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The death and rebirth of my home server

sgt.hootr.club

21–30 of 116 posts

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#21
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could be some other hardware issue for you, yeah. I recall there are some problems that can happen if the usb power supply is too weak. But this fixed it for me.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#22
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…

My main desktop machine with assorted components is from 2014, also with an SSD and HDD. Each component has lasted all this time somehow. The total uptime of each drive is 11.5 years (101,023 hours) with 159 power cycles. The SSD is 256 GB and has 71 TB written, it's my main drive. It has 46% lifetime remaining, I hope everything lasts another 10+ years.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#23
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).

I have a rasperry pi 2 and 4 that have been running on the same size uSD (reputable brand) for 5 years and haven’t had any issues. I have swap turned off. You just have to be aware of the i/o and not do anything stupid. Clearly for heavy i/o with multitasking they are not ideal.

You can buy cards that support SMART if you want to track wear, but they are expensive.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#25
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).

I suspect it isn’t the hardware but the bullheaded approach of running a desktop Linux environment from an SD card.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#26
If i'm reading this correctly, can run Immich from a Raspberry Pi 4? That's pretty cool.

I bought all the stuff (new case, networking card and a Jonsbro N4 to repurpose some intel i7-9700 era processor and motherboard, but didn't get it setup yet, as I was starting to rethink the power consumption....

Also looking to use this rebuild as an opportunity to learn Nix.

Let me know if you all have some good article references, to point me at. I've been doing some research, but could always do more.

I may end up putting a low power NUC in the case, or something. I don't know...

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#27
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…

Hardware wearing out is not common at the individual component level. It only becomes common when you are running a large number of servers, those individual small probabilities add up.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#28

Why not get a Beelink N95 and call it a day?

I picked Beelink a couple years ago. It didn’t last long. I can’t simply reboot it. I have to unplug it, wait 5 minutes, plug it in, and then boot it. It turns OS installs and even system updates into such a hassle that it’s not even worth using anymore. I wanted to run it headless and just connect remotely, and that doesn’t really work well with this issue, as I need regular physical access.

I assume it’s a bad capacitor or something. I tried changing out the power adapter, but that didn’t help.

I don’t see myself ever buying another Beelink.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#29
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash memory generally doesn't have great lifespan for repeated writes; using it as a root device is going to kill it pretty quickly. I had a similar problem once running a NAS off a USB stick; within a year of so the stick would no longer accept new data and I swapped it out for an SSD instead.

Yeah but it's also SD cards in particular and Raspberry Pis in particular.

Are there other computers that run off of SD cards long term successfully that are not Raspberry Pi’s?
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