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!
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
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.
Sorry if my question sound naive but would it make sense to connect the dongle to internet over wifi instead of 4G?
Reading the doc I had the impression that the wifi chip only serves as a hotspot, but what if I want to connect the dongle to my home wifi and use it as a home server, does it make any sense?
Fusion is quite interesting. I forked miniflux into https://github.com/rcarmo/picoflux because I wanted something lighter, but I like Fusion's screenshots better than the mini/picoflux web UI, so I will be looking at that ASAP.
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.
Oh I see, that sounds like a gamble. Another question if you don't mind - were you worried about security at all? Like what if there's something vulnerable (or worse, backdoored) in there?
> 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
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?
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.
It's really cool and I do have a Pi in "homeprod" since the Debian 9 days (!): my trusty unbound DNS resolver.
For anyone who wants a way more beefy homelab but still at a bargain price, I think it's hard to beat used Xeon workstations. Buy one with a 4-cores Xeon and then replace it with a 20-cores / 40 threads.
It'll run a ZFS tank and shitloads of VMs without any issue: it's made for that.
I didn't pay it $10, more like $200.
I only turn my Xeon server on when I need it (hence the 24/7 Pi running unbound: that one is up all the time and consumes nothing).
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.
Happy to answer any question and take suggestions as to what other software would be a good addition!
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)
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
It might even be possible to replace the kernel in the image by the newest postmarketOS kernel to upgrade.
Reading the doc I had the impression that the wifi chip only serves as a hotspot, but what if I want to connect the dongle to my home wifi and use it as a home server, does it make any sense?
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.
And how do you find decently priced simcards that work in larger regions?
My N=1 experience is bad, so far.
Give us the source code then lad
Here you go!
I would recommend reading the docs first (they're pretty good) and then enabling the security settings that make sense for your setup.
It's pretty cool to be able to ask your agent over Telegram for a graph of the disk usage over the past week or to ask it to update a container image.
I guess you backup the configs to GitHub (or w/e) incase it stops working so you don’t have to start from scratch?
For anyone who wants a way more beefy homelab but still at a bargain price, I think it's hard to beat used Xeon workstations. Buy one with a 4-cores Xeon and then replace it with a 20-cores / 40 threads.
It'll run a ZFS tank and shitloads of VMs without any issue: it's made for that.
I didn't pay it $10, more like $200.
I only turn my Xeon server on when I need it (hence the 24/7 Pi running unbound: that one is up all the time and consumes nothing).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SHVWVaJAIHs