Yet another Hacker News

What I run on my $10 USD OpenStick, Linux, Homelab

22 points LaurensBER 33 minutes ago 5 comments

LaurensBER 33 minutes ago | parent

I've had a lot of fun with this little gadget and it's pretty cool to see how much you can host on a cheap gadget if you pick the right software! Given how expensive RAM is these days, I figured, this might be a good option for other people to get started with self-hosting as well!

Happy to answer any question and take suggestions as to what other software would be a good addition!

Grombobulous 21 minutes ago | parent

I’m curious, is there’s any issue with the original openstick repository being relatively untouched for 4 years now?

I notice that the links to the hardware in hackaday are broken but I imagine you could find this hardware somewhere.

Edit: I found the not-broken link in the blog that was linked in the hackaday article too if that helps anyone: https://extrowerk.com/2022-07-31/OpenStick.html

LaurensBER 13 minutes ago | parent

I haven't tried to compile the kernel myself but as far as I can see it's running a mainline 6.6 kernel, from 2024. I would not expect any issues when trying to update it to 7.3.

It might even be possible to replace the kernel in the image by the newest postmarketOS kernel to upgrade.

NortySpock 11 minutes ago | parent

Nice list, I'll have to try a few! I've been having fun squeezing things into a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) and a thin client acting as a server (16GB), there's something about passively cooled compute that feels "free"...

Possibly of note from my services list:

victoria-metrics : currently at 230 MB ram because I send it all kinds of metrics

victoria-logs : 114 MB ram -- log aggregator

vl-agent : 25 MB ram (log forwarder for above)

ntp : 2 MB ram

librespeed : 16 MB ram (LAN speed testing, useful for wifi / quick ethernet checks)

corentinth/it-tools : 5 MB ram

mqtt mosquitto : 5 MB ram (message broker)

smokeping : 52 MB ram (latency history)

https://github.com/apenwarr/blip : 2 MB (live DNS latency checker)

lighttpd : 2 MB (static web server serving a single homepage)

Grombobulous 12 minutes ago | parent

Another decent “the device was not originally intended for this” discount you can find for HomeLab devices is ChromeBox.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SHVWVaJAIHs