full image - Repost: What should I replace my old 2012 Mac mini with? It's my birthday tomorrow. (from Reddit.com, What should I replace my old 2012 Mac mini with? It's my birthday tomorrow.)
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My first post in this subreddit. It isn't exactly a "will it run Plex" post, but sort of? I'm kind of an old-school repurpose my old hardware kind of guy who majored in CS with an emphasis in networking like 30 years ago. I did run Plex for a minute about 15 years ago and pretty quickly switched to Emby because it gave me greater control of details. Jellyfin forked from that and I did try Jellyfin several years ago but at the time there were some Emby clients that I needed that didn't have very good equivalents for Jellyfin so I'm still on Emby. (I should probably try Jellyfin again because open source is a good thing. Emby did start that way....)Everything I run at home is a docker container. I've got 18 at the moment (but want to add two more soon). Since initially starting my Emby server I've added supporting containers (Radarr, Sonarr, Ombi, Qbittorrent, Sabnzbd, Jackett, Flaresolverr, etc.) and I've also gotten into home automation (Home Assistant, mosquitto, and zigbee2mqtt. I want to add Frigate.) I also run a gluetun container to create a VPN-fronted network that some of those containers use. And I use a traefik container (and related labels on the other containers) to allow some protected remote access to a few of the containers (including Emby). It also handles renewing server certificates with Let's Encrypt. I also self-host a website in a nginx container. I've recently learned React and am in the process of building a small portfolio of rather simple full-stack web apps that I could show to potential employers. (I'm between jobs at the moment.)The title is accurate, I do run it all on a 2012 Mac mini right now. I replaced the OS with Linux when I started using it as a server. Eventually I needed to max out the ram (16 GB). But now I'm pushing it too hard. At least one or two of my containers probably have memory leaks as well. I've scheduled it to reboot every night (and backup then upgrade every week) and that helps a little.I do have a Synology NAS and with Container Manager now fronting something very much like docker compose (maybe it is underneath) running containers on that is an option. However, I've resisted using my NAS that way because I really need the NAS to serve files well and I don't necessarily want to compromise that by giving it too much to do. Nevertheless, in the past year when my current Mac mini server started showing its age, I did offload sabnzbd to the Synology, and that's helped some.In case anyone is about to say I don't have to self-host all this stuff--that I should put at least some of it in one of the clouds, I'll say I know, and I have learned how to do that at work with AWS (and to a more limited extent with Azure). However, for the stuff I run at home, I consider this my hobby and I would like to keep self-hosting it on real hardware from my basement.For this server upgrade, I'm willing to spend *some* money on something new. But I'm still really frugal so looking for deals. Maybe there is or will be something good to be had on Black Friday? I know you homelab experts want to see some evidence that I've done some homework and what I'm thinking about. But I'm really pretty lost when it comes to hardware options. I think I want a NUC or something similar, but not necessarily Intel. But I just barely learned that acronym. In the past I've used Raspberry Pi's for a few things but they were first generation and I'm not really very current on what is available now in that space or if it would even be an option with everything I'm trying to run.Three of my containers have some hardware needs besides basic CPU, disk, and memory. Emby/Jellyfin does transcoding. It sometimes serves up to four streams simultaneously. So, something with a GPU might be helpful there to allow for hardware acceleration. (My current setup works OK for a couple simultaneous streams if they're x264 encoded, but will choke on anything encoded with x265.) Home Assistant uses a Zigbee USB stick to control my Zigbee mesh. Frigate, which I'm not running yet, can detect people or other objects from video streams and trigger alerts, etc. Currently this would be just for my Reolink doorbell stream but I might add a couple more external security cameras. I have read this would benefit more from a Google Coral TPU USB accelerator than anything else. You can buy the same thing for an M.2 slot so whatever I get will need at least USB, but maybe M.2 would be useful.TLDR;Looking for hardware recommendation to run ~30 containers. Needs 32 GB RAM (maybe upgradeable to 64). I want to install headless ubuntu server on it. Needs at least 2 USB ports. Maybe M.2 slot but could use a USB port for that. Let's say 2 ethernet ports, although in my current setup I only use one. It needs be capable of some on-the-fly video transcoding. Looking for small-ish form factor. I don't have a rack. Low power and quiet are plusses.Thank you to anyone who has bothered to read this far and is willing to make any recommendation after understanding what I'll be using it for!
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