what internship are you doing?
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
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.
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’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.
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 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
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.
Or you just spin up Games-On-Whales and have the same with almost no work!
I’ve got 2 proxmox servers and I’d never have the courage to try that, seems hardcore as fuck
Holy shit you just described my setup to a T
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!!!
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
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
Stage 4: “I’m done. This isn’t worth it and I don’t actually NEED any of it! rm -rf / it all and wander silently off into the woods. Curl up on a mound of moss and watch all the things that bumble.”
Stage 5 - you live in the woods and talk to a rock
lol at ‘accidental’ beta testers. I tell my family they’re testing my shit
Isn’t that what they’re for?
The thing that I hate about self-hosting is that a lot of apps that could just be a plain offline thing are instead being designed to be super bloated server-docker things. Databases are not reasonably portable data formats.
An sqlite database is a perfectly fine portable data format.
Or, and apparently this is crazy these days - I can just use a file that’s in a format appropriate to what I’m trying to do, compatible with the simpler offline app it was made for, and then just use a more general purpose syncing method whether online or sneakernet if I need to do some kind of data transfer - as opposed to accumulating an ever expanding collection of server stacks that are just redundantly doing the same kind of thing anyway while needlessly adding an insane amount of attack surface.
SQLite allows for more efficient querying of data than doing it by hand, can enforce constraints on the data, and I can query it from my shell.
Of course it’s not going to replace a commonly-used format for a domain. If no such format exists, it’s a perfectly acceptable data format for data that’s tabular in nature. And it can by sync’d/backed up the same as any other file.
Databases are not reasonably portable data formats.
I mean… if you stick to standard SQL…
This is why my self created apps all use Markdown files instead if DBs.
I think I have reached stage 4: No hosting, off-site backup is on an external SSD in a locker at work
2 and 3 are the same and you’re deluded if you think otherwise
The difference between 2nd and 3rd is about 24h
My nextcloud instance is on a managed hosting server and has been for the last 4 years. My homeassistant uses the standard raspberry pi image since I’ve had it for the last 3 months.
(And yes I have to constantly withstand the urge to fully self-host my Nextcloud and reinstall my Homeassistant with a Gentoo base.)
Me transition from stage 1 to stage 2, nervously.
Just wait till stage 4 - I’ve got a 12u server rack, separate 6u networking cabinet, 80+ containers running on multiple VMs managed by multiple Proxmox nodes and all my infrastructure is transitioning to OpenTofu and OpenBao so I can spin up new VMs, manage the containers with Komodo, etc and all managed with single sign on. I’ve got ~$12k sunk into my local AI server alone. I have like 2 active users besides myself…
I won’t lie. I’ve found myself peaking into corners of the house and thinking about where I’d install a proper rack. House just isn’t wired properly for it, though.
I had two separate 20 amp circuits ran into a closet and threw an exhaust fan to outside so I save on cooling costs. Where there’s a will there’s a way!
Fellow stage 4 self-hoster here. Time to start a support group.
Not to be rude but isn’t this just humble-bragging and a subset of Stage 3?
It’s a meme so… Sure? I’d say the jump is from commodity hardware and manual maintenance to enterprise hardware, infrastructure as code, and high availability. It’s a whole new level of pain in my opinion both in terms of mental fatigue and on my wallet
Fair enough. It feels like a difference in scale and not category, but I acknowledge that’s subjective.
Stage 4 clustered servers so k8s can keep the containers up and configured
Stage 5 GitOps
Stage 6 federated clusters on your buddies infrastructure so each of you have off site high availability. Or hardware squirled away at families houses.
Stage 7 OpenStack running on all those clusters, giving a seamless single-cloud experience.
Honestly I prefer the kubevirt, kubeOVN route (ala Harvester).
OpenStack is a decades long labor of love that feels like it was started decades ago, you know?
- I do this shit for money I ain’t going to do it for free. I’m not about to be the 24/7 unpaid on call for my families pagerduty rota. Paid cloud services for me
“Wow these R730/R740 ear destroying rack servers are super cheap on ebay”
No lie, they’re awesome. I’ve got two R720s, and they really aren’t bad. I leave one off. The other runs 4-5 VMs and doesn’t spin loud at all. Lack rack, surplus drives, a refurbed UPS and it just goes.
Had an R710 in my bedroom for a few years, do not recommend
Stage 4: code your own social network and run it on the ThinkPad under the stairs with a DB server in a wardrobe… Fight scrapers and spammers incessantly.
What scrapers and spammers? You’re the only user there.
Its the age of AI man. I had a scraper criple my VPS because I put a Maloja instance there (self hosted last.fm) and ot waspaging though a zillion cross reference links.
LOOOOL
4th is writing your own self hosted tools
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.
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.
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.
hmm actually me uncle asked me if I want his 10" netbook from like 2012. But I said I’m gonna buy a better netbook. Now thinking… Look at all these pre-2017 macbooks! I mean we could do a cluster!
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.
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.
My Nextcloud runs on a basic ass raspberry pi and uses a USB hardware RAID. It fulfills all my NAS needs.
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.
