ThinkCentre m93 as a home server for Home Assistant

[GameRetro]

Hi, I just ordered a ThinkCentre m93 tiny form factor PC. From the spec sheet it comes with a 500 GB HDD, 4th gen. i5, 4 GB of ram. I already have an extra 4GB ram stick so will be upgrading the ram to 8GB.

 

The plan is to use it as a general and all purpose home server. The equipment I have currently is Cat5e LAN to every room (multiple cables), a 24 port switch, a few patch panels, a 12U wall mountable rack, two Mi AX 1800 wifi routers chained together (I think it's bridge mode) one as the main router the other as an AP for the other floor, and a 4 port LAN relay that I can control via either built in software or MQTT and such (in order to be able to reset the cable modem and such remotely).

 

Now the plan is to have this managed via Home Assistant, and to gradually build home statistics and automation bit by bit as I get more familiar or more ambitious with the software/hardware that I have or will have.

 

I am well versed in PC hardware and software, but I would still always want to learn more and prepare well. All that introductory info aside the questions/points I need help with are as follows:

 

- Given that I might want to run different services on this server not just Home Assistant (for example maybe run my own cloud or network storage), I plan to go the Linux route. I am not familiar with Docker but I read that you install Home Assistant with Docker. Will there be any significant downside to this approach versus other approaches for installing Home Assistant?

- I read that I can use either Debian or Ubuntu. I have used Ubuntu in the past (albeit I would consider myself very much a linux newb for all intents and purposes) - so will I be missing out on anything if I went ubuntu over debian?

- There's the single SATA interface port in the machine from what I read, so I will have to limit myself to one internal drive for now. How much of a performance hit would it be to go with the HDD versus any cheap SSD for this use case?

- In addition to the previous question - there is a WIFI card slot on the mainboard and I read you can only use it for WIFI - is there really no way to convert/adapt the wifi slot to accept an msata/m.2 SSD? I understand that the slot may be different but there could be adapters no? Or is it bios locked to only accept WIFI modules? I presume it's this last bit but I want to understand it better if anyone would bother explaining.

 

Sorry for the lengthy post and thanks for your time, answers and discussion~

[brwainer]

I have not used Home Assistant, but I can generally answer a lot of your questions.

 

Debian is “more stable” because (unless you choose Debian testing) things are moved more slowly to the stable releases. This is especially true when dealing with new hardware, but that’s not a concern for you. I would suggest going Ubuntu Server just because that’s going to have the most guides available for it.

 

The M93 has 4 sata ports, three are Sata 3 and one is Sata 2. At least I’m assuming yours will have the same motherboard as mine has. Actually I have an “M83” and an “M93p” and both use the same motherboard. I chose to replace the DVD drive with this adaptor https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SNCLGL4 , I have one 2.5” SSD and 2x 3.5” HDDs in both the M83 and the M93p (the second 3.5” drive is in the normal position)

 

My two systems have 16GB of RAM and I’ve installed Proxmox, which is a Debian based hypervisor. But I’m running things that aren’t available as neat containers, for you I suggest the docker/container path as you will have much better RAM efficiency.

 

 

EDIT: I’ve realized after writing that, that you are probably talking about the M93 Tiny, I was talking about the SFF version which is bigger. For the M93 Tiny I recommend you go with an SSD. All modern software is written assuming SSD for anything other than bulk storage.

[GameRetro]

Hi, thanks so much for your reply - it was definitely helpful.

 

Since there are more guides for Ubuntu that is a valid remark so I will be going with that.

 

And will also source an SSD with DRAM for the OS. I had not considered that modern software would be optimized further for SSD, but it makes sense. Thank you.

[voyager_]

I originally tried running home assistant in a docker and found that the docker version is a lite version and is much more limited when compared to the OS version of Home assistant. When you try to add devices that are not native to home assistant you normally have to add them through hacs which is not supported on the lite version. I have mine currently running in a vm with 1 core and 1 hyperthread with 2Gb of ram. Home assistant doesnt need alot of reasources to run, when I was looking at adding it I considered using an old Pi that I had laying around.

[GameRetro]

Interesting... are there any guides on how to set it up as a VM in Ubuntu linux server? I guess I need to investigate all this more. My general idea was that on Linux I can just add processes/software like this and have multiple stuff running on the server as software but I guess there's far more to it than first meets the eye.

[brwainer]

If you’re going to go the VM route your host OS should be something that is designed for it, to make your life easier. Proxmox is my recommendation. Within the VM, Ubuntu server is still a good choice.

[voyager_]

8 hours ago, brwainer said:

If you’re going to go the VM route your host OS should be something that is designed for it, to make your life easier. Proxmox is my recommendation. Within the VM, Ubuntu server is still a good choice.

Proxmox is a great option, I have mine running on Unraid and the reasource use is almost nothing. 

[GameRetro]

I read a bit more on this and have decided I'll probably go Debian + Supervised installation.

 

From what I can tell it loses out on no features.

 

EDIT: Still appreciate all the feedback and info, it has guided me to all these extra information and I am so very thankful!

(besides I am waiting on an SSD and more RAM before actually starting any installs)