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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If you have the spare cash, I found the N100 NAS motherboard to be a great source of occasional weekend projects, and now it very definitely looks like I’ve gone overboard.

    I started out just wanting a file server to store backups.then…

    • DHCP and NAT because my ISP would only allow one user.
    • DNS so I could refer to systems by name
    • pihole
    • mythtv/tvheadend so I could watch OTA tv & archive CDs & DVDs
    • hostapd for Wifi
    • homeassistant
    • immich
    • nextcloud
    • tandoor recipes
    • just added fastenhealth for medical records

    It didn’t feel like a lot, because it took years. Among the amazing things has been all the times I’ve been able to upgrade the motherboard by just plugging the HD into the new board. Started out just using old desktop boards; the N100 was the first purpose-bought board, and also the most complicated upgrade, because it added UEFI. There definitely are projects out there that don’t have an arm option, so something x86 is more flexible.


  • Pi 4 should be plenty to run Jellyfin, homeassistant, pihole and octoprint. Docker setup is pretty straightforward, and I can vouch that HA & pihole containers work great on RPi, if you want to leave the Jellyfin setup as-is and put the others alongside.

    If you’re looking for an excuse to expand, my vote is for an N100 type system. I got one with 4 ethernet ports, PCIe for a wifi card, couple of NVME slots, and a half dozen SATA ports for $100-150. That’s a huge step up in potential without much increase in power draw. With the right wifi card, you can even use it to replace your WAP/router.



  • The services you’ve mentioned are all pretty low compute impact, just bandwidth, so I’d expect your MBP to be fine. Transcoding for jellyfin is the only real wildcard, and that depends on your media and client setups. I run pihole, homeassistant, immich, and kodi on a raspberry pi 4 with plenty of overhead for more services. NAS is nice if your library outgrows a single disk and your storage bandwidth gets choked by USB multiplexing.

    My suggestion is to consider a cheap VPS and vanity domain for external access. Domains cheap as $5/year; fair VPSs cheap as $30/year. Use SSH to forward localhost ports on the VPS to container ports on the MBP, then nginx on thee VPS to reverse-proxy to those forwarded ports. You get unique names for every service, LetsEncrypt certificates, and an offsite location for critical backups. Make sure you are the one paying for VPS & DNS so they don’t get surprise-cancelled.




  • I switched from an I3-530, nominal TDP 73W, to an N-100, nominal TDP 7W, and power from the wall didn’t change at all. Even the i3 ran around 0.1 CPU load, except when transcoding, and I’m left with the impression that most of the power goes into HDDs, RAM, maybe fans, and PS losses. My sense is that the best way to decrease homelab power use is to minimize the number of devices. Start with your seyrver at 60W, add a WAP at 10-15W, maybe a switch at 10-15W… Not because of the CPUs, necessarily, but because every CPU every CPU comes with systems to keep the CPU going, keep the power regulated, etc.





  • My first server was a single-core Pentium - maybe even 486 - desktop I got from university surplus. That started a train of upgrading my server to the old desktop every 5-or-so years, which meant the server was typically 5-10 years old. The last system was pretty power-hungry, though, so the latest upgrade was an N100/16 GB/120 GB system SSD.

    I have hopes that the N100 will last 10 years, but I’m at the point where it wouldn’t be awful to add a low-cost, low-power computer to my tech upgrade cycle. Old hardware is definitely a great way to start a self-hosting journey.