!Selfhosted Anyone else using Mac minis as VM hosts for self hosting? My Friendica server is a Linux VM on a Mac Mini in my living room. The VM is bound to a VLAN tagged network interface so it’s completely firewalled off from the rest of my network. Also got a second Linux VM on the same box for hosting local stuff on my main VLAN (HomeBridge/etc).
I feel like they’re really nice platforms for this, if not the cheapest. Cheaper than one might think though; I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast.
BornDeranged
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I did think about this, but finally abandoned the idea for 3 reasons:
1. Not much choice of hardware
2. Unlikely to come across old hardware of that type to repurpose
3. Much harder to move workloads from/to the cloud if necessary.
That being said, if I had a spare Mac mini I would probably have tried 🤓
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Sarah Brown
in reply to BornDeranged • •nublug likes this.
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in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Aniki 🌱🌿 likes this.
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in reply to BornDeranged • •nublug likes this.
Skunk
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I want to do something like this
to replace my huge ass dual xenon and have less noise and electricity consumption.
I’m looking for a refurbished M1 Mac mini with 10Gbe but still out of luck.
Why the M1 and not M2 or 3 ? Price of course but also because Asahi Linux will work perfectly on M1 before the new chips.
Asahi Linux
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Sarah Brown
in reply to Skunk • •@Skunk Nice. I’m happy with the M2 running MacOS and just spinning up Linux VMs in UTM as needed. It seems to handle them without breaking a sweat and, for self hosted stuff, having the VM bridged to a VLAN tagged interface gives me that extra reassurance without having to have the whole machine on that interface.
If the baddies compromise the Friendica server, I can just Remote Desktop into the Mac and nuke the VM. Bye bye.
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Skunk
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Yup it's probably what I'll end up doing if I can't find my refurbished M1 (and I already own an M2 mostly used to fly long hauls flights on Xplane 12).
But I'll wait till they launch the mini M3 to see what becomes available on the second hand market, then simply VM until Asahi Linux is mature enough.
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TCB13
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •How come? Second hand HP Mini should be cheaper...
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Sarah Brown
in reply to TCB13 • •deleted
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I believe NUCs are more expensive than mini pcs and less bang for buck.
Check out intel i5 9th gen. You can get one with hdd for ~$250. Some of them support m2.
Sarah Brown
in reply to deleted • •@deleted I couldn’t find one with equivalent performance to the M2 for less money.
I am not purchasing in dollars.
Decronym
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #327 for this sub, first seen 2nd Dec 2023, 12:35]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Decronym: A simple Reddit bot
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Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •like this
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bighatchester
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •mesamune
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I happened to have one. It's a decent little machine. They don't seem to die.
However for hosting, I wouldn't use them. Spec wise they kinda suck.
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Skwiggs
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I've been thinking more and more about getting a Mac Mini specifically for this as well. They're silent, not too power hungry and more than powerful enough, and I would just love scripting in Swift on there 😆 (but maybe that's just me).
How long have you had it setup like this? And what's your experience been so far?
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Sarah Brown
in reply to Skwiggs • •@Skwiggs Few months. I was using an old laptop with Debian before but Friendica was cooking it, literally.
The M2 Mini doesn’t break a sweat. It just takes the load and gets on with it.
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appel
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •like this
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ninjan
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •"I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast."
You must be putting a lot of stock in the CPU and 10G Ethernet. Because the pricing on storage and RAM, which are much more important resources in most self-hosting scenarios, differ an extreme amount since you can't upgrade the RAM in the M-chip Minis. They also cap out at 32 GB which isn't bad but half of what say AM4 can do. Power Efficiency is of course also great on the M-series chips which is worth something.
If we're purely talking Intel NUCs then the i7s and i9s do get expensive but so does the M2 pro. M2 is absolutely faster than i5 and i3 but I can't really imagine a use case where that would matter for self-hosting?
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Sarah Brown
in reply to ninjan • •Judicus doesn't like this.
tvcvt
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Aniki 🌱🌿 As I said, I did the comparisons fully expecting to get a NUC. The Mac was cheaper at the performance point.
As for US prices, not especially relevant to me. Import taxes are a thing.
sfcl33t
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Arcanum likes this.