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Ask HN: Always on low power home server

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Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#131

Post by 600frogs »

jpeeler wrote: post #129
600frogs wrote: post #65

Can someone explain to me the use case of a home server? I've always enjoyed tinkering with RPis, but have never found a good enough reason to keep one running 24/7 as a server. PiHole seems to be the best use case for it, but uBlock Origin or Wipr handles ad blocking for me.

Personally while I do run AdGuard Home on my Pi, the most important software is my password manager service. Keeping all my passwords both synchronized among devices and local without worrying about the power draw from the Pi staying on has worked very well.

Out of interest, why would you not use a hosted service such as bitwarden? I've been appreciating everyone commenting on this thread with their use cases but I haven't seen a single one where is hasn't been easier to do the same thing better with a service. Is it a privacy thing, or just the peace of mind knowing the services you use aren't going to shut down and stop working because you're hosting it?

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#133

Post by jpeeler »

600frogs wrote: post #131
jpeeler wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally while I do run AdGuard Home on my Pi, the most important software is my password manager service. Keeping all my passwords both synchronized among devices and local without worrying about the power draw from the Pi staying on has worked very well.

Out of interest, why would you not use a hosted service such as bitwarden? I've been appreciating everyone commenting on this thread with their use cases but I haven't seen a single one where is hasn't been easier to do the same thing better with a service. Is it a privacy thing, or just the peace of mind knowing the services you use aren't going to shut down and stop working because you're hosting it?

Specifically it's more of a peace of mind thing with regard to security. I actually do use Bitwarden though (bitwarden_rs container) and although the critical info in the database is encrypted, I worry less about my network getting hacked than a high value target such as a hosted password manager. It is for this same reason that I don't save passwords in the browser and defer to my locally running password manager.

Note that for non-technical people, using a hosted password manager is far preferable in most cases than not. And for technical people who don't want to go through the effort of standing up their own service, paying for somebody else to do it for you is no doubt easier.

It is nice that when you self-host you also don't have to worry about a third party service shutting down. But for security oriented software I think it'd be too risky to continue running indefinitely without maintenance, so unless people stepped up to maintain the code you'd only be buying yourself your own migration timeline really.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#134

Post by boring_twenties »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #113
yumraj wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your OS? Are running plane Linux or some NAS variant?

I'm a masochist and run Gentoo on it. I work with Gentoo all the time at work so I just run it on everything to keep me on top of my game... That being said, I might switch it to FreeNAS in the future. FreeBSD 13-BETA1 uses the same ZFS codebase as ZFS on Linux (OpenZFS) so maybe I can do incremental (snapshot) backups of Linux ZFS boxes to it even though it's BSD. Doing Gentoo updates regularly is exhausting when yo…

Incremental snapshots work fine for me even from the base ZFS (i.e. not OpenZFS) in FreeBSD 12 to a Linux box with OpenZFS.

Also, if you're comfortable with the command line, I fail to see any reason you would prefer FreeNAS over straight up FreeBSD.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#135

Post by 40four »

techrat wrote: post #109
40four wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks, the OP was asking for alternatives to Raspberry Pi, but everyone keeps saying just use Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive or get some obscure second hand hardware. I think the best alternative, while staying in the SBC realm, is a RockPro64 by Pine64. These boards have PCI-e slots and very cheap SATA & NVMe attachments. That way you get full performance from your SSD, versus a USB connection. And the boards ha…

Ultimately, OP was looking for a low power server without relying on a MicroSD. So no, it's not strictly an alternative to a Raspberry Pi because once you boot from USB, MicroSD durability is no longer the issue.

I really don’t mean this in a mean way, but I’d be surprised if the OP didn’t realize he could just jam a hard drive into the Pi with USB.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#136

Post by kwdc »

Late posting but I'll leave this here anyway. Mainly so I can point others as needed.

Raspi is actually the answer. Use better sd cards. Or consider making the root fs readonly and put the other changing data on usb external storage. Even an external harddisk.

Give it the ability to turn other machines on/off as needed. I have a pi that is always on and orchestrates all sorts of little tasks. Some of them require plenty of writes. I havent burnt through a SD card yet.

NFS/samba fs mounts to allow the pi to upload to a server. Etc.

You'd be surprised how much just one pi can do. I certainly was.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#137

Post by ev1 »

40four wrote: post #135
techrat wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, OP was looking for a low power server without relying on a MicroSD. So no, it's not strictly an alternative to a Raspberry Pi because once you boot from USB, MicroSD durability is no longer the issue.

I really don’t mean this in a mean way, but I’d be surprised if the OP didn’t realize he could just jam a hard drive into the Pi with USB.

To be totally fair, this wasn't really a thing until recently

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#139

Post by valyala »

philjohn wrote: post #22

I've used a few cheap Chinese "mini PC" as found on Amazon. The model with an Atom quad core is fine for light uses (and with the built in dGPU can hardware encode with Plex, albeit not h265 10bit). The current one I have is an Ace PC with a Pentium Quad Core - it does have a fan, but it hardly ever comes on, and it has 2.5" sata drive support in addition to the 120GB eMMC flash on board. I've got a 1TB 860 Evo in th…

Did you try substituting InfluxDB with VictoriaMetrics? It needs lower amounts of resources (cpu, ram, disk io, disk space) than InfluxDB. https://valyala.medium.com/insert-benchmarks-with-inch-influ...
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