeff's video is because it's clocked a lot higher. And power usage increases exponentially with higher clockspeeds
The Pi5 is made on the 28nm node, which is from around 2011. Of course it has other efficiency improvements like the GPU and the ARM architecture, but pound for pound I don't think the Pi5 even beats a 6 year old desktop in efficiency if the desktop was properly downclocked and not running some inefficient HDD's or the likes.
Rockchip boards on the other hand are made on 22nm, which is why they tend to be a bit more efficient.
True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you're not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.
The problems I've had with my RPis have all revolved around the fragility of their SD storage. I got burned one too many times trying to host something important in my house with these things, just for them to get corrupted and lose everything. Backing up these systems was its own nightmare, which failed as much as it succeeded.
A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn't shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you're literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.
Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC's from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.
Still got'em all. Pis are 3d printing, running small automation projects, running on solar in my back yard. I have far too many others that I took a hit on, honestly. Acme Arietta G25 is one that I've really only done some hardware dev on. I'll prob be buried with it. I had a Pocket C.H.I.P that was sick, but after the company fell, I ditched it. Omega Onion 2 hasn't seen any electrons since about. Two weeks after I received it.
But yeah, five liters of fun...
I have a small cluster of Pis running k3s kubernetes and running several services for my household. Yea they could all run on a single beefy server but I had fun learning it all.
I recommend look into managed, vlan capable switches after you get your firewall figured out. That will allow you to put hosts on different vlans and separate lab stuff from the rest of your home network stuff.
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