What I run on my $10 USD OpenStick homelab

LaurensBER

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!

Grombobulous

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

geoffbp

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?

z3ratul163071

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.

rustyhancock

> 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

dataflow

Anyone know where you can buy the hardware of this OpenStick like they did in the post?

photon_collider

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?

amelius

Does anyone know of a 4G/5G LTE stick that has a decent Linux installation/user experience? And how do you find decently priced simcards that work in larger regions? My N=1 experience is bad, so far.

rcarmo

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.

hikemu

The NSA being able to see what you can do, is not an acceptable trade off.

TacticalCoder

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).

Qision

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?

drummojg

On my $10 USD OpenStick I run an automatic ATM machine.

jamienk

When I click the link it says $20 not $10

drnick1

Do you really needs graphs to know what's going on in your machine? I run a far more powerful home server on a what was once a gaming PC and just use top if I want to check the CPU load...

pteetor

A tip for anyone playing with tiny Linux boxes: Sys admin can be tedious. I run an AI agent on a bigger computer, I give that agent sudo access to the tiny machine, and I have the agent handle all the sys admin. I just say, "Install this. Configure that.", and it does the work. Makes my life easier! (Bonus: I instructed the agent to keep detailed records of all installations and decision, so sys config is fully documented.)

suprjami

> sends a message to my Telegram whenever one of my containers has an update available I use Podman auto update for this. It looks for updated images and automatically downloads them and restarts the container. Almost my entire self hosted setup is auto updating. A good feeling in this era of daily CVEs.

rbanffy

It’s more powerful than the RPi Zeros I use on my cluster - kind of same as a Zero 2. What I’d love to see is a stick that plugs into an Ethernet switch with PoE so you assemble a cluster just by literally plugging nodes to a cluster. For that to work, the best form factor would be a vertical board with a male Ethernet connector on one side so that it’d fit on the horizontal RJ45 on the switch and not be limited by the RJ45’s width.

Insimwytim

The installation process is a bit involved, but once you’re up and running it runs Debian Preinstalled? Can you install another distro on it?

dools

If anyone’s interested in have about 300 of these that I need to sell. They are all equipped with the board edition on which the SIM card works with the OpenStick, and come with the original IMEI/firmware. I also have factory software that flashes and restores them while preserving the IMEI by saving the firmware to GCS.