Ohhh for sure, but if you just wanted to try using HA on a PC, the old PC can make a good testbed.
If you want really low power consumption/heat generation, there are plenty of ARM machines that are not based on SD cards, and run fast and quiet.
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I have recently moved to the Intel NUC7PJYH J5005 NUC. Quad Core Pentium, WiFi and Bluetooth built in, SFF, x4 USB and SD card reader. The CPU has a TDP of 10w and performance of old legendary Q6600.
It is very cost effective for what it can do. I picked up an brand new one, 8gb 2133mHz RAM, and a 120gb SSD for $400 AUD.
Installed Ubuntu (officially supported on this model), and run HA, Motioneye, Unifi, MQTT, TasmoAdmin and Syncthing all in a Docker stack. Doesn’t skip a beat and is very quick for reboots, etc.
Can highly recommend.
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That one’s a dual core Celeron CPU, vs the Quad Core Pentium J5005. If you don’t plan on doing much with it now, or in the future, dual core will be more than ample.
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Yeah mine is dual core but 7 series… it’s not much dearer than the 5 series…
Not to be too much of a smartarse but Docker wont start?
I also watched a youtube video comparing Debian and Ubuntu and Ubuntu came out on top even though the poster admitted doing a distribution upgrade on Ubuntu had totally trashed his setup on 3 seperate occasions!! Lol. That was it for me.
Anyway, it is a fact that Intel only officially supports Ubuntu… no idea why and no issues at all with Debian. No issues with doing a distribution upgrade either.
But it will run fine whatever you choose I’m sure…
I’m confused…?
Do you have any examples? Would be interested to have multiple options to throw at Mrs.Coedy if/when I play the “save money & space” card in future.
I am also considering a small footprint Dell/Acer desktop they do quite a lot that are around shoebox sized and easy enough to get from refurbishers after Office clearances.
I’m sure Ubuntu will be ok, though I’ve been bit by dist upgrade issues and migrated most vm’s to Debian and CentOS. Maybe the assumption is that Debian is compatible by default since Ubuntu is based on it. Who knows.
My only frustration with Debian is having to backport to get newer packages. (or build from source as a last resort)
This site is good if you want to follow small/embedded systems https://www.cnx-software.com
Also take a look at the Khadas VIM. Or the machines, or the devices from hardkernel, eg https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4-special-price/
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Yes I found I had to use backports to get Cockpit running. Yeah that was a pain but pretty easy. I haven’t needed to do that for everything else because docker.
That to me is a show stopper particularly when it is avoidable by using a more stable distro.
Yes that’s why my server (not the ha one) still runs 12.04.
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Nobody forced them to update. It’s supported for several years. There really isn’t any reason to update except new shiny.
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That’s true unless you need a new version of Python for example… I also like to stay up-to-date.
Sorry to bring this up again, but would you mind tell me which ‘flavour’ of Ubuntu you used? Desktop, Server, Cloud or Core? I seems Core is apparently geared towards NUCs / headless installs, is that the one I should be using for hassio / docker?
I personally didn’t experience stability issues.
I used a cheap “ADATA” SD-Card that came with a old tablet that I had and it lasted 8 months before giving up and not booting, probably because the database writes every second to it, trashing it slowly. (You can disable it if you want, but I want those sweet graphs)
I now bought a cheap 16GB SanDisk SD Card from a local store near my house and its going strong for almost 3 months now.
I’ll look for a alternative storage for the database later, meanwhile I’ll buy new SD Cards once in a while. Just backup regularly and there’s no problem (Learned that in a hard way first time).
EDIT: I must add that at boot it’s sometimes unreliable and won’t load HA, but loads the plugins, probably because it can’t connect to some container or stuff like that. I solve it by restaring my router and my RPi, then it boots. Once it boots, there’s no issues.
if you have to reboot your router for ANYTHING, you have a problem
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Just HA gives that trouble. The router is running OpenWRT and has never crashed.
It’s quite simple: Everything still works, but HA doesn’t boot up, so I have to restart the router and HA in order for it to boot up.
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This indicates a serious problem. Again, you should NEVER have to reboot your router unless you have a firmware update.