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Upgrading my home server

earth.li

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Re: Upgrading my home server

#51

Post by zzzcpan »

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 can solve HDD noise issue in a tower case DIY style by suspending HDDs in some rubberry material. There is plenty of space for that where CDROMs used to be put. Or buy a tower case that has anti vibration for HDDs already.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#53

Post by fulafel »

neilv wrote: post #42
fulafel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For both cheap and easy, pick up a used ThinkPad. Comes witj built in console too, normally a feature only found in high end blade racks!

And a built-in UPS. But be careful of cooling, if you want to run it with the lid closed. Also, if you want to run RAID mirroring, a used ThinkPad might only have one 2.5" drive bay, and no M.2. But if it has an UltraBay of some kind, you can buy a SATA adapter. (Personally, the last 24/7 data (not compute) server I built for home, I considered a ThinkPad, and I also previously had IBM 1U and beige box Linux servers,…

Re cooling, its often good to mount them on their side with cover partly open.

For a home server, you usually need backups i dependent of mirroring but not the availability optimization and associated operational complexity of raid-1.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#54

Post by rograndom »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #11
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?

You register a domain name, set it up on CloudFlare and use a script which checks if your IP changed and submits it to the CloudFlare REST API setting an A record: https://github.com/kissgyorgy/cloudflare-dyndns

I ran into an issue doing this a few years ago where my ISP was blocking ports 80 and 443. I could port forward from my router on non-standard ports like host1.domain.tld:10080 (wan) -> 80 (lan), but LetsEncrypt didn't really like this and it was a pain to manually enter port numbers.

My solution was to use a VPS that was doing other stuff to also act as a nginx proxy to the internal machine on a non-blocked port. So it's now host2.domain.tld:443/80 (vps/nginx) -> host1.domain.tld:10080 (wan/host1.domain.tld) -> 80 (lan).

Re: Upgrading my home server

#55

Post by bpye »

Havoc wrote: post #38
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

If you stick it behind Cloudflare then your limited upload isn't really going to matter for a simple website as it should end up cached.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#56

Post by bpye »

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 use rclone on a SystemD timer on my NixOS box. Each night it'll sync the changes to a cloud provider. I couple this with automatic ZFS snapshots - this way in a catastrophic failure I'm at most 1 day behind, but if something gets deleted or such then I have snapshots to save (hourly). I even have those set up with "File History" with Samba/Windows so I can look at previous versions.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#57

Post by Bubbadoo »

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.

The Supermicro 2U I used for a home server, sounded like a jet engine on take-off out of the box. But you'll find fan settings in the bios to experiment with and as long as the server's temps can handle it, you can slow the fans to almost imperceptible levels. And this is mid-2000s technology (SS-6025 and X7DB mboard). Today, I'd be looking at some of the small form-factor servers, like the Intel NUC.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#58

Post by beatgammit »

amelius wrote: post #31
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.

I've been trying to justify that, but it's just too limited for what I want. I basically want to run ZFS, which is a bit RAM hungry, as well as some other processes. So, I basically want 4GB minimum, preferably 8. The latest RPi has 4GB RAM with me option to expand, so it might barely fit the bill for now. I'm not really a fan of the USB interface for driving hard drives, not to mention having to get separate power figured out, and the RPi 4 also runs a little hot.

So I have been looking at other options, like the Nano Pi m4 and the RockPro64, both of which have SATA expansion options. However, to get everything I'll need, it'll cost $100+ and only be a short term solution anyway.

So, I've decided to just get another stick of RAM for my old desktop (runs 4GB right now) and just eat the extra memory usage.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#59

Post by thequailman »

My setup: AMD ryzen tower with 32GB ram and multi port PCI NICs running Debian. Internet comes into the onboard NIC, and I VLAN out the NICs to downstream devices. Server itself doesn't run anything directly, instead I use nspawn "VMs" connected to the same VLANs as necessary. I rsync to a raspberry pi with a USB HDD at a relatives house.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#60

Post by beatgammit »

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?

It really depends on how things are set up at your ISP.

In college, we had dynamically assigned, but publicly accessible addresses, so I used a dynamic DNS service to tie the domain name to my computer. I used freedns.afraid.org (mentioned by someone else), though other options exist and many routers integrate with a couple services out of the box (often dyndns.org). You can check if this will work by finding out your public IP (type "what's my IP" in a web search) and checking if that corresponds to the IP on your router (should be the WAN IP). If it is, you're probably set, but you'll need to check to see if your ISP blocks any ports. To check, just set up something on your computer and mess with the port forwarding settings on your router to point to it, and then test accessing it from outside your network (easiest is to start a webserver and try to access it from your phone while running in data).

If you can access services on your computer but your ISP blocks ports you want to use, call them and ask if those blocks can get removed. If not, you can get it to work by doing a reverse proxy using a VPS (good providers are Digital Ocean, Vultr, and Linode) to point to the ports your ISP does allow.

If you can't access your computer at all, you have two options:

1. Ask your ISP if they offer static IPs (mine does for ~$5/month) 2. Set up a tunnel from your computer to your VPS (SSH tunnels, VPN, etc)

Most ISPs either offer static IPs or give you a dynamic (changing), but publicly facing IP, so you probably won't need a VPS at all and just need to figure out the dynamic DNS thing.

As for assymetric upload/download, it's really not an issue, sending lots of data one way will just be slower than the other way. There just isn't much you can do about it.

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