this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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39
Old PC as Server (self.selfhosted)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by LazerDickMcCheese to c/[email protected]
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I have an early 2000s PC (pre-SATA) with 512MB RAM (I'd love to tell you about the CPU, but its under a cooler that isn't going anywhere) that's been sitting in closets for about 15 years. Assuming I'm willing to buy into it, can something like that reasonably host the following simultaneously on a 40GB boot drive:

Nextcloud Actual Photoprism KitchenOwl SearXNG Katvia Paperless-ngx

Or should I just get new hardware? Regardless, I'd like to do something with this trusty ol business server.

Edit: Lenovo or Dell as the most cost-effective, reliable self-host server in your opinion?

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[–] LazerDickMcCheese 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Holy shit, that's genius. I saved your comment for reference. This is probably how I'll end up learning to make these things work

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Well thanks, and all credit goes to the person who passed that setup on to me, and the person who passed it on to them... Everyone is so infatuated with docker these days and I just don't know why. Cool you can run stuff in a container, but so can I. Just like I've seen so many people who think VMware is the ultimate because, what, businesses pay for it and that makes it better? Honestly when I tried VMware I found it to be a monstrous resource hog that my desktop machine could barely handle, and yet I can run KVM on servers that are almost twenty years old.

This is one of the reasons why it pays to play around with older hardware -- you get to see how smoothly various options run, and pick the solution that doesn't require next-generation hardware just to get by. I've always ran older used machines because I can get them dirt-cheap, I know the bugs are worked out of the hardware, and they are just fine. I'm actually upgrading to some Poweredge R620 racks this year, which are still 11 years old, but they use half the power for a massive boost in processing so I'm working on replacing the other machine.