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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • Its just a dock, so no.

    It works with most laptops running Linux, but its still just a dock. That gigabit port is just a usb-c/thunderbolt device, it is not a full machine. Same with the video, its just DP alt mode, there is no GPU in there.

    If you want a small form factor machine to use a server, look for a used tiny/mini/micro workstation.








  • Here are a few of my favorites, some of which are exposed, some are not:

    • Mealie - Recipe management. Import recipes by URL is my favorite feature, then I tweak and try it out (I have to be gluten free, so this makes it easy to track what worked for us).
    • Homepage - a homepage to put quick links to all of my stuff, neat and clean.
    • Grafana - for visualization of current data of my systems, paired with Prometheus.
    • Technitium DNS - for all of my DNS needs.
    • Jellyfin - for all my media, let’s me pick out what my kids can see/watch without me having to look over their shoulder, along with being a great looking solution for me.
    • Immich - photo and video management

    All of these (and more, this is just a dsmple of favorites) run on Proxmox. I mostly use LXC over docker, personal preference.

    Home Assistant is probably the single most useful for me, already mentioned, just about everything at home is automated/controlled through there.





  • Tiny/mini/micro.

    You can grab a used box for under $200. Most I’ve picked up have been around $100-$125, then I drop in a new m.2 for the host, maybe add/change ram depending on what I got it with.

    Data lives on the NAS (really multiple for me, but besides the point here), and you’ll get waaaayyyyy more compute with a usff PC like that than you will with a pi or what a NAS can offer. They also run really light on power when you aren’t putting the CPU to work, so budget friendly in a bunch of ways.

    I’ve got a goal after a move my wife and I are planning to run the whole shebang on solar, with battery and a switch to utility power. I’ve got 10 of these little monsters now, after a recent addition, and its quite doable from my measurements of actual power usage.

    Which is a really long way of saying you may want to look at some tiny/mini/micro PCs.