djdarren

Oh aye, he’s a monumental prick.

It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy dashboard.

I use Soulseek to the exclusion of any other music acquisition services. Between it and Lidarr my Navidrome server is GLORIOUS these days.

Yeah, I figured as much. I do have Nextcloud on my server, and probably should get around to shifting most of what’s in my SyncThing over to it.

I’ve used SyncThing for over a year from Graphene to, well, any computer I have. But I’ve never been able to work out: is it possible to set ST so that it doesn’t take up space on a device, like how cloud storage platforms do?

My 2014 Mac mini has two internal hard drives because that era supported Fusion drives. Mine wasn’t specced with a Fusion, but for about £10 I picked up an adapter from eBay so I could populate the NVME slot. As a result I’ve got a 1tb 2.5" SSD that houses /home, and a 250gb NVME drive that the rest of the OS lives on. But they could be set up in any way that suits.

The only real caveat with that Mac is to ensure the one you get has 16gb RAM, because it ain’t upgradable (unless you’re dosdude1). Also, it’s GPU isn’t much cop. But mine is running Debian and a bunch of services on 8gb and doesn’t cause me any issues.

Oh aye, I get it. But when you’re new to the platform and trying to work with tools that are familiar, you don’t know about any of that.

As a Mac user who’s migrated over to Linux over the past year or so, I’ve got an idea of where OP is coming from.

Docker on macOS is accessed via a Desktop GUI, so you can easily see what you have installed, how it’s running, etc… So when I shifted over to Linux, I was thrown off by there being no such tool. I wasn’t used to using a terminal to do everything, and grumbled quite a lot about there being no Docker Desktop GUI, given how many self-hostable services run through Docker.

I’ve since gotten used to it, but it really is quite jarring.

It’s the land of the Finn’s.

I have ADHD, so, well, everything.

Also, time off work AND I get to eat and drink too much. Fine by me.

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.

Particularly when it’s an old Intel Mac that Apple obsoleted years ago, but which still runs Linux perfectly. Also, they’re reasonably powerful and cost bugger all because the M-series Macs have blown them all out of the water.

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.