Read the linked article.
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!
Another decent “the device was not originally intended for this” discount you can find for HomeLab devices is ChromeBox.
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)
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
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.
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?
Years ago I grabbed an inordinate amount of used Chromeboxen on ebay (some Celeron, mostly i7, Haswell), flashed with MrChromeBox, upgraded SSD and RAM. Had double digit nodes in a local K8s. They aren’t going to run LLMs, but damn great at Homelab containers/services still.
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.
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
Anyone know where you can buy the hardware of this OpenStick like they did in the post?
I grabbed mine from AliExpress.
It can be a bit of a gamble (the sellers usually don’t specify the exact SOC on the description) but given the price you’re not taking that much of a risk.
Worst case scenario you end up with a backup 4G dongle.
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?
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.
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.
Oh I see, that sounds like a gamble. Another question if you don’t mind - were you worried about security at all? Like what if there’s something vulnerable (or worse, backdoored) in there?
It’s been a pretty good experience so far, the default security settings are extremely constrained but it has a “YOLO” mode which removes them.
I would recommend reading the docs first (they’re pretty good) and then enabling the security settings that make sense for your setup.
It’s pretty cool to be able to ask your agent over Telegram for a graph of the disk usage over the past week or to ask it to update a container image.
The NSA being able to see what you can do, is not an acceptable trade off.
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).
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?