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The death and rebirth of my home server

sgt.hootr.club

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Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#11

Post by bombcar »

larrydag wrote: post #7

I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of de…

There is for hard drives - SMART - the problem is, unless you're an enterprise (and let's all stop and laugh because we KNOW that most "enterprises" run at least some hardware until the only person who even knows it exists is long in the grave) you're not going to do preventative replacement.

And especially for home use, where nien 9s is more realistic than nine 9s, you're better off having a solid backup strategy and a source of spare parts.

My main "tank" server is 16 years old this year, and has blown out one motherboard - it was a bit annoying to be "offline" for a few days as a replacement wandered in from eBay, but it worked. If it happened today I might import the zpool into another device temporarily - or permanently, who knows? This R510 probably takes more power than a datacenter.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#12

Post by bombcar »

arjie wrote: post #6

Classic power failure and raspberry pi with SD cards. When I last set up things for my parents, I simply imaged a bunch of SD cards and had the data stored on an external hard drive. I live in the US and they live in India and this is for their RaspBMC. With the SD cards they just swap a broken one with a new one and call it a day. Been 12 years or so now. Went back to their home a few years ago and everything but th…

Abusing frontier AI to determine what the hell I did with ancient installs, and then modernizing it, as been quite useful.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#15

Post by inigyou »

plasticchris wrote: post #14
inigyou wrote: post #2

Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).

Make the sdcard a read only root fs, problem solved

Doesn't actually help. It eventually goes corrupt anyway. It might be related to power ripple or something.

Makes it easy to replace, though.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#16

Post by hn_throw2025 »

A few years ago I decided to give up on sdcards for my main 24/7 homelab server.

I now use a small SSD connected via USB3 and a slightly modified version of this : https://framps.github.io/raspiBackupDoc/introduction.html

...to take snapshots to my NAS periodically.

I keep a similar small SSD in the drawer ready for a restore and swap if the main system drive fails.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#17

Post by inigyou »

larrydag wrote: post #7

I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of de…

SSDs have a fairly linear wear-out mechanism although the exact end point is unpredictable as always. HDDs fail randomly or from mechanical shock.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#18

Post by Venn1 »

My Raspberry Pi 4 has been used to run both a Jitsi and Trackmania server over the years. I never considered using the SD card since it can boot and run from a USB 3 flash drive. Later on, I picked up an Argon One case to add a SATA SSD.

Thankfully, modern Rockchip SBCs tend to come with NVMe slots.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#19

Post by steinuil »

plasticchris wrote: post #14
inigyou wrote: post #2

Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).

Make the sdcard a read only root fs, problem solved

Yeah that's more or less my goal for the setup in the post... I didn't have much time to investigate what else I could move off of the SD card but I suspect there's a few other things I could do. NixOS makes it super easy too.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#20

Post by qmr »

binaryturtle wrote: post #10
larrydag wrote: post #7

I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of de…

I'm running my own home server on an old 2014 Mac mini, 24/7 basically. It both has a SSD and a HDD (old "Fusion" disk type of machine, but I use both parts separately, the SSD part for the OS, the HDD part for the data.) A few days ago the HDD had its 100,000 Power_On_Hours anniversary. :) According to SMART this is way past the expected/ designed life time of the disk (the normalised value reports "1" since a few y…

Not unlike a combustion engine, cycles can do more damage than hours.
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