Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Always on low power home server

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 139 posts

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#111

Post by sliken »

How about an x86-64 that runs just whatever your favorite flavor of linux is?

In particular the Hardkernel ODROID-H2+. It's got 2x2.5G ethernet ports (and optionally 4 more), M2/nvme, 2 SATA, and 2 dimms (max 32GB ram).

It's not particular power hungry (max TDP of the J4115 is 10 watts), if your needs change the extra ram could be quite handy.

Should be fine for router duty, firewall, network service, plex/kodi, even light NAS duty. It's got way more CPU than the RPI and clones, avoids ugly things like network or storage over USB, yet generates minimal heat/noise.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#112

Post by Teknoman117 »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #87
Teknoman117 wrote: post #68

What's your budget? My home server is mainly a file server and automated backup server. I also use it to host dedicated servers for some games my friends and I play (minecraft, KSP dark multiplayer, halo ce, etc.). It does PiHole and steam/origin/blizzard/uplay download caching (steam game install from a bonded dual-10G server is fun) as well. I picked up a SuperMicro mini-ITX 8 core Xeon-D based server board on eBay…

10W at idle sounds unbelievable, my AMD A1 server with 2x2.5 HDDs takes 30W at idle (okay, a bag of mostly idle services running). Is this some special server power saving feature? Are you measuring at 12V of before the power supply? What kind of power supply do you use? Is it noisy?

10W is just the motherboard. The whole thing pulls 25-30W at idle with 6 HDDs (10 TB WD Red).

The measurement was with a kill-a-watt at the wall. The motherboard has a SuperMicro "proprietary" 12V connector (that they give you the pinout for and the connector housing) that can be used instead of the 24 pin ATX connector (populate one or the other). It has some regulators onboard to supply 5V for the hard drive logic. I'm using a 120W 12V laptop brick.

Xeon-D is really neat as it has 10G NICs and SAS on-die with the CPU and run at really low power since there's no chipset (except the ASPEED IPMI). I'm waiting for some nice EPYC embedded boards (they also have on-die 10G) before upgrading. Except the eval board, I've only seen them with quad 1G interfaces.

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X10SDV-8C...

It's fanless, but if your airflow is bad it'll overheat under load, I just zip tied a 60mm Noctua fan to it (NF-A6x25). I have it in a Fractal Node 304 case. It's nice and compact and fits on a shelf in the closet.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#113

Post by Teknoman117 »

yumraj wrote: post #107
Teknoman117 wrote: post #68

What's your budget? My home server is mainly a file server and automated backup server. I also use it to host dedicated servers for some games my friends and I play (minecraft, KSP dark multiplayer, halo ce, etc.). It does PiHole and steam/origin/blizzard/uplay download caching (steam game install from a bonded dual-10G server is fun) as well. I picked up a SuperMicro mini-ITX 8 core Xeon-D based server board on eBay…

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 you run it on 6 machines (personal laptop and desktop, work laptop and desktop, personal fileserver, personal guest PC). My personal machines (except the file server) all use the same CPU architecture (znver1) so I just run the same image on all of those.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#114

Post by sliken »

600frogs wrote: post #77
DoktorDelta wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an old desktop running Plex, so I can stream my personal movie and TV library to any of the Roku devices in my house.

I've never heard of or used Roku before, from a quick search it seems to be a chromecast style stick to plug in to a TV to watch stuff, is there any reason you couldn't plug an RPi or your desktop straight into the TV to watch from?

Well roku's are popular, have nice software, and are easy to stream to. They are also newbie friendly, hand someone a remote and they'll likely have netflix, amazon prime video, youtube, and related streaming services going in no time. Even a 5 year old can manage to get things going.

It's the best I've seen, way better than I've seen built in TV's. It's also the Switzerland of streaming services. No problems with Apple devices disliking google services, or vice versa. So you get the best selection of streaming channels I've seen.

It's also popular enough that clients written for roku tend to be better than less popular devices, like say some random brand TV. Not to mention TVs are often useful for 10+ years, and it's way cheaper to upgrade a Roku than replace a TV.

Oh and there's a Plex client.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#115

Post by brugeman »

vinay_ys wrote: post #70
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.

For a household with 2+ people – each with personal phone and personal laptop plus a bunch of common devices like TVs, streaming speakers etc you would need a bunch of useful local LAN services: 1. Local Backup storage server – always have a local+cloud back – neither one is good enough just by itself. 2. Local streaming service – photos, music, home videos etc. 3. Internet gateway – a. filtering firewall, b. privacy…

How about photos etc, can you please share what you're using and why? Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#116

Post by brugeman »

npteljes wrote: post #76
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.

I was annoyed that my media is only available on my main machine, if I wanted to watch something on my phone or show a photo to someone, I needed to boot it up. So a home server to host files for me and my household seemed logical. Since then I went on a degoogling trip and as part of that, I installed Nextcloud, also very useful. I also do my backups to the homeserver (and then back up the homeserver too).

Can I ask what you're using to view video/photo from your home server on your/family phones? Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#117

Post by yumraj »

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…

If you're considering FreeNAS you may want to wait till the TrueNAS SCALE comes out.

TrueNAS is the new branding of FreeNAS, with FreeNAS remaining on FreeBSD and TrueNAS SCALE being based on Linux with ZFS. TrueNAS SCALE is in alpha at the moment so I haven't tried it..

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#118

Post by noxer »

Can_Not wrote: post #108
noxer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The battery will die within months and you risk a house fire. Other than that yes, laptops hardware makes a good small server. See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26298116

Every laptop I've owned with a removable battery worked on wall power without the battery.

Did you even read the message?

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#119

Post by colinhb »

ysleepy wrote: post #17
colinhb wrote: post #15

My favorite platform is PC Engines APU 2. Consider something like the apu2e4 with its aluminum case and a msata card. I turn them into routers, media servers, Bitcoin nodes, etc. More expensive than Pies but I’ve had great success with them. https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

I deployed one, it is good hardware, but the performance is pretty low, behind an rpi3. The advantages of x86 aren't really realized because you only have serial port and run of the mill installers aren't all handling it well. I'd only go for it for router purposes. no way you can run a re-encoder on it for media use.

Think that’s a legit take. Agree 100% about reencoding — I’ve only used it for minidlna and mpd.

I’ve also only run openbsd on apus so haven’t experienced the serial port installer issues. Didn’t know that would be an issue for modern linux. Good for others to be aware of if so.

More generally, you’re probably right that x86 doesn’t matter as much now as five years ago or so.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#120

Post by dirktheman »

I ran into similar issues when using Rpi with SD cards, but I switched to a bootable SSD and had zero issues since.

If you don't like tinkering with your Rpi I can also recommend the Odroid C4: it has a better GPU and a native eMMC connector so you don't have to fiddle around with SD cards.

Post reply on HN