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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

#81

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #52
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).

"Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes." This is not specific to RPis. When an SD card is subjected to "unpredictable" writes it creates potential risk of corruption. The writes are triggered by software, not the RPi hardware There is no rule that says the RPi user must mount the root filesystem r/w on the card. It can be mounted r/w on mfs or tmpfs, for example, and the card can be r…

By "RPI owner behaviour" I mean the decision made by the RPi owner in choosing what operating system software to run and how to configure it

When I bought RPi Model B the hardware did not come with an OS pre-installed

It booted only from SD card

It was up to me to choose which OS to run. I did not choose any of the "recommended" operating systems. I was already booting other "diskless" computers using USB sticks with root mounted on tmpfs so I wanted to use that same OS for the RPi

I never experienced SD card corruption with RPi hardware

However I have experienced SD card corruption with other SBCs that had an OS pre-installed, an OS not chosen by me

By choosing to run a "recommended" OS on the RPi perhaps I would experience SD card corruption

But if that happened I would not attriubute it to the RPi. I would blame myself. And I would make different choices going forward

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#83

Post by rmunn »

mattrighetti wrote: post #77
DJBunnies wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had more than my fair share of SD failures running pis off their official power supplies. It really is a high failure rate.

Do pis have an official power supply?

Yes. https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/power-supply/

I have always bought the official power supply, yet of the two Pi 3s that I have connected to my TV at home, the one that runs Kodi/OSMC to serve up movies has never suffered any filesystem corruption, despite it suffering repeated power outages without warning (it's low enough to the ground that the toddler has often pulled the power cable out, and I haven't been able to find a better place to keep it). The other one, bought at the same time from the same source, is meant to be the one the kids use for programming in Snap!, a variant of MIT Scratch that doesn't have the artificial limitations that Scratch has. (Snap! functions — the exclamation mark is part of the name — can take lists as input, whereas Scratch functions can only take numbers or strings, giving it an artificial ceiling; also, Snap! functions can take functions as input and return functions, making higher-order programming possible, while Scratch deliberately does not allow that). However, that Raspberry Pi has suffered two SD card failures in the past year; it's been down more often than it's been up, and I've ended up using either my laptop or my wife's laptop for my kids' programming lessons.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#84

Post by Lord_Zero »

baq wrote: post #64
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).

I’ve got an rpi4 booting from an usb ssd and bought a n100 minipc anyway… last February for $150. Should have bought a 40ft container of these

I regret selling mine

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#85

Post by Dylan16807 »

b112 wrote: post #35
nubinetwork wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Somebody set up us the bomb.

There is no need to bring this up on every mention of buying a computer part. And this is also very wrong. TLC nvme drives go below $40, and the smallest ones have more than enough storage for a pi.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#86

Post by ErroneousBosh »

SahAssar wrote: post #74
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually weird that Raspberry Pis seem so bad at using SD cards. I've just scrapped a large PBX which had a whopping 8MB SD card in it. Its 486 processor booted Linux off the SD card, it wrote CDRs to the SD card, it served said CDRs up over a web interface off it, it saved its logs to the card, and all the other day-to-day chatter of a running system. It was installed pretty much 20 years ago. The date sticker…

I'm going to guess that it was not a normal COTS SD card, and instead designed for continuous writes. The factors for SD card failures in raspberry pi seem to be mostly SD cards not meant for the purpose and having things like swap, atime or disk logs enabled which leads to unnecessary writes.

It just appears to be a pretty standard Sandisk SD card.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#87

Post by b112 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #85
b112 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Somebody set up us the bomb.

There is no need to bring this up on every mention of buying a computer part. And this is also very wrong. TLC nvme drives go below $40, and the smallest ones have more than enough storage for a pi.

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

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#88

Post by moebrowne »

mvanbaak wrote: post #46

> I chose to enable zram for swap swap is used when you run out of ram. using a ramdisk for swap ... You see how that doesnt make sense?

> swap is used when you run out of ram

This is not correct. Swap is not a RAM overflow.

> Swap is not generally about getting emergency memory, it's about making memory reclamation egalitarian and efficient. In fact, using it as "emergency memory" is generally actively harmful.

https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#89

Post by mDyJzDPmBdG »

inigyou wrote: post #5
danparsonson wrote: post #4

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.

I found GoPros to cook SD cards from time to time. It makes me wonder if normal sized SD are still manufactured and are they more resistant. For years in stores I only saw miro SD with adapter to full size.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#90

Post by onel »

That was a good read.

But this is the kind of experience that makes technical people fall in love with self-hosting, but also keeps the majority of the population away.

Most of the people don't want the hassle of managing a self-hosting box.

I think a middle ground option might where someone hosts it for you, but you can also move to your own hardware at any time might be best

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