random resource - lots of options. look up *ARR stacks

github.com/Rick45/quick-arr-Stack

LLMs

dont bother unless youre shelling out for a big ol gpu etc

You can run stuff on a little GPU, IGPU, or even just a CPU. You’ll be limited by RAM/VRAM, and obviously it’ll be slower, but it’ll work.

I have a server that I wanted to do this with, and cpu-only interference was several minutes for pretty simple tasks (all text, couple of sentences). I shelled out the cash for a 5060 Ti 16GB earlier this summer, and even with a pcie 3 x16 slot running at x4, I’m down to 5-30 second responses and rapid output speeds, even with large conversations. But the initial prompt/loading is still a couple of minutes by itself, so I leave the model in vram always.

Or you can go straight to the source and use the Trash Guides

Like all projects, you should think about needs, budget, and time. You’ve got a good list of what you want to run which is a good start. Budget is next, particularly considering the price of hardware these days.

FWIW, I run Jellyfin, Navidrome, the entire arr stack, Forgejo, Paperless, mealio, and Immich on a NAS with 24GB RAM and have never needed more. 8GB would have been a bit tight but probably doable. 16 will be plenty for you.

Anything slightly better than a potato will run all of that except the llm’s. To have a useful llm you need to spend circa £1k on a GPU and even then it won’t come close to Claude or chatgpt. Skip the llm’s for now. Just get yourself a solid little server to do everything else you need. Add dedicated hardware specifically for llm’s in future if you really want to. An old used gaming pc will be plenty for your server. I personally use Debian , but there are loads of suitable options available

Thanks. It sounds like the AI stuff will push my budget over what I’m comfortable with and everything else I want will run well under.

Distro matters less as your skill increases, but if you’re new, mint is the way to go.

I run jellyfin on my PC and I have a 9070xt that can handle llms.

Learn how to use docker, it makes jellyfin much easier. But you’ll have some trials setting up a domain and https certs and doing port forwarding etc FYI.

I vaguely understand what docker is. I’ve tried to set it up on my Mac and had no luck getting it going. My understanding is that if you want to move your jellyfin install to another machine, it’s easy to just grab the whole container rather than hunting down jellyfin’s settings spread throughout the disk. I’ve moved a Plex installation and it’s not fun. It’s not hard but it’s not fun. So yes, it would be beneficial to be able to just move a container from machine to machine if need be.

I’m not new, but I shouldn’t consider myself any more advanced than a new/beginner level user. I remember liking Red Hat back when that was a home user distro. I didn’t much like Fedora. I have used Mint and I like it well enough. I also like Ubuntu. Heard good things about one called Cachy.

kubernetes makes it easier again, but with more trials, i spent hours figuring out DNS

You can run an LLM, but it will be limited. Look into Open Vino Model Server.

I’d recommend a minimal install distro (Ubuntu server, Arch, Gentoo, etc…), then add the things you need from there.

Document every step. <— important

@cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com this is the very important bit:

Document every step. <— important

Whatever you do will make sense for about a day, you’ll have a rough idea of what you did the following weekend, after that… all gone.

And, whatever you do won’t be right first time, so you will be editing those notes - all part of the journey

Thanks. I took note the first time I read that, but I appreciate the emphasis.

Not llamacpp?

OVMS + a model that was built for it is far more responsive than llamacpp.

Strongly recommend looking into Proxmox hypervisor as your base OS. Then install as many Linux VMs/LXCs as you like, with backups/snapshots all taken care for you. I’m on an Intel 8th gen CPU and have 3-4 VMs running, including Jellyfin, Home Assistant OS, an assortment of random docker images and a dedicated headless Debian VM for various AI projects. The CPU is more than enough, your 12th gen target will breeze through it. Get more RAM than you think you need - it will become the bottleneck for what you can do, not your CPU. I’m running 64GB and don’t regret it!

For video encoding/decoding like Jellyfin/Frigate, make sure you stick with Intel CPU for hardware codec support via QuickSync, otherwise you’ll need to add a GPU.

Yeah, I wasn’t targeting Intel specifically, that’s just what most/all the refurbished SFF PCs I’ve looked at have been running, and I know Intel is good for HEVC transcoding.

16GB ram is plenty for everything but getting into LLM’s.
If you do that then more is always better… 32GB plus a 6-8GB GPU would be a basic setup for qwen 35b-a3b for example

Deleted

Wonder what this bot is farming for

What make you ask that?

lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/75533109

You think it’s a not? I read that other post as a person with too much faith in an LLM, but a person.

If I was looking for content for a blog or a video, would it be such a bad thing? Getting a lot of good information. Not sure what’s wrong with that.

It’s disingenuous. People think they’re responding to someone’s need/curiousity and in fact they’re being farmed for content by an AI-generated post.

Fair. But, in your/their world, how does one seek the information? If they aren’t allowed to ask, should they then just ask AI, or read an article otherwise written from Reddit/forum posts?

To ask it another way: How do you justify a person being curious and asking in good faith if an AI could just farm the post later? I think, but I’m not sure, that Lemmy has some kinds of safeguards against that? I know with Reddit it was wide open. I used it for the better part of a decade, wrote long-winded posts full of information; I know AI was trained in part based on my posts (among millions of others).

For distro I’d recommend God’s Chosen Stock Debian. You want prioritize smooth upgrade paths from one major version to another since the server should last a long ass time, and Debian is that. Debian has the eyes on it to make it chill and if there are things to do they’re caught and noted (and more often something is set up to just do it for you).

So no, distro doesn’t matter as long as you can get your software going. But you’re not going to beat the insane stability of Debian. Any OS based on it is just an echo, which may even involve custom kernels which add more work for the specific distro maintainers and may slow critical security updates.

I run no GUI but you can def have one. I just SSH in. I do everything in containers (Docker 1st and I’m moving to Podman - but Podman is too heavy a lift to start, Docker compose files are always right there, use em) and LXC containers run by Incus (it has a web gui as well!).

I’ve been looking at “games on whales” https://games-on-whales.github.io/ to stream games from a beefy server to weaker computers and tablets. Might be a good route for your games without having to directly game on the server.

I have a 4 core 7th gen Intel CPU and it seems fine with doing x265 transcoding on multiple streams, but I’ve never tried finding out how many 4K ones it can do at once. I have 32 GB of RAM (I bought cheapo laptop RAM before the true AI shitshow, praise be, stuck them in with a DIMM board cooked up by China). I had 16 before that, and it was fine. But I just kept adding services.

An LLM will eat your RAM, you’d want 32 GB to be able to run a 16 GB one. But a GPU will be much, much faster. LLMs are just matrix math - that’s why they’ll never be able to think for real - and GPUs are sicko good at that kinda math (cause screens are a matrix!). I don’t fuck with LLMs though, no ethics in that whole shitshow.

Good luck!

I second debian!

I initially had some trouble getting streamed games to use the integrated gpu while the server was headless. I’ve heard you can use a dummy plug into one of the hdmi ports, but I found that using “xrdp” as the remote desktop client works as well. I hope sharing this might save you the hassle evetually.

I third Debian. I was a Ubuntu server fanboy for the longest time. I kept getting scared by “but it uses old packages” message about Debian. But it’s way overblown. Also, if you are using Docker for hosting your services, system packages don’t matter.

Thanks. The more I see, the more I realise I should just leave the AI stuff out. AI and gaming were outlier possibilities anyway, though I’m way more interested in gaming than AI. Right there with you on AI ethics. I don’t like seeing them steal art and rip off artists, but they can be good at tracking down solutions on various forums. At least, they do it faster. But it sounds like running one might be outside my budget, so I’m more interested in running services, and light/classic gaming, since I have an Xbox (Series X).

I’m running a simple COMAI instance on my desktop that recommends linux commands and does limited chat. it was easy. It spins the processor up to 50% to give a response and takes a couple of seconds depending on complexity. I run the other stuff on a dedicated server, but with nginx proxy manager, I can send the COMAI instance to a page on my domain even though it is on a different computer on my LAN.

something that can push at least 2-3 4K streams.

12th gen i5 with 16GB DDR4. Maybe 32GB if I can swing it.

unless you’re transcoding each stream that should work, at least for Plex.

Currently running 10th gen i5 with 32gb of DDR and can run one 4k transcode, five 1080 streams, and four live TV streams. though, the transcode is laggy but if you pause and let it buffer it should work.

keep in mind I’m also running headless transmission, a VPN, tor, and like 8 other services on the same server.

if all you’re streaming is 4k, you will hit a point of diminishing returns on network throughput. I’d recommend getting a switch with SFPs and connect your server up to a 2.5gbe or even a 10gbe (though overkill but the sky is the limit). as long as all your stream boxes are connected through that switch on their regular 1gbe they should be fine.

personally I run a opnsense router/firewall and have everything passed through an unlocked Brocade ICX6610-48P-E. you can find them on eBay. FYI, these are commercial units and are VERY LOUD. basement or attic installation is a must if you don’t have a network closet. bonus, the ICX6610 allows you to turn on/off POE per port and even set the voltage. this means you can power everything from cameras, stream boxes, wireless APs, to even some POE lights. it’s also a managed switch, which means you can split your ports up on VLANs and other really neat things.

Hi there ! If your i5 gen10 can only handle one 4k transcode, you might want to double check if your hardware acceleration parameters are correctly set ^^

My home server runs on a small Intel N100, a 4k transcode eats up 30% of the CPU at most. I checked, it can transcode 3 streams without any lag, up to 4 transcodings if nothing else is eating the cpu. I’m not using Plex though, I got Jellyfin. I don’t know how Plex handles things.

my i5 doesn’t have a built in graphics core. it’s just a CPU. this means hardware acceleration for video encoding is intensive.

like I said before too, there are other services that are running on the server as well. things like siem, aggregators, containerized desktops, etc.

thanks for the info though! if I ever upgrade the CPU in the future I’ll definitely get one with a GPU for hardware acceleration.

Oh OK! This makes sense then :)

Just one thing that could be easy to forget. Power usage. Cost adds up as the hours and days pass :)

With unprecedented temps in excess of 106 F, running a couple of old lenovo desktops is nothing compared to my AC bill.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DNS Domain Name Service/System IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage PSU Power Supply Unit Plex Brand of media server package PoE Power over Ethernet SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network nginx Popular HTTP server

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12th Gen is definitively neat, but overkill for what you are doing. 8th or 9th gen is fine. 16gigs is fine, 8gig would also work

I really like the Lenovo m720q line of mini pcs (used/refurb) but they will not fit an hdd.

/edit: I mean an 3,5” HDD. They will fit one 2,5” HDD fine.

Deleted

No you are right, the m720q will fit an 2.5” and also m.2 drives.

Sorry, what I meant is that they will not fit 3,5” hdds, let alone multiple ones.

Deleted

my i7 3700k with 8gb of ddr3 handles multiple 4k streams just fine. it doesn’t transcode on the fly super well, I transcode everything to hevc before putting it on the server. it will happily transcode a single 4k stream in the rare case a client doesn’t want hevc.

point is, don’t target latest gen simply because it’s latest. 12th gen is definitely newer than I’d opt for, and while 16gb is cool, 32 is absolutely overkill for the use cases you listed (other than the llm, which others properly list as “don’t worry about it unless you have 3k in your back pocket to shell on gpus”)

I’d always recommend not spending any money until you know what you really want and even then use any spares/old stuff you already have. The first build should be a true “budget build” :D

What I have is a Mac mini (M2 Pro, 16GB RAM) and a MacBook Air (M2 base, 16GB RAM). The desktop (the mini) would be absolutely overkill, but I don’t want it doing a bunch of stuff when my wife and I are trying to actively use it as a server.

The last Intel box I had shit the bed and I no longer have it. I had a 4th gen Xeon (1231-v3) with 16GB DDR4 and a 3GB Radeon 280. If I still had that tower, I’d start with that for sure.

The cheapest PCs are ones that didn’t make the cut for Windows 11, so I’d look for 6th or 7th Gen. RAM is cheaper as well. Then you can build something cheap, and iterate from there.

For a beginner, check out Unraid. It’ll do 99% of what you want without being a hassle.

Check out refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad TinyPCs. Small, quiet and durable.

Didn’t see it mentioned, but would recommend openmediavault. It runs on headless debian and is very stable.

+1

I’ve used OMV for a few years now. It’s relatively straight forward to just get working with plenty of options for more granular control. The documentation, in my experience, has also been quite good.

It isn’t nearly as much fun a building a dedicated server, (or what I like to do – repurpose old junk) but the services you mentioned will run just fine on a decent desktop or laptop, especially if you aren’t doing some hungry task while they are running. -1 for Plex. +1 for Jellyfin. You can run them all on your LAN and access them around the house by the machine’s LAN IP and the services’ port number. You can do the same thing if you have tailscale on your phone or other remote computer, just use the tailscale IP and the service’s port. You can use Nginx Proxy Manager to send your services through a cloudflared tunnel to a hostname you buy, and keep access limited to just yourself and a select few (FYI I hear Cloudflared doesn’t like a lot of video streaming, so don’t give access to too many folks).

Jellyfin will run on a windows machine without screwing with docker, and will host your music too, though the UI isn’t great.

You can use a simple fileserver on windows to host other stuff like pics.

Just start somewhere and you’ll be neck-deep before you know it. You can use

I’ve used OMV for a few years now. It’s relatively straight forward to just get working with plenty of options for more granular control. The documentation, in my experience, has also been quite good.