this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
12 points (87.5% liked)

Selfhosted

40041 readers
722 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
12
What do folks think about these N5105s? (www.aliexpress.us)
submitted 1 year ago by damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is... delicious!

I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).

So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).

Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?

Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.

top 31 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] panja@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use an N5105 for my Opnsense firewall and run Adguard Home on it as well. Installing software on it was incredibly easy. Mine was barebones, had no OS, and it has an American Megatrends BIOS so it was as easy as selecting boot from USB.

I have no doubt it could run a small homelab. I have my Unraid running on a worse quad core gen 4 i5 processor (20+ docker images, 1 VM).

The only downside I would point out is that some of these things are passively cooled and put out some HEAT. It looks like yours has a fan so that's nice. Maybe another would be Plex transcoding.. depending on how many people you have on your Plex you maybe could run into some transcoding issues.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I only have myself and a family member. It's mostly local use, but I do tend to use on multiple platforms - tv, phone, tablet. So my current setup does get around to transcoding a lot. Thanks for telling me about your gen4 i5 running a bunch of docker containers :)

[–] manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have a J4125 driving an entertainment center fairly competently, was eyeing a N5105 as a personal device.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What all do you run on it? Does it support 4K streaming? Remote Plex users or just local for you?

[–] manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just local, streams 4k fairly OK but will studder sometimes, not enough to be a problem in general but if you want a perfect image full time you might be disappointed.

Its primarily a media player and runs 8 and 16 bit emulators. Haven't tried anything more ambitious yet. It streams content from my NAS just fine. I don't think multiple users would work on it for video streaming however others uses maybe.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the rundown. My other usecase is running a GitHub Runner and running some CI/CD or automations kind of work. Some data pipeline work, some npm builds. Right now that all runs on my main Windows PC that's also the media center and gaming PC. Overloaded that fella, so thinking of expanding the homelab to purpose-based machines.

[–] manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

this is the usecase i want a personal unit for. I have a Pi4 which I use mostly for Ci/CD and maint but sometimes there is just no way to easily get something to run on ARM and I'm firing up a 800watt PC or a 160watt laptop again.

IMO either of the Intel options we are discussing here will work well for you.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks! I think I'm gonna go for the N5105. I was looking at the spec diff between that and the N100 and though the N100 has more processing power, it seems the N5105 has better GPU for less price. Strange.

[–] manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's always those details. I want the gpu so I can do transcoding of new files. Is you don't need a gpu go for the 100

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

definitely considering transcoding as an option. Even if I use it for the github runner work, some of the data pipelines use puppeteer and Chrome, which needs a GPU for nicely rendering CSS. So I think the 5105 is the better bet... :)

[–] atomicpeach@pawb.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I use a similar one of these (different io panel and case) for OPNSense and it's been a delight. Not sure how well it would handle Plex but if you don't need to transcode the files it should be fine. I bought one without ram, os, and storage for $150 last year. That listing isn't available anymore.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You bought it from Aliexpress too?

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You bought it from Aliexpress too?

[–] atomicpeach@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, the seller was Topton Computer Store. No complaints from me on the purchase/process!

[–] iMeddles@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I run Plex on essentially one of these (different case, but n5105/8gb ram, bought from AliExpress) and they're great little machines for it. Most of my library is 1080p, but I have run 2 simultaneous 4k transcodes before and it just keeps chugging along happily. I'm actually running proxmox on it, with Plex being just one container out of several, so it also has the grunt to do several simultainious streams and keep my mastodon server, torrent box, pihole, and a few other things running at the same time. In my experience, you'll run out of ram before ever chocking the CPU on a standard setup, so it might be worth upping to the n100 to get 16gs instead.

It wouldn't be any cheaper for them to ship without windows, because the windows os youre getting from aliexpress sellers selling budget pcs is almost always counterfeit :p but installing Linux on them is a breeze, they've got a full standard uefi BIOS, so just plug a USB stick with Ubuntu on it in, and install as usual.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

damn! Thanks for the LD. Did not expect you to say the Win will be fake :D But good to know about the RAM situation. I mentioned this elsewhere that the 5105 seems to do better GPU than the N100. So if some other seller has a 5105 with 16 GB RAM, I'll go for that instead. Man I wanna play with proxmox. Just never had an idle machine to do that. Maybe this will be it.

[–] iMeddles@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Getting proxmox to pass the GPU through to containers is a little fiddly, but it got a lot easier since they moved to the 6.x kernel, and there's plenty of guides around. It could well be worth a look if you want to run multiple servers on one device

As for the GPU, they're unlikely to make a huge difference either way, but note that the n5105 has no hardware support for the AV1 codec, so any media you have or end up with in that format will need decoding on the CPU. The n100 igpu has hardware decode instead, so if you think you might end up with any av1 content, then that's the way to go.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How about proxmox running GitHub runners? Maybe it can run a few containers, each running an independent GitHub runner which can pick up different tasks in parallel?

AV1 content... I don't think I have need for it. But maybe I'm wrong? I have an Apple TV and iOS devices running Plex apps. Do those need AV1 now?

[–] iMeddles@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AV1 isn't needed yet, because its only really being used for live streaming like youtube gaming at the moment (Plex itself only started supporting AV1 in December). That might change in the next few years, depending on if the scene picks it up as a technology, its just a case of whether you want to future proof yourself. Of course, given how cheap these mini pcs are, you might be as well sticking with the N5105 now, and then picking up an N100 (or even whatever it's successor is) in a few years time. If you do end up running proxmox, you can always cluster them together, so you can keep using the old one alongside the new one. (Because they're so cheap, I actually have three of them in a little cluster, so I can patch and reboot each proxmox server without downtime to my plex server)

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

That’s brilliant clustering!! And yeah, I suspect not setup will work for a few years before needing whatever is the latest mini pc 😊

[–] fixmycode@feddit.cl 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I bought a N5100 from AliExpress and I use it to run my -arr apps and Plex, and so far it has behaved really good. It's fanless in an all-metal case and it gets a bit hot, but nothing you wouldn't put your hand over. Weirdly, before I installed Debian in it, the BIOS and UEFI console made the CPU so hot I was worried it would not work without a fan, but after the OS took over, it's working without any issue. I installed 16gb of ram in it and two SSDs, and the power consumption is so low I'm really amazed.

Edit: I might add, I bought it barebones, so I missed the W11 license, but I was never planning to use it anyway.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Wait, how did Debian fix the bios??

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wait, how did Debian fix the bios??

[–] synestine@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

It probably didn't. What's probably happening is that when Debian starts, it loads power management, while being in the BIOS/UEFI still has everything at max.

[–] fixmycode@feddit.cl 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I believe that the OS puts the CPU in a different state, that's all. while the BIOS and the UEFI shell had it boosting all the time or something like that

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The link points to the J4125 priced at USD99. I'm thinking of the second one - 8GB/256GB N5105. Or maybe even the N100, since it has more RAM on it.

load more comments
view more: next ›