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points by LaurensBER 12 hours ago | 0 comments

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!

[–] NortySpock 11 hours 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)

[–] krautsauer 6 hours ago

https://github.com/openspeedtest/Speed-Test would be a speedtest that's static files only. (Though I'm not sure you'll find a lighttpd config. The nginx one is somewhat involved. https://github.com/openspeedtest/Nginx-Configuration/blob/f4... )

[–] rcarmo 10 hours ago

How much telemetry do you have in victoria-metrics? I've stuck to graphite but have been considering moving to it.

[–] NortySpock 7 hours ago

lol last time I crowed about VictoriaMetrics someone accused me of being a bot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48192183

But anyways, a fun test I ran was "load 4.5 million samples of Beijing hourly air quality data (ozone, S02, PM2.5, etc) from May 2013 to May 2017." (using Bento to turn the csv into json to fire at the API, with some batching and 4 http connections to Victoriametrics )

VictoriaMetrics accepts all of this in 54 seconds, network traffic shows between 9 and 14MB per second , and the data is available several seconds later (it's definitely a noticeable delay for me before it shows up in the VictoriaMetrics UI). Server is an old passively cooled thin client with a quad core AMD GX-415GA (circa 2013) and DDR3 ram.

So, 4.5M data points, 11 timeseries. Docker volume says it's under 14MB in size.

In my regular day-to-day telemetry (separate container) the volume is 99MB in size, it has 11,747 timeseries, 18,689 total samples, but I only keep a few days of data retention.

I think VictoriaMetrics is great, and I have found their documentation is extensive and easy to follow.

[–] polycancel 7 hours ago

Thanks for the write up. Are there any instruction to force the device to enter EDL mode?

I have used the wvthoog.nl instruction (here is the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20260220053304/https://wvthoog.n... )

I got it working and can ssh in, till I delete the hotspot connection following the instruction on the site:

nmcli connection delete hotspot

Now the device is bricked. Well I guess linux is running on it, but there is no way to get to it. Any tips? I have used the instruction on wvthoog.nl but they didn't work.

[–] msephton 5 hours ago

This is really cool. I enjoyed the way your post was written. I’m thinking FreshRSS would be a good candidate - it looks hideous - but acts as a fetcher/cache/proxy for RSS reader apps on your phone or computer, so that when they launch there’s no time consuming wait for feeds to refresh.

[–] Grombobulous 12 hours 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

[–] LaurensBER 11 hours 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.

[–] 40four 7 hours ago

I haven’t dug in too far, but I found this website that sparsely has a 1-click installer ready to go.

https://openstick.org/