I have a little home lab that’s been running well for about 5 years on the current hardware, and another 5 years before that on older stuff.
I also have a separate computer running 24/7 for Frigate, which is IP camera software for motion and object detection, recording, etc.
All in all it uses about 200 watts continuously. I’m sure a good chunk of that is the 8 HDDs, but I decided it was time to upgrade so I could cut it down to a single computer that does everything using a low power (but still performant) CPU.
I did a bunch of research and found what I wanted at MicroCenter and picked it up yesterday.
I wanted some specific things and it was hard digging through the specs on everything, but I think I ended up with some great stuff.
Today I’ll back up all the software, install the new hardware, and restore the backups. It’ll take some more work to transfer the frigate stuff to the new machine, but maybe I’ll tackle that today, too.
Don’t worry, though, because Lemmy runs on a remote server, so my high jinks won’t affect it!
Nice Project. I frequently read about self hosting and do it yourself type media servers but have yet to apply any time to doing anything about it.
Thank you for the work you put in to this community!
Very cool. Do you have a way to monitor your cameras remotely from your phone? I’m using commercial cameras and a phone app for this only because I was too lazy to do research on open source solutions.
Yessir, it’s fun to check on the baby at night when I’m away working 💞.
I have a domain name which gets directed to my houses IP address, and from there I have Nginx Proxy Manager to control security etc. It took me a while to wrap my head around how that stuff works because I’m just a hobbyist, but now I’m an old pro at it.
In the future I’d like to add a hop through cloudflare to hide my houses IP address from whoever is interested in that, which is probably nobody. I have to research how to set that up, but it’s probably pretty easy.
Anyway, my homebrew solution is much more complicated than any commercial product out there, which is why there’s a market for that stuff!
The main reason that I keep with the commercial stuff atm is notifications. I’m sure there’s a way for a diy motion-triggered camera system to notify my phone of a new recording. I just haven’t been up for the configuration hassle.
I have received today a manual of the Akkadian language, and I’m very excited to start learning. I fashioned a chopstick into a stylus, and started practicing cuneiform writing on Play-Doh. It’s not an ideal substitute for clay because it’s slightly elastic, and the imprinted signs fade, but it’s much cleaner than dealing with clay.