As I mentioned in my intro page – I had, for a few years, been running my self-hosted systems on a Raspberry-Pi.
The Pi’s are wonderful bits of kit – relatively inexpensive, low powered, and extremely capable, and whilst I have deprovisioned the one I used for my docker containers, I will still be running three others in my network – one for my aircraft tracker service, one for my Pi-hole DNS sinkhole, and my Pi-400 for when I just want to tinker.
If you want to learn about how to set-up and configure the Pi-hole – I wrote a series of blogs a couple of years ago – you can find those on my 365 days of blogs posts here. I’ll explain about the aircraft tracker on Part 3 of this series.
The Pi I initially used to run my containers on was an old Pi 2 model B, but then I moved to a Pi 5. The Pi 5 will eventually become my aircraft tracker which is currently running on my Pi-400, and I’m not sure what I use the Pi2 for (yet), but there’s lots of projects I could use it for.
For now though – let me turn to the hardware I’m now using for my docker containers.
The Mini PC I purchased is an AMD Ryzen 7 5825U Mini PC–NucBox M5 plus.
This is an absolutely fantastic bit of kit, and certainly powerful enough to run as many containers I’ll ever want to – Reviews show that it’s a capable machine to run as a daily Windows machine, but I bought it to run Ubuntu and docker containers, so most of its features I’ll most likely never use.
The spec for the PC is below:
- 4.5GHz 8 core, 16 thread Ryzen 7 8525U CPU
- 1TB SSD – PCIe 3.0
- 32GB DDR4 Dual Channel
- 1x USB-C
- 2x USB 3.2
- 2x USB 2.0
- 1x HDMI
- 1x Display Port
- 2x Ethernet
- WiFi 6E
- Bluetooth 5.2
- Windows 11 pre-installed
You can purchase this PC in various places, but I’d recommend going direct to the US site as it’s the cheapest option by far – Below are the prices at the time of writing:
- Amazon: £429.95
- GMTktec EU site: €319.99 (£272.45)
- GMTek US site: $319.99 (£235.83)
For storage, I have attached 2x Seagate 6TB external hard drives – one of these drives I’ve had for a while as external storage on one of my Windows PC’s, the other I bought specifically for this project. More about these drives later!
As mentioned, when I bought the PC, it came with Windows 11 pre-installed, but I re-formatted the drive and installed Ubuntu-Server instead – mainly because I like tinkering with Linux, but also because I need to learn more about Linux Admin for my day job, so it serves dual purpose.
Its perfectly fine to keep Windows on the machine, and use Docker Desktop for managing your containers, but I want to use cmd-line as much as possible to build up my Linux-fu!
When installing Ubuntu Server, I enabled SSH so that I don’t have to permanently attach a monitor, keyboard, or mouse – although I did use all 3 when initially formatting the machine, and installing the new operating system. With the new OS, I simply open a terminal on my main PC and connect to the server via the SSH connection.
So, now we have the hardware, lets look at Part 2 – Docker.