I did this a few years ago with a stack of pi 4s connected to a four port PoE switch. One was an openWRT router, one was a plex server connected to some spinning discs via usb, and I had another you could plug an hdmi cable into and use to view the media. I eventually found out I could host the whole thing on a single pi, but it was still a fun project. Could probably do it all on a pi 5 with an nvme hat no problem. Might look into that when I get the spare tinkering money.

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Not quite. You need to run a cable from a PoE(power over Ethernet) port on a capable switch to each pie. You just need power to the switch and the switch will power all the pis through their own individual cable. You are only limited to the power supply on the switch you use.

If your main goal is a monero node/mining, start with AMD 3000 series processors, 3700x is a good place to start, and build a used system. If it’s just a node, any SoC will work with enough storage. A few months of a VPS could cost the same as buying your own hardware, that and you own the hardware and data instead of some corporation.

Everything runs in a docker container, so you will probably want to wrap your head around that first thing. Most people start with portainer or dockge for easy docker management and learning with a gui, although learning everything through the command line has its merits as well.

I would get a raspberry pi or an old NUC and just dive right into figuring out how to run the monero node. I believe the monero project maintains docker images. The monero communities are super helpful and nice, and so are the self hosted communities, if you hit a snag or don’t understand something.

Allows me to run my pis in my rack with only one cable for network and power. It’s how I run all my SoCs, I hate cable management, so I reduce cables as much as possible.

I know there are third party solutions, just waiting for what they said would be coming soon when they announced the pi 5. That was almost a year ago now, right?

Power over Ethernet? Anyone else waiting for this?

If you use WireGuard for local access, I don’t think you need to open any port on your firewall, unless you are sharing your plex with other people that do not have access via WireGuard. But I know just enough to get me in trouble, so I’m sure I’ll be corrected on this.

Reliability of connection to the drives, especially during unscheduled power cycles. USB is known for random drops, or not picking the drive up before all your other services have started, and can cause the need for extra troubleshooting. Can run fine… or it could not. This is in reference to storage drives, not OS drives.

Trunas with Tailscale/headscale/NetBird as far as software and security. As far as hardware, you want storage that is not attached via usb. Either an off the shelf nas solution or a diy nas would work. There are a few YouTubers that touched on this, hardware haven and raidowl I think.

The newer Omada routers are pretty good, and their software is getting better. Personally I use Opnsense on a Chinese fanless router from eBay. Paid for an n100, got an i3-1113 with dual channel memory does everything I need no issue, and it has helped me learn ALOT. However if I had the $200 just laying around today, I would stick with Omada just for simplicity.

Jeff Geerling did a video on them, got me super interested and thinking on how to implement and use with family.

Install MacOS X: get a bopping song from Röyksopp

Proxmox is based on kvm/qemu, and is very resource conservative. There is virtually no impact on performance due to the hypervisor, even on older processors. Scheduling on the cpu and hypervisor makes running multiple VMs at the same time trivial as well. RAM and I/O bandwidth are the two things that can affect performance. Running out of RAM due to too many VMs will grind you to a halt, but so would running too many applications or containers on bare metal. Running everything off of one spinning sata disk will make it impossible, but again, same downfall on bare metal.

Those minimal impacts to performance are a minor nuisance compared to the ability to run experiments and learn on sandboxed VMs. Now that TrueNAS has better virtualization support, it has caught my eye as a better homelab solution, but I will always have a proxmox server running somewhere in my stack just due to the versatility it gives me.

It can be tough through words to understand intent sometimes, and I to write sarcastic and dry, so no problem.

Flatpak is helpful, it’s how I ran several programs before my work forced me to windows, it does have its place in the toolbox.

Again, not arguing against, just why I don’t…. You do you, I’m just talking about me. Just cause I don’t use something for some reason doesn’t make me anti that thing. Linux community can be so volatile sometimes

Had forgotten about backports. Need to get that set back up. Thank you for the reminder.

I stopped using flatpak when I found out both I had to update outside of the package manager. Also using flatpak gave me some issues with my sound card, so I just run the .deb. To each their own though, which is why I love Linux.

They also have a .deb you can manually update as well.

Debian is working as intended. You are wanting to use Ubuntu or Mint if you want more up to date packages.