I currently have a server, a Dell T310 with an SSD in it and 12Gig of ram (weird config, I know I messed up but it works fine so I can’t be bothered to change that for now), with all my dockers running in it.
It runs mostly fine, with Debian 11, a VPN so that I can block public ssh and allow it only on the VPN network, an nginx proxy to have services like a forgejo and a music library (ampache).
However it can’t run a Minecraft server with more than a single person on it without stuttering ; so I was considering changing it maybe next year, after more than 3 years of services, for something beefier but also consuming less W/h (current consumption is 80W), and since I already have a Mac for work I was wondering how suitable a Mac Mini M1/M2 would be for a homelab?
Does anyone have such a configuration and how does it work for you? Any hurdle that you should be aware of?
Got an M2 mini and at first had it running with MacOS and k3s (mini kubernetes). What annoyed me a bit was that if you restart you need to login to get kubernetes/docker starting up again. Also you cannot start docker desktop from cli, but need GUI access via apple remote desktop. You could remove the login but then your setup is completely unsecured against local access. After waiting a bit asahi linux supported the M2 mini and I gave it a try. It’s a fedora linux, which I’m not super familiar with, but installing it was quite smooth and installing k3s was also easy and I’m only really using the server via ssh tunnel port forwarding and kubectl which is fine for me. It even uses less watt in this config what I remember after measuring. Restarting also starts k3s without login as with any linux. So quite happy with this config.