> Not eager to ruin the evening by starting a debugging session
Use a clanker. Nothing has brought back so much joy into homelabbing for me as having LLMs handle the boring stuff.
I launch it in opencode on the system or elsewhere to ssh in (I think giving it KVM is an overkill but an option nonetheless) and tell it to fix things. Not just ask questions and generate configs. I have backups, let it rip. They have gotten shockingly good at it even when they write bash wrappers just to catch some logs.
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.
My 3 Pis have destroyed 6 SD cards. One of them also somehow drew too much power when trying to boot and got so hot it burnt me and melted itself but that could have been the power supply. I know the 4s and 5s can blow SD cards if you run them without heatsinks.
What I'm saying is, your anecdotal evidence of two pis doesn't justify saying we did something wrong with the configuration. In my experience raspberry pis still behave like "throwaway devices" but their price tags do not justify it anymore.
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 refere…
You can, I am self-hosting Immich via Docker on Raspberry Pi 4 with small SSD and it's nothing but good experience so far (but I keep the photos backed up elsewhere just in case, I use Immich mostly to share curated sets of photos)
Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).
Can confirm, I've got a pi 5 here that's been running 24/7 for over a year (possibly two)... it boots fine, but anything else makes it run so slowly because the sdcard is trashed. The current setup writes to the systemd journal at least twice every minute... It's next iteration is getting a proper nvme.
Ho-ho my friend! You want to buy storage for your computer before 2030? I'm so sorry, but you now pay big time, now you sell your car for one nvme drive.
Personally I would get a used Dell Optiplex / Lenovo ThinkCentre / HP EliteDesk. Either the "mini" / "micro" if you really want small. I am a fan of the SFF (Small Form Factor) size and the Dell Optiplex models. In particular the 70XX versions that offer Intel AMT / vPro for remote management.
I run a Proxmox server on my Dell Optiplex SFF 7070. With the SFF size you can add two low-profile PCIe cards, if desired. In my case I added a 10Gbit NIC.
The reason I would go with a used Dell / Lenovo / HP is that these tend to be well-built machines that run for years and years 24/7 in offices and proven to work well.
Personally I would get a used Dell Optiplex / Lenovo ThinkCentre / HP EliteDesk. Either the "mini" / "micro" if you really want small. I am a fan of the SFF (Small Form Factor) size and the Dell Optiplex models. In particular the 70XX versions that offer Intel AMT / vPro for remote management. I run a Proxmox server on my Dell Optiplex SFF 7070. With the SFF size you can add two low-profile PCIe cards, if desired. In…
Or a used tower form factor PowerEdge if you want a little bigger, but still designed to be quiet in an office environment.
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…
Life expectancy really depends on how the hardware gets used. I run a small fleet of servers that are heavily CPU / GPU loaded, and the most frequent hardware failure I see is power supplies, with RAM as #2 and spinning HDDs as #3. Each of these (on enterprise-grade gear) has some amount of reporting / monitoring, but it's rarely the case that I get any advance warning before a failure. The RAM is probably the nicest, as it sometimes starts with correctable ECC warnings. Nearly all of the PSU failures have been sudden deaths, with the only saving grace being N+1 redundant supplies usually keeping the victim server alive.