As mentioned already, Hetzner is a very big Hoster in Germany. I am a customer since nearly 15 years now and in all that time they also rised the prices only once for the package I use (and I think it was only recently in 2023 or so where it went from 4,90€ to 5,39€). Also their Storage Box seems to be not only one of the cheapest out there I have seen, but as far as I remember, you do not have to pay for the traffic if you want to restore your data, like it is with other hosters. Also they had a good service, were responsive if I opened a Ticket in the past and I can not remember if I had ever problems with the service I use (Web Hosting package).

I always have the feeling I should know k8s more, although I am sure I do not need it. Can you mix Architectures in k8s Clusters? Like my Homelab (x64) has the Pi-Hole and the Z69 Box (ARM) takes over with a standby Pi-Hole if the homelab goes down? Or do k8s Clusters need to be uniform regarding CPU architecture?

Haha :-) I was seriously considering hosting my own KBin or Lemmy Instance on my Homelab for a bit, but then I figured it would be just for fun (which is not a bad thing) and will just consume electricity and space for something I use once or twice a day and I use almost exclusively alone. So it won’t even contribute to the community. I am not even sure if it would be fast enough, but that sounds like a nice Sunday afternoon project to just prove that it works (or doesn’t) for fun :-)

That’s a good Idea too. If I find nothing else, before it sits here any longer, I will ask around my friends and colleagues and ultimately it will go to a thriftstore. I do not like to throw away stuff that still works, so this is a really good idea. Thank you :-)

Hmm… Smart Mirror like Magic Mirror? It’s the first time I hear this… looks really interesting! I will look into this. I always wondered where to put a panel you easily see, but is not intrusive to show some information you should know for the upcoming day… Smart Mirrors sounds like they tick all the boxes!

It could have been a cheap entry into the Z* topic, that is why I asked specifically for those 2. I have no real need currently for Z* devices at the moment, but I am curious and might start with a USB dongle in the future… but that one then can go directly into my Homelab anyway. Thanks for the suggestion :-)

That is what I did until recently with my other Box that has an AMD T40E… but then it had to run Nextcloud that I wanted to move from an external hoster to my Home and it was just too slow to be usable. So my Homelab (just a MiniPC) has to run anyway 24/7 for the family and it has all the other Containers as well. To save a bit of power on that one, the Minecraft Server (that even in idle consumes quite some CPU cycles) can be turned on / off by the family via a button in Home Assistant :-)

SSH Reverse Tunneling is super useful to get remote systems connected which only have very limited internet access through mobile carriers. They usually do NAT and you have no chance to connect to these sites with a dial-in VPN or other technologies that require YOU to connect to the remote system. So we just create a reverse ssh tunnel with autossh that is kept alive by the remote system itself and we connect back to the system to the ssh tunnel. Since ssh is installed anyway, that is one of the simplest and most versatile options to connect to these systems for us.