What I run on my $10 USD OpenStick, Linux, Homelab(blog.bosscher.ch)
70 pointsby LaurensBERan hour ago7 comments
  • photon_collider3 minutes ago
    Really cool setup! This is the first time I’m hearing about ZeroClaw. I’ve been thinking adding something like this in my own homelab. How has it been for you?
  • LaurensBERan hour ago
    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!

    • NortySpockan hour ago
      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)

    • Grombobulousan hour ago
      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

      • LaurensBERan hour ago
        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.

  • dataflow13 minutes ago
    Anyone know where you can buy the hardware of this OpenStick like they did in the post?
    • LaurensBER5 minutes ago
      I grabbed mine from AliExpress.

      It can be a bit of a gamble (the sellers usually don't specify the exact SOC on the description) but given the price you're not taking that much of a risk.

      Worst case scenario you end up with a backup 4G dongle.

  • geoffbp40 minutes ago
    Cool!

    I guess you backup the configs to GitHub (or w/e) incase it stops working so you don’t have to start from scratch?

    • LaurensBER4 minutes ago
      I'm using restic to make a backup to Backblaze every night. I originally wanted to install everything with NixOS but the hardware is a bit too constrained for that.
  • rustyhancock26 minutes ago
    > I’m running my own fork, which can handle large blocklists in an efficient manner, but you probably shouldn’t run binaries provided by random strangers

    Give us the source code then lad

  • z3ratul16307134 minutes ago
    it's the right direction. my home lab started with my own mail server, git, file sync and few other things years ago served by a 2gb ram arm sbc.
  • Grombobulousan hour ago
    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

    • jprd38 minutes ago
      Years ago I grabbed an inordinate amount of used Chromeboxen on ebay (some Celeron, mostly i7, Haswell), flashed with MrChromeBox, upgraded SSD and RAM. Had double digit nodes in a local K8s. They aren't going to run LLMs, but damn great at Homelab containers/services still.