I posted awhile back that I was having issues with a containerized deployment of Pihole.
I also posted not long ago that I decided to use Portainer to manage my deployment container stacks.
I thought I could fix the original Pihole container, but after seeing it die again, I immediately began work on using a different system as a host for the containers.
I have three laptops that weren't being used. Each was running Window desktop OS variants. I wanted to install Linux on each.
The three candidate replacement systems were:
Dell Latitude E5530: This system is a very old system that I bought used for $100 - 4 GB of RAM; i5-3380 CPU
Alienware 15 R2: This system is also an older system, but not quite as old as the E5530 system mentioned above. This was used by my daughter. We initially thought the system was broken but I couldn't find anything wrong with it. It ias 8 GB of RAM and uses the i5-6300 CPU. It has a 1 TB HDD. It also has a small (256 GB) SSD.
Alienware M17x R3: This system is also an olser system but has the best specs of the three candidate systems: 12 GB RAM, i7-2760QM CPU; 750 GB SSD
I installed Ubuntu 24.04 onto each of the three systems, testing to determine how well that Ubuntu version would operate on those hardware platforms (while also keeping in mind that they were laptops).
I found that the Alienware M17x system was the most robust and ran Ubuntu without issues. The other two systems run Ubuntu well enough, but I noticed they were under higher load when idle.
As the systems already had Ubuntu, it was pretty easy for me to install the prerequisite packages for Docker. It was super easy to get my containers up and running again on the new host.
On top of that, I installed Portainer not long after getting the new host sorted. I then had to duplicate the Pihole container from within Portainer so that Portainer would have full control over it. Until I did that, I had limited control over Pihole using Portainer. Note that I've already posted about Portainer.
I've been monitoring the new host and redeployed hosts. I've noticed no issues.
I also kept the original system running (a Dell XPS 8930 with an i5-8400 CPU, 8 GB RAM, and 1 TB HDD). A Pihole container is still running on that host and it hasn't thrown errors since I moved to a new hosting system, oddly enough.
About the only thing that I had to enable as a requirement was for the M17x system to not sleep/hibernate when I closed the lid. I found a way to disable hibernation on that host.
As a server, the M17x runs like a champ, especially when Linux is used.
I'd still be using that system if it weren't for the fact that it tends to eat GPUs. It's been through two Nvidia GeForce 580M GPUs and those weren't cheap. I think it was the 580Ms that were fragile.
In fact, all of those Dell systems responded extremely well to Linux, especially the Alienware 15 R2, as Windows was choking it...this was why my daughter stopped using it. It was running Windows 10 when she stopped using it and while I couldn't find anything wrong with the system, when I was troubleshooting, I saw that the HDD appeared to be what was choking the system. Drive resources were constantly pegged when monitoring Task Manager. That all stopped when I installed Ubuntu. That's the power of Linux right there!
I'll update the blog if I see anything bad, but I've been monitoring the new host for almost 2 months and I've not seen any issues.
