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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

#111

Post by TacticalCoder »

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).

Yup and I read TFA and it's not clear: "The death and rebirth of my home server" and, somehow, his Raspberry Pi is his server!? Running RAID, I'm Mich (immich), Jellyfin, etc. all from a Pi is amazing.

Don't get me wrong: I've got like seven Pis, 4 NUCs (but only one "recent" N100 one) and even though two of the Pis are up 24/7 (one runs the unbound DNS and the other, well, serves as a router/firewall to isolate my main PC from the rest of the machines) my server, as in the machine that has disks in RAID (ZFS), runs VMs, containers (including Immich and Jellyfin), etc. is a Xeon with ECC RAM.

I had no idea a Pi 4 was that beefy.

Now of course booting off a microSD card: yuk (I know, I know, there are read-only trickeries that can be achieved).

> The important stuff mostly lived in external HDDs and the configuration lived almost entirely in my NixOS configuration.

Yeah NixOS or what-have-you: if you have server, I'd recommend you have a plan B for when it fails. My little infra at home is mostly automated: it's all scripts provisioning the VMs, setting up cloudinit for the first boot, etc.

As long as I've got backups of my config/scripts and of my data, setting up a new server really doesn't take long (heck I did it not long ago, mostly to be sure the "death and rebirth" procedure of my own server was sound).

I personally prefer my 10+ years old Xeon with ECC as a server than my N100 NUC but then the Xeon consumes more energy... YMMV.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#112

Post by tonymet »

marysol5 wrote: post #100
tonymet wrote: post #48

Lack of proper IO connector is the reason I abandoned Raspi. SD card crashes are nearly a guarantee. Total pita too since there’s no display during the BIOS.

ARM doesn't have BIOS, BIOS is even legacy to pre-x86

call it a boot loader or whatever you like, the system that helps you diagnose boot issues.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#113

Post by b112 »

wildzzz wrote: post #104
b112 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really would just prefer a working, non-buggy, Pi2 maybe without all the crazy extra power + compute + RAM. Or at least have the option, because $20 is more my style for a lot of these tasks, not $150CDN.

I dug up my Pi2 for a project the other day. The plan was for it to be a USB serial to network bridge for up to six devices and to use ZMQ pub/sub for passing commands and telemetry. Most telemetry strings were only 500B but I sometimes see two sequential 32KB mega strings for dumping data. The Pi was choking on the mega strings and they were getting cut off early. I spent forever trying to debug this and eventually…

Yeah. I agree. The older Pis did have their limitations, to be sure. But you're hit the nail on the head, a modern but still cheap Pi is very doable. Fixed design flaws, lower RAM still, lower power too!, and just.. cheap compute.

But other avenues exist now, including just old hardware.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#114

Post by b112 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #107
b112 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I've every brought this up, ever.

So when I say "every mention" I'm not talking about how many times you in particular did so, it's about it being brought up a lot and this being a completely unrelated post that really doesn't need the complaint.

I didn't notice it being brought up a lot, but also, it wasn't a complaint. It's a joke. Most specifically, taking what is supposed to be cheap compute, and adding something made super expensive is just funny.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#115

Post by binaryturtle »

nickjj wrote: post #22
binaryturtle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My SSD only reports as 121 GB. Dunno why it's such an odd size.

With 21,647,615 MiB (~20.64 TiB) written. Reporting as 99 (down from initial 100?) in the normalised value, but the normalised value hasn't changed since I first checked in 2015, so maybe it doesn't work? The wear leveling is at 180 (down from initial 200?), and the threshold at 100, so still ~80 to go until expected EOL. I'm losing between 1 and 2 points per year at the current rate.

I'm also hoping for another 10 years at least. *knock-on-wood*

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#116

Post by arboles »

throwaway270925 wrote: post #106
Havoc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively cheapest fix is an m10 optane and nvme enclosure. You maybe need to enable usb quirks in the kernel depending on on enclosure. Costs about 20 bucks all in That’ll keep the rasp online for essentially forever cause optane isn’t going to wear out

> cheapest fix is an m10 optane > Costs about 20 bucks I agree that its a good, long-lasting fix, but when was the last time you checked the pricing on those? If you can even find any, they certainly wont be cheap nowadays!

They literally cost 20 bucks on ebay if not less
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