PiBox: a tiny personal server for self-hosting (pibox.io)

Unlike literally every other random assemblage of jazz you might possibly stumble into- which will be neither a toaster nor an air-frier, but some weirdo alien device a couple handful of earthlings have seen- you'll have a hope of getting better with this broadly known system. Otherwise, it's a: "Great! You went with Xin! It has flaky documentation, no one uses it on prod, but look at all the great boxes it says it can tick! And it's so much simpler!"

There's many many good pieces about, sure. But for real, there are zero assemblages, zero meta-solutions that let individual computing problem/answers slot in, as compared to Kubernetes. There's nothing remotely as meta-versatile. That's the use case, that which defines it against everything else: it's meta architecture that works to define how we'd get answers to any architecture problem. It's a viable answer to every system setup, unlike everything else which has narrowed, winnowed concerns.

You try to brush off, saying, it's my opinion here. That's a small slight, but generally, there's just nothing remotely of interest to the public anywhere near as broadly capable, that serves anywhere near a wide of range of concerns, that is anywhere near as flexible. (Counter-example me!) There's a variety of other piecemeal ideas out there- Hashicorp has a constellation of ideas that are all pretty good & which one can assemble. Doubter's gonna doubt, but the core premise of kubernetes- an all-purpose malleable api-server that records shit, operators that make the shit real, is an intelligble solid consistent base that underpins so much more, unifies & makes sense of computing so much better, so profoundly generally, across such a broader range of big & small computing, than anything else has remotely neared, that it is obvious & clear to those who try this better/general/pro-social/well-adopted paradigm of systems to be a repeatable, knowable, clear, enunciated & learnable way, that there's really no other platform appliance is worthy of mentionable compare.

You might not like my phrasing, but asking you what you saw, what possibilities would arise to you is a general & sincere question & you being so mortally offended at being challenged doesn't feel fair either. It would have been interesting to see you either try to guess, or put in 3 minutes of looking around & state more clearly what was unapparent about how these might be related. I was hoping you'd work to carry a little water in the discussion, to help illuminate what your mindset was, after a little trying.

> Get ahold of yourself

This is weirdly aggressive.

I’ve done some searching and there are plenty of friendly and informed people on Twitter that are able to answer questions about the pros and cons of Kubernetes if you search #k8s and #kubernetes. I have learned not to ask rektide any sort of question for obvious reasons.

For $455, you can buy an i3 CPU, motherboard with a 2.5G NIC, 16GB RAM, case and power supply to handle 4 spinning disks and an NVMe M.2. Is it tiny? No. It is, however, good enough to be your primary server for anything not ridiculously compute-intensive, 5-10x faster than the Pi, with 2-4x the RAM and much better bandwidth.

You trade off physical size and electrical power -- but if you want 4 spinning disks, that's going to be the same across builds. In return, you get repairability, upgradability, and probably better cooling.

I'll make a post with the parts list and software install steps in a month or so if it would help anyone out. I bought https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09GK2QSY1, and a few alternatives, and I'm going to benchmark their performance under heavy load (using a much studlier machine to generate traffic).

These mini PCs are getting to be _really cheap_. Cheap enough that my home infra is moving towards a tiny mini PC ($100 or less) attached to every pair of monitors, keyboards, and the network, and a central server to do actual work.

FWIW, I've got a PiBox on order (w/o the drives), and I think the price is VERY reasonable. (No relationship other than waiting customer.) The PiBox "mainboard" that hosts the CM4 has much better I/O capabilities than a garden variety RPi 4. I'm actually going to be using mine for a small, light NAS and application server, and I'm confident it will work well.

However, the easiest way to have low idle power is to use a NUC-like computer.

Many models consume between 5 W and 10 W during light load at the wall plug, while those with the highest power consumption use between 10 W and 15 W at the wall plug, during light load.

The fastest SBCs with ARM cores that can be found at a reasonable price are comparable in speed with Intel Jasper Lake, but Raspberry Pi uses obsolete Cortex-A72 cores, which are 2 to 3 times slower.

Even a 7-year old NUC-like computer from Intel/Gigabyte/Zotac etc., with a "Core" CPU, e.g. a Skylake U, is much faster than anything with Jasper Lake or with Cortex-A76 or older ARM cores.

While a new NUC-like computer is more expensive, an old one might be as cheap as a Raspberry Pi, while being much faster.

During the last 20 years, I had a permanently active 24x7 server, which hosts a large number of services, e.g. firewall, router, NTP server, DNS server, DNS proxy and cache, e-mail server, Web server, Web proxy and cache, file server, etc.

The first server which did all that used the fastest Pentium 4 and it had an average power consumption of over 200 W. The current hardware of the server is the 5th version since the beginning. At each upgrade, the average power consumption has been cut into half. The current server consumes around 10 W and it uses an Intel NUC with a Coffee Lake U CPU, together with 4 USB to Ethernet adapters, to provide 5 Ethernet ports.

I have experimented with various ARM-based SBCs, but when old NUCs are available, repurposing them is a higher-performance solution.