Ask HN: Tell me about your dream home server | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tell me about your dream home server

4 pointsprivacypoet12 comments

Curious to hear what folks on HN have (or dream of having) as a home server. - Which hardware? - Which OS? - Any indispensable apps running on your server?

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I got an HP proliant ML350 G6 for free, so I want to use that for my server. The problem is it has a firmware issue. It thinks it's overheating when it's not, and kicks the fans onto their highest setting. Software wise I want to run my own local music and video streaming, filesharing, and be able to run whatever I need to practice network/cybersecurity/webdev. I'm very new to everything involved, so it's going to take me a long time to figure out.

Thank you. Which OS have you been using so far?

I've been using openmediavault. I'm thinking of switching to fedora.

The main thing is that I want to upgrade my 42TB Spinning Rust NAS to be 100TB+ NVME. I would ideally like triple mirrored storage, but that would be pretty expensive, so I might raidz2 with some striping if it won't wear out the drives too early. I would need prices on SSD to fall another 75%, which I'm estimating to be another 3-4 years.

I'd say zero moving parts, extremely scalable storage, and very low standby power with the ability to burst up greatly when needed. It should also look relatively attractive and not require a rack mount. Just needs to run Debian.

Among other things, it should have an AI accelerator for hosting models for stuff.

So... probably a 3090 or 4090? Or more exotic budget options like an A770 or a tenstorrent pcie card.

I would run Clear Linux or CachyOS (depending on if I need Nvidia driver support).

I just built a windows “gaming PC” w/ the latest Zen2, liquid cooling, RGB bling, all SSD storage, etc. I settled for a 4080 because those were possible to get. I wrote a web app that collects data and builds text (and some image) models. It runs tailscale so I can access the application from my tablet or laptop anywhere.

I also have a rather old desktop computer that runs Linux, has a 1050 and has a ZFS storage array on hard disks and serves files, media, controls WiFi access points and does other IoT controlling tasks.

Other than getting a 4090 I don’t want for much. It is possible to build a much more powerful machine but in terms of fan noise it is not easy to live with. Some people’s “ideal” would be about small size, low power, no fan, etc. See this site

https://www.servethehome.com/

For insight into hardware from hyper scale to micro desktops you can buy on ebay.

Tell me more, what do you mean with “models for stuff”?

Well historically, personally, I would have run ESRGAN upscaling and other video processing AI models as part of a video encoding pipeline.

Right now I would run/train Stable Diffusion and maybe run Facebook's GPT-like model (that just apparently leaked out from 4chan), and then run clients to mess with them on computers, phones and stuff. But the generative AI space is moving so fast, all that could be obsolete in a month.

There are crazy AI projects for all sorts of stuff (text to speech, "vector" searches on data, meme animation generation from stick figure drawings), and the requirement to run them is generally "a GPU with lots of VRAM"

For one thing it needs to be a router so it can have the public IP.

Tell me more, why do you recommend having a public IP? And are you saying that can only be achieved with certain hardware?

If you want to serve anything to the Internet you want a public IP; it's much cleaner than port forwarding. And your ISP only gives you one and it lands on your router, so you want your router to also be your server. It's nothing to do with hardware per se, but you'd want multiple Ethernet ports and triple Wi-Fi radios.

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