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Upgrading my home server

earth.li

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Re: Upgrading my home server

#31

Post by amelius »

effie wrote: post #18

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

Why not go for an RPi or mintbox? Both can be passively cooled.

And you can use an RPi to switch on a "real" server in case you need it.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#32

Post by effie »

kyriakos wrote: post #22
effie wrote: post #18

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

I have my doubts over bedroom quiet if you have hard drives in it. Ssd unfortunately still too expensive for redundant home storage use.

You are right, 3.5" disks can be loud, 2.5" drives or SSDs are better in that respect. Other option is to spin down / suspend the box after inactivity.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#33

Post by cyphar »

bscphil wrote: post #29
xorfish wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loudest component will usually be the drives, otherwise something else is to loud.

I don't know that I've ever seen a rackmount server where the fans weren't by far the loudest part. Granted, I haven't bought a new server from the last few years, but manufacturers seem to have very little desire to reduce fan noise, and without that it's unlikely they'll be quieter than even a rack full of drives.

If you're using consumer gear in a rackmount form factor (which I'd recommend, given that AMD Ryzen and Threadripper support ECC and are really cheap compared to Xeons), then you can get nice Noctua fans which really help make the fans much more reasonable.

Right now the PSU fan is the loudest thing in my rack, but I think I'm going to cut and solder a much quieter fan in place.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#34

Post by lunchables »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #27
ThatPlayer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used ddclient which has support for a lot more DNS services, including Cloudflare: https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient

I wrote the script because I did not wanted to use ddclient :D and it's terrible config syntax. Also, it corrupted the cache regularly for some reason.

I wanted to add my "anecdata": I've run ddclient with namecheap for years and never had a single issue.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#35

Post by cyphar »

polskibus wrote: post #10

Has anyone experimented with BL-R for home server backup (or a backup's backup)? Are there tools for home use that help automate the backup, keep track of metadata, somehow handle delta backup to new discs, etc?

I'd suggest restic for backups (it's encrypted and deduplicated automatically, with the ability to have very simple retention policies). It backs up to basically any dumb storage service (S3, Backblaze, Google Cloud) and you can sync it yourself since it's just a tree of files like a git repo. For storage on the actual machine, use ZFS or something similar so that you can do your restic backups on an atomic snapshot.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#36

Post by bscphil »

cyphar wrote: post #33
bscphil wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that I've ever seen a rackmount server where the fans weren't by far the loudest part. Granted, I haven't bought a new server from the last few years, but manufacturers seem to have very little desire to reduce fan noise, and without that it's unlikely they'll be quieter than even a rack full of drives.

If you're using consumer gear in a rackmount form factor (which I'd recommend, given that AMD Ryzen and Threadripper support ECC and are really cheap compared to Xeons), then you can get nice Noctua fans which really help make the fans much more reasonable. Right now the PSU fan is the loudest thing in my rack, but I think I'm going to cut and solder a much quieter fan in place.

Yes! My next server is definitely going to be a custom build, probably with Ryzen. I've gotten far too tired of the problems I've had with Enterprise hardware, and forced incompatibilities. It will probably still be a tower though, in order to get it as quiet as possible for my apartment.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#37

Post by pixelmonkey »

amelius wrote: post #6

What is the best and cheapest way to make a home server available to the internet, using a standard "home use" ISP contract? Can you give it a domain name? How do you deal with the asymmetrical upload/download speeds of most home connections?

If you just want it accessible from any of your other devices in a secure/private way without fussing much with DNS and port forwarding, ZeroTier is an excellent modern solution.

https://zerotier.com/

Re: Upgrading my home server

#38

Post by Havoc »

amelius wrote: post #6

What is the best and cheapest way to make a home server available to the internet, using a standard "home use" ISP contract? Can you give it a domain name? How do you deal with the asymmetrical upload/download speeds of most home connections?

Some routers (e.g. Asus) come with a free service to do that out the box. That'll be MyButterfly.asuscomm.com domain though.

>asymmetrical upload/download speeds of most home connections?

If it's something fibre like then it's probably enough for casual hosting

Re: Upgrading my home server

#39

Post by tiew9Vii »

kyriakos wrote: post #22
effie wrote: post #18

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

I have my doubts over bedroom quiet if you have hard drives in it. Ssd unfortunately still too expensive for redundant home storage use.

I have a Fractal Design Define R5 case (https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-ser...) in my living room at the side of my television where I sit a few feet away in a small apartment and can not hear it unless I put my head right next to it, then I can just about hear the case fans.

It's fitted with 4 x 4TB WD Reds, a stock AMD Ryzen 2600 cooler, Corsair RM850x PSU and the cheapest graphics card I could find with a HDMI out, the graphic card has a small fan. I also have a HBA card I modded adding a small Noctua fan as they are passively cooled and designed to go in rack mount cases where they have high airflow passing over them so get to hot in a desktop.

The case has rubber mountings for the hard drives and sound reducing material on the side panels.

I built it to be quiet but didn't go massively out my way or spend massively to make it quieter i.e. I choose a good case but have stock case fans, stock cpu cooler and choose a PSU where the fan only spins up under load which I'll never hit.

It's not to hard to build something that for all intent and purposes is silent as long as you don't pimp it out with the latest fastest graphic cards, have it maxed out 24/7, or go small.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#40

Post by Havoc »

I'm gonna stick to just using my previous gen laptop as I upgrade.

Need fresh ones due to GPU so the old one is perfectly fine for server duty still. Stick a couple USB3 docks on there & good to go

But...now I'm unsure what to do with the old old one...

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