Owning a Pet Server in 2022 (Part 2)

In part 1 I de­scribed why I want­ed this server, and some of the trade­offs and de­ci­sions I had to make to make it hap­pen and work nice­ly.

This is an up­date af­ter re­view­ing some of those de­ci­sion­s, and adding some more soft­ware.

Hardware Changes

• I added a pow­ered hub. This makes the two-HDD sit­u­a­­tion much more man­age­able avoid­ing un­der­­volts that could harm the hard­ware. I used a cheap pow­ered USB HUB.

• I tried us­ing a Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM, USB 3 and faster CPU and ... there was no per­­ceiv­able dif­fer­­ence in per­­for­­mance. So, it's back to a Pi 3B+ with 1GB of RAM.

  Mem­o­ry us­age hov­­ers around 500MB so no prob­lem there.

• I will get a 4-­port white HUB and in­te­grate it in­to the case (or do a new case) at some point.

Software Changes

• Moved all ser­vices to run dock­­er­ized.

  I was re­luc­­tant at first, sus­pec­t­ing a per­­for­­mance im­­pact. Well, it's neg­li­gi­ble and it makes run­n­ing things MUCH sim­­pler.

  Spe­­cial h/t to lin­uxserv­er.io for their nice, qual­i­­ty con­­tain­er­s.

• Added Hedge­­Doc a kick­­ass mark­­down ed­i­­tor / note-­­tak­ing ap­­pli­­ca­­tion / many oth­­er things. Us­ing it to write this!

• Added FreeRSS as a re­­place­­ment for my us­age of In­­ore­ad­er.

• Added Medusa, Tran­s­mis­­sion and Jel­­lyfin which com­bined turn in­­­to a nice "hey, I want to watch this TV show" so­lu­­tion.

• THi­­sis in ad­di­­tion to a we­b­site, gitea and mux­imux to give a uni­­fied fron­­tend to ev­ery­thing.

How does it perform?

I can be stream­ing a video via Jel­lyfin (with transcod­ing) and read­ing news on FreshRSS with nice re­sponse times, and mem­o­ry us­age hov­ers around 500M­B, which CPU load is around 4.

So, I think this is about as far as I can push it, but it's a lot of func­tion­al­i­ty for a tiny, cheap, home serv­er.