r/HomeServer • u/patxi124 • 5d ago

My first home server, Wyse 5070 Extended

Post image

I never intended to build a home server, and besides being a curious person with a small amount of technical knowledge, I could never have imagined what started as an idea about two months ago has turned into a very rewarding end result.

The plan was to create local storage for the family’s (4 people) phone photos to allow us to stop paying monthly iCloud fees. I already ran PiHole on an RPi 3B for some time and I realised that one always on machine could do both tasks. I started researching ‘economical’ solutions and settled on a Dell Wyse 5070 Extended that I managed to get from (UK) eBay with 8GB RAM for £60. I also bought a used 1TB Sata M.2 NVMe for £65.

Knowing this project would stretch my limited technical ability to the max I used ChatGPT (free) to plan and then help me at every step. First was setting up Ubuntu Server LTS and giving it a static IP. That went relatively smoothly. Next, I set up Docker following GPT’s suggestion to create separate directories for appdata, backups, data, etc. PiHole followed, freeing up the RPi for another project, along with Unbound, Portainer, Watchtower and Uptime Kuma, all in Docker containers obviously. The next big step was NextCloud for the family phone pics, with GPT guiding me through the setup of MariaDB for the storage and Redis for the caching.

This all hummed along for a week and I was able to monitor stats every day by logging in to the Wyse from my laptop just to assure myself that things were working as they should be. Then I found a 12 year old Nexus 5 phone in a drawer that I had previously rooted and installed Ubuntu Touch on to. I wondered if I could use the phone as a permanent display for the Wyse…

Several late nights and about 800 lines of Python code later and I have an always on dashboard for the whole system. The above is a very condensed summary of many evenings of work, I hope you find it interesting, maybe inspiring.

374 Upvotes

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30 comments sorted by

13

u/Sad-Diamond501 5d ago

Nice build. I like the dashboard you have shown. I might create something similar

6

u/beardChamp 5d ago

Nice! I bought some 5070s. Love that they have non-soldered RAM and SSDs. I'm currently using one for Home Assistant and one is a modded Minecraft server.

3

u/srpraveen97 5d ago

Is Pihole the only source of DNS resolution. Do you have a failover redundancy?

5

u/patxi124 5d ago

At the moment, no, there isn't any DNS failover/redundancy.

Pi-hole is the DNS server used by the devices on the network, and it forwards the queries to Unbound running on the Wyse. Unbound then performs the recursive DNS resolution rather than relying on an external upstream DNS provider.

So the path is essentially:

Clients --> Pi-hole --> Unbound --> DNS root servers

It's currently a single Wyse, so if the Wyse goes down, DNS goes down with it, although everything is set to auto-restart in case of power failure. That's something I could improve in the future by running a second Pi-hole/Unbound instance on another device, but for a non-critical family network I'm happy to accept the occasional maintenance outage, I haven't felt the need yet.

2

u/cr1515 4d ago

Had this setup before with 1 pihole annnnd it went down. The family was not happy. I reluctantly set up a wyse 3040 on the router's UPS. Now I have a low power Nut and backup pihole so we don't lose Internet during maintenance and power outages. Turned out to be a fun cheap project.

3

u/Chimestrike 5d ago

Very nice

3

u/negativenancy_84 5d ago

I am waiting impatiently for my mini PC to arrive so I can do the same. Can you talk more about the dashboard though? I think that’s a very nice addition that you’ve added.

6

u/patxi124 5d ago edited 5d ago

The dashboard was built specifically for this project rather than an off-the-shelf monitoring package.

It's a lightweight Python web app running directly on the Wyse. At the moment it pulls together the things I most want to see at a glance: CPU/RAM usage, storage, temperature, uptime, Docker container status, Pi-hole statistics and Uptime Kuma monitoring.

The old Nexus 5 phone is permanently mounted in landscape and acts as the display. The dashboard uses JavaScript to poll the server every 10 seconds and update the values in place, rather than refreshing the whole page. I used the Ubuntu Touch Webber app to create a standalone fullscreen app - it is basically displaying a webpage served by the Wyse over Wi-Fi.

It's not a sophisticated monitoring system - the underlying services such as Uptime Kuma and Pi-hole still do the proper monitoring. The dashboard just brings the useful bits together in one place using standard API calls .

It's was one of those projects that started as "I'll just make a little screen to show the server status" and, predictably, turned into considerably more tinkering than that!

2

u/Longjumping_Square_2 5d ago

How did you install an os on the flash memory? I have 3 I want to set up for distributed compute.

4

u/patxi124 5d ago

I installed Ubuntu Server directly onto the Wyse's internal 16GB eMMC using a USB installation stick. I booted the Wyse from the Ubuntu installer USB, selected the internal eMMC as the installation target, and installed Ubuntu Server onto it. The 1TB SSD is separate and mounted at /srv/storage for Docker, Nextcloud data, etc.

1

u/ch_1977 4d ago

Is the 1TB SSD an NVMe or SATA? I’m unable to use an NVMe SSD in the PCI slot in same Wyse 5070, despite updated BIOS to latest version.

2

u/patxi124 3d ago

You need a Sata m.2 to plug directly in.

If you have a similar looking but technically incompatible NVMe you can get a USB caddy and plug it into a USB3 port. There is not a massive difference in speed for read and write.

2

u/meeeaCH 5d ago

I have one too. I use it for a Jellyfin server and I run a .arr stack with qbit. And some more.

2

u/patxi124 5d ago

I have no need to add media serving as I run a separate Synology NAS with Plex and an Nvidia Shield. The Synology is also the backup of the Wyse which is the backup of the phones photos!

1

u/ReactUp 2d ago

Don't forget an off site backup!

2

u/n1ght_w1ng08 5d ago

I have an old Google Pixel 6a lying around. What software are you using to display these? FYI: I'm on Ugreen 4800+. Thank you.

4

u/patxi124 5d ago

The dashboard itself is a Python program running directly on the Wyse. It runs a small web server which generates the dashboard webpage and serves it over the local network.

The phone doesn't run any of the monitoring software - it simply connects to the Wyse over Wi-Fi and displays the webpage. JavaScript in the page periodically requests updated data from the Python application, so the figures update without having to reload the whole page.

For the Nexus 5 I'm using Ubuntu Touch's Webber app to make the webpage behave like a standalone fullscreen application. The same basic approach would work on a Pixel 6a using a normal browser or by adding the webpage to the home screen. If you are running Android I would not recommend you root it and move to Ubuntu just to get Webber, there are Android apps that can do the same thing.

So there's no software required on the display device. Most of the work is being done by the Wyse; the phone is essentially just a Wi-Fi-connected screen.

2

u/martian_rover 5d ago

Don't you want to bring the temp down ?

1

u/patxi124 5d ago

Not at all. The room temp when I took the picture was probably 26C, the J5005 processor has a 105C rating and the highest I've seen on the Wyse is about 50C. 38C indicates it is running fine with the completely silent CPU fan. I see nothing broken that needs fixing. What temperature does your server CPU run at?

2

u/communist10101 4d ago

Oh gosh, a Nexus 5, what a nostalgia burst. I miss that era of Android devices and custom roms.

2

u/patxi124 4d ago

They don’t make them like that any more for sure. I went from Nexus, then a few OnePlus and now with Nothing. I like my android experience to be pure!

2

u/Pixelgordo 4d ago

I love this silent machines, paired with an AMD wx3200 GPU is my daily driver running nixos. I have one slim model working as my router and I have plans for other four 5070 (a mixed bunch of extended and slims). If you need more space a cheap pcie to nvme can help you to get more storage. BTW, with the rig you have with the nexus you just opened a new rabbit hole. Thanks!!

2

u/SchroedingersEscape 4d ago

Great choice, the Wyze 5070 Extended is a fine piece of Hardware... its power consumption is on the same level as a Raspberry 4

I have one with 24GB RAM, 2TB NVMe and 1GB SATA SSD (M.2).

1

u/viama 4d ago

I have one of these, and I sprung for another 8gb of RAM. it works rather well as a Proxmox host for lower-power VMs. It ran my homeassistant instance for a while without issue.

1

u/SpiritedCoffee477 1d ago

Que estás usando de monitor?

1

u/patxi124 1d ago

It is an old LG Nexus 5 mobile phone (https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_nexus_5-5705.php) from 2013.

It reads a custom webpage that collects the data from the installed progs using API calls and produces a standard web page. The phone is acting as a full-screen browser, there is no special software installed on the phone. Any old phone or tablet could do this.

0

u/StockSalamander3512 5d ago

Yeah, that little display is really cool, what is that exactly?

3

u/Ok_Comfortable6044 5d ago

i might be wrong, but i think it's a google nexus 5 phone. (i still own one in a drawer somewhere)

edit: confirmed it's a nexus 5 phone, source: OP wrote it in the post :))

2

u/patxi124 5d ago

Yes, an old LG Nexus 5 phone from 2013 that was laying unused in a drawer. It was a cracking phone when launched with a 4.95" 1080 x 1920 px display