what internship are you doing?
lol at ‘accidental’ beta testers. I tell my family they’re testing my shit
Isn’t that what they’re for?
Stage 3
When you spur of the moment decide to turn your gaming pc into a proxmox machine and then miss gaming so you end up down a rabbit hole of iommu groups to pass your Gpu through to a steam os VM to wrestle with Linux virtual display drivers so you can use sunshine to cast your games to your laptop
It eventually worked but you can quickly end up in a niche hell hole with little to no coherent documentation.
Trash guides is a gateway drug
Ive been thinking about this for a while, but I imagined it could become hell on earth, thanks for the warning! It will keep the idea away from my head for another week or so
Or you just spin up Games-On-Whales and have the same with almost no work!
You seem to have similar setup
Though for gaming I still use it mostly “directly”
Sunshine only when Im bored on work laptop
The VM still outputs to same display and has keyboard/mouse/etc. passedI’ve been happy with the setup for the last year and half or so
I’ve got 2 proxmox servers and I’d never have the courage to try that, seems hardcore as fuck
I converted my gaming machine into a server a while back. I like to live dangerously though, no proxmox. Baremetal. If my blog is slow, sorry y’all, I’m gaming. Deal with it.
I am so pleased with so many crazy people in this thread. I’m not alone!!!
Holy shit you just described my setup to a T
Is it worth it after that’s all said and done?
I’d love to power gaming in my house from a central server, but I keep imagining that it would be spotty and frustrating as hell.
Your mileage will vary some hardware has better support than others latency can be an issue on titles that are sensitive to it.
Rocket league is unplayable but survival craft games play really well!
The most straightforward approach to dabbling with it would be to install classicoldsongs Apollo on a windows machine it includes virtual display drivers that just work out the box, pair a moonlight client and see how it works for you!
Years ago, I used Moonlight to cast to an Nvidia Shield. It worked pretty well, although it still required a lot of back and forth to tinker with things on the host PC. Still, it was better than the Steam Link at the time. Recently, I tried using the built-in streaming in Steam to play on a different PC in the house, but it was much the same story: lots of back-and-forth, launchers were annoying, and sometimes it wouldn’t display on the right screen.
Maybe virtual machines would be an improvement.
Game streaming is good, but not perfect. It’s useable, but you do get the occasional stutter, dropped frames, connection issues, etc. Not to mention increased input lag.
If you must have your PC in a different room, you’d be better off buying an optical hdmi cord. That’s what I do for gaming on my TV after playing a few games through various game streaming apps and getting fed up with it.
I’ve seen this idea a few times now. How do you get your controllers to connect? Say I want to keep my PC in the basement and have a TV on the second floor. How do I connect the controllers?
I run a USB to Ethernet adapter from my PC to living room TV along with a optical HDMI cable, I even have a second HDMI for when I want to run a second portable monitor on the couch arm rest for notes and stuff
I’m not sure how the person you responded to did it, but LTT has a whole video series on doing just that from what I remember.
I’ve done this a few ways:
Optical thunderbolt to thunderbolt dock… so the dock would be next to your tv and you plugin to the dock with whatever. This works amazingly well.
Game streaming over Ethernet - moonlight/sunshine do a great job, on a high quality network it’s not noticable. Only downside is they don’t forward microphone, so you end up doing some gymnastics to get microphone input.
Laptops have an integrated UPS!
Tried that for a while. The battery turned into a spicy pillow and nearly broke the keyboard from how much it puffed out.
If you do that, make sure the laptop has a feature to keep the battery from charging to 100% at all times. UPSs with lead acid batteries handle sitting at 100% much better.
I use a NAS for backup and I am always concerned about the backup being in the same physical location as the primary. I still haven’t figured out the best way to resolve that.
rsync.net, borg, rclone.
Or get an s3 bucket on AWS, linode, digital ocean and dump things there.
Gift a NAS to one of your friends or someone in your family who lives in a very secure location and has very good internet.
Except tell them that the condition for you giving then a few TB on your hardware is that you sync your NAS to their NAS daily
One encrypted backup to the cloud or trade space with a friend.
When I replaced my first NAS I moved the original to a family member’s basement and run a nightly job to sync what I don’t want to lose between the two.
My solution is to have a mini PC in a remote location which boots at a given time each day (BIOS option using RTC Clock). It autoconnects via Wireguard VPN to my home network. I have rest-server running in a container.
Locally, I have a cron job for restic backups to the remote rest-server, followed by an ssh command to update and power off.
Has been solid so far!
I think I have reached stage 4: No hosting, off-site backup is on an external SSD in a locker at work
I’m worried I don’t know if I’m 2 or 3
I’m definitely stage 3 but it’s still an enjoyable hobby that isn’t that time-consuming. I think stage 4 is creating your own services and spamming social media in search of users.
For me it goes from interested in alternatives, to uber into hosting as much you can, down to the essentials.
With this sort of thing, I’m always left wondering what I’m missing in terms of the hardware. Like, I’ve been collecting bits and bobs of old hardware for years, but it feels like if I want anything more than an absolutely basic raspberry-pi-level server, I need to buy dedicated hardware. For example, I want to put together a nas, especially since I do have a collection of spare, old hard drives, but would want raid for that. Unfortunately, its rare to find a mobo that has more than four sata ports, and all the power supplies I have available to harvest from other systems are either too weak, or are proprietary, meaning I’m halfway to buying a new PC anyway. Is there something I’m missing, or do others just have more disposable income?
You can get an PCIe HBA on ebay for $50-60 bucks and will allow you to connect 8 disks to a single system. Look for ones that specifically say they have been flashed to IT mode which will let the host system address the individual drives and enable you to use MDADM for RAID. My “Server” is literally just the old motherboard from my gaming PC with 4x 8TB drives connected to one of those ebay HBAs.
That’s basically what I did, along with the new PSU, but thats still a lot to spend on a hobby/luxury, unfortunately, so I can’t really afford to tinker with it more than that.
To piggyback off of OR3X’s comment, I purchased a LSI 9300-16I for my Plex server which will support 16 data/SAS drives with the 4 way cables. They make a 8I version as well that’s cheaper. Power is still something you have to work out though, but that’s a single PSU.
I purchased my unit on eBay for $53 a couple years back. I use unRAID to host everything and would recommend because it’s fairly simple to setup, and works very well with mixed disks and parity. I’ve had 5+ old drives fail over the past few years and never lost any data.
I bought a second hand Intel NUC and put a big harddrive in it (I think only.some models have a slot). Works pretty good.
You dont have 11 leftover/trash computers/laptops/harddrives your family dumped on you? Im 26 and ive been given legitimately 16 different computers from my mom, dad, grandparents, and in-laws
Where do you think all the aforementioned hard drives came from? Lol. Its just that so many of the other parts are proprietary/old that I can’t mix-and-match to make something more useful. For a breif period, I had four separate working desktops, and not one had a standard power supply or mobo. I swear all of that should be made illegal.
For a lot of purposes, an old slow system is great. Craigslist (if you’re in a country that has it, otherwise use your local equivalent) is a great place to find super cheap old equipment to build server infrastructure from. Thrift shops too, I regularly find old UPSs that just need a new lawnmower battery chucked in to work at my local thrift shop, they charge like $10 for em. Usually found near power strips.
My Nextcloud runs on a basic ass raspberry pi and uses a USB hardware RAID. It fulfills all my NAS needs.
Nonsense! The old laptop I run proxmox, home assistant, and most of my containers on is mounted to the wall in the garage, not under the stairs.
I’m trying to figure out where to put my server, currently it’s on my desk. I want to avoid the garage because of exhaust/dirt/temperature swings. The understair closet is next to the shower, so humidity could be a concern, and also it’s a small awkward shaped space. I would prefer to set it up in the utility room, but there’s humidity and dust from the dryer and washer. Maybe I’m just being too precious though
Mine is actually in a toilet cubby in my garage, it’s the only part of the garage that’s heated and it’s mostly separate from the mess I make in the rest of the space. But I do blow it out with compressed air semi-regularly because its still less than ideal.
It was convenient though because it’s on the other side of a wall shared by my entertainment center, so it was easy to cut holes and put in keystone plates on both sides.
Airflow solves humidity. Cut a hole in the door and install a fan
I left all of that shit behind and now just use VLC to stream to any pc on my network from a shared drive.
Um… Where does the guy in the middle host his shit these days? Asking for a friend.
I use podman + quadlets (just contianers hooked into sysremmd) maintained mostly via hermes and claude so I don’t have to fuck around with nerd shit at home and trouble shoot.
Aim for step 2.5 and be the middle guy but hosting it all on a retired PC in the closet. It’s almost like step 3.
Alternatively, I guess you could use a VPS but those can get expensive quick.
I’m in stage 2
Me too but now I’m afraid
Same, been there for a decade.
I’m careful about what I want to host because I know I’m the asshole that needs to fix it when it breaks, and password managers that my wife uses are 100% off the self-hosted menu.
Vaultwarden requires Bitwarden to keep on allowing client access. Even if there are FOSS plugins/clients, I still need ot host it between my house and a cloud and it needs to be highly available.
I’ll keep paying for that one.
How about a basic ass keepass file that you put on your Nextcloud? I’ve been using that for years and I’m happy with that
Works for me, would NOT work for the wife and kids.
I’ve barely got them convinced to use a low friction password manager. Even the loss of autocomplete on phone would be enough they’d start using browser based secrets.
Same here for pretty much the same reasons
I’m also in stage 2 but getting closer to stage 3 😂
Stage 2 is ideal. Normie self hosting. Once you figure out docker youre cooked in the pipeline
I just use flash drives to transfer stuff from my computer to the ipad so i can watch in bed lol, keep my music on an mp3 player
Surprisingly those dual-ended USB-A + USB-C flash drives can be pretty decent, especially for stuff like this.
it’s easier to wait like 5 minutes for files to transfer than to maintain a whole wireless streaming setup. i think of it like walking over to the video rental store lol
It’s a peaceful life.
