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CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

https://twitter.com/CommieGIR/statu...6554980353?s=20

Added an MD1220 to expand my FreeNAS pseudo-SAN. SSD caching, here we come.

NihilCredo
Jun 6, 2011

iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt



Dick Nipples posted:

Ya - RPi isn’t great for anything you want to set and forget.

I actually bought a cheap little Celeron-based NUC that I do this with. Something similar to this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XRG5YL8/

I run a DNS-over-TLS unbound Forwarder and a WireGuard VPN Server off of it. I’d recommend springing for something like that - it’s very well suited to those tasks and won’t suffer the pier related downfalls of the RPi.

Yeah, NUCs and FreeNAS or OMV is definitely what I'd recommend to a less-technical person wanting a home server.

Me, I'm as interested in tinkering as in actually running it, so for the price of a NUC I would have more fun buying 3-5 Pis and setting up a Swarm / Nomad / K3s cluster

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

NihilCredo posted:

Yeah, NUCs and FreeNAS or OMV is definitely what I'd recommend to a less-technical person wanting a home server.

Me, I'm as interested in tinkering as in actually running it, so for the price of a NUC I would have more fun buying 3-5 Pis and setting up a Swarm / Nomad / K3s cluster

NUCs are great, but really pricey for what they are.

Look on eBay for the Dell Optiplex 3050 SFFs:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-OptiP...bYAAOSwXQpexbs5

Massively upgrade-able, and super small footprint and low power. Socketed CPU, DDR4 SODIMM, both M2 and 2.5" Disk.

CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jun 21, 2020

Dick Nipples
Feb 27, 2011

Clear alcohols are for rich women on diets.


CommieGIR posted:

NUCs are great, but really pricey for what they are.

Look on eBay for the Dell Optiplex 3050 SFFs:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-OptiP...bYAAOSwXQpexbs5

Massively upgrade-able, and super small footprint and low power. Socketed CPU, DDR4 SODIMM, both M2 and 2.5" Disk.

Oooo neat. I've been on the hunt for a slightly more powerful variant. Colour me intrigued.

That also solves a use-case I have - moving a WireGuard VPN to my parents house for me to use for remote administration of their network.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

Dick Nipples posted:

Oooo neat. I've been on the hunt for a slightly more powerful variant. Colour me intrigued.

That also solves a use-case I have - moving a WireGuard VPN to my parents house for me to use for remote administration of their network.

HP and Lenovos have versions as well.

Dick Nipples
Feb 27, 2011

Clear alcohols are for rich women on diets.


CommieGIR posted:

HP and Lenovos have versions as well.

Ya - I had seen these before and have in fact worked on some of them. It just never occurred to me that I should use one as a network appliance. In my head, I was stuck in this idea that those are little desktop machines.

That said, I picked up one of the slightly newer ones - a 3070 for a couple hundred off. Will provision that one as my network appliance and repurpose the other one for my parents.

Good call.

lordfrikk
Mar 11, 2010

casual lamer


Paul MaudDib posted:

I have an X11SSH with an i3 7100 for most of the same reasons, it's nice.

If you don't want to pass it through to a guest or hardware transcoding, you don't technically need the integrated graphics. IPMI acts as integrated graphics.

The other way you can go is something like an Asrock Rack X470D4U, which lets you use a 3600 or similar, and then you can use software encoding instead. More power but better transcode quality. Zen2 is really efficient so it makes up most/all of the difference from jumping to more cores.

Those motherboards are nice but they're not miniITX. I don't want such a big device right now because it will be on a table on next to my monitor. In the future I will have space for full-blown rack but until then I want something compact but sufficiently beefy.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast


brains posted:

So I ran a similar setup for a couple years, using a pi 3b and a pair of external USB hdds on a powered hub and set up samba for network access. Honestly, the point of failure here is the pi itself, unfortunately. The filesystem is very sensitive to corruption from unscheduled power interruptions. After the first few times my various high-quality SD cards died, I moved to booting off a USB thumb drive and that gave me the longest period of stability, but even it eventually corrupted and died too. With a webserver or any 24/7 program that writes continuously (think logs), you run a real risk of filesystem corruption if the power supply varies even a little.

That said, every time the pi died, the data on my HDDs was completely fine, so it really wasn't much impact overall. Get everything set up and then image your SD card so you can just clone it when the install corrupts and get back up and running quickly.

Couldn't you run a usb power bank as a ups to the pi? That would be cheap and easy. That said, I don't know how common it is for power banks to allow constant charging/discharging

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Jun 22, 2020

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

Nap Ghost

HalloKitty posted:

Couldn't you run a usb power bank as a ups to the pi? That would be cheap and easy. That said, I don't know how common it is for power banks to allow constant charging/discharging
It's not very common and some folks like from Adafruit sell expensive powerbanks (in the $80+ range last I checked) that disable the low current auto-shutoff feature that is standard on most powerbanks now. I've been struggling to set this up for an LED light strip that I'd like to have connected to a battery because the AAAs only last a week with my usage pattern and changing batteries weekly is really lame.

Some people setup resistors to draw a minimal current but I'd prefer something a bit less janky because I have kittens that attack and chew all sorts of shiny things.

brains
May 12, 2004



HalloKitty posted:

Couldn't you run a usb power bank as a ups to the pi? That would be cheap and easy. That said, I don't know how common it is for power banks to allow constant charging/discharging

the problem is the switchover logic/circuit; it's non-existent in the powerbank because that's not what they are designed for, and even a slight undervoltage during a power loss is what causes the problems with corruption. like others have said, you can do it, you just can't assume unattended stability like you would for a dedicated NAS or server, because at some point or another the power will dip or shut off and the pi won't boot back up.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


lordfrikk posted:

Those motherboards are nice but they're not miniITX. I don't want such a big device right now because it will be on a table on next to my monitor. In the future I will have space for full-blown rack but until then I want something compact but sufficiently beefy.

You can get microserver-style chassis.

Also, there are mITX versions if you want them too. Check out the Asrock Rack X570D4i-2T or whatever.

brains posted:

the problem is the switchover logic/circuit; it's non-existent in the powerbank because that's not what they are designed for, and even a slight undervoltage during a power loss is what causes the problems with corruption. like others have said, you can do it, you just can't assume unattended stability like you would for a dedicated NAS or server, because at some point or another the power will dip or shut off and the pi won't boot back up.

tbh if you are going to run a Pi, you really need to set it up how you want and then take a backup image of the card. When corruption occurs you just throw it away and buy a new card and flash the image back down.

another option would be to set everything up as Ansible/Chef/Puppet scripts so that you can just tell it to run and it'll do the same things on a fresh image. But you need to have the discipline to have 100% of your configuration run through that system.

or, just PXE boot the whole thing from another server.

however you do it, with a Pi you need to design around failure. everything you care about on a Pi needs to exist somewhere not on the SD card, back it up to an external or something, because on a long enough scale corruption with a Pi is inevitable and will occur to 100% of people. And it's not just "maybe in the 5-10 year timeframe" like a normal PC, the majority probably fail within a year or two.

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Jun 22, 2020

Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Just the tip!


Exciting Lemon

Pi 3+s at least support switching over the firmware to boot from USB, which I've found perfectly reliable compared to SD cards.

Crunchy Black
Oct 24, 2017

CASTOR: Uh, it was all fine and you don't remember?
VINDMAN: No, it was bad and I do remember.




Which if you're going to do you also need a backup of because they will die.

Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Just the tip!


Exciting Lemon

Crunchy Black posted:

Which if you're going to do you also need a backup of because they will die.
Agreed but it definitely reduces the frequency and frustration factor.

D. Ebdrup
Mar 13, 2009



I wrote a single thing to my Pi3+' microSD card: A gmirror of a FAT partition with FreeBSDs standard loader, which is also written to the USB drives.
The only reason I did this is because if it ever forgets to boot from the USB drive for whatever reason, it'll presumably boot from the microSD card.
The zpool that it boots to a mirror created with copies=3 so every block has 3 ditto blocks, but since the only thing the device does is collect and aggregate logs from every other device on the network, if I need more than 20MBps/sec of bandwidth for those disks, something has gone TERRIBLY wrong.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


It genuinely surprises me that pi implementations r/w to their disk so much. In theory the whole point is to not do that.

wolrah
May 8, 2006
what?


H110Hawk posted:

It genuinely surprises me that pi implementations r/w to their disk so much. In theory the whole point is to not do that.

Most of the actual appliance distros built for the purpose are pretty good about this and either run entirely r/o or use a r/o boot partition separate from a r/w partition for user data.

Anything built on top of Raspbian on the other hand behaves mostly like a normal Debian system, as you'd reasonably expect.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


wolrah posted:

Most of the actual appliance distros built for the purpose are pretty good about this and either run entirely r/o or use a r/o boot partition separate from a r/w partition for user data.

Anything built on top of Raspbian on the other hand behaves mostly like a normal Debian system, as you'd reasonably expect.

I apparently unreasonably expect something called pihole that's been around for years now to have a very low i/o footprint due to the same reasons that are listed here. Nothing but basic config documents should be persisted to disk. Databases can be downloaded per boot. Stats can be lost on unclean reboot. If you desperately want to it could be persisted on clean reboot.

Random side projects people throw together on the weekend that churn through SD cards? Sure.

Dick Nipples
Feb 27, 2011

Clear alcohols are for rich women on diets.


H110Hawk posted:

I apparently unreasonably expect something called pihole that's been around for years now to have a very low i/o footprint due to the same reasons that are listed here. Nothing but basic config documents should be persisted to disk. Databases can be downloaded per boot. Stats can be lost on unclean reboot. If you desperately want to it could be persisted on clean reboot.

Random side projects people throw together on the weekend that churn through SD cards? Sure.

I mean it’s the intersection of people that look at RPi and think “tiny computer! Treat it the same as usual Linux distro” and embedded hardware.

Building for embedded scenarios is a different game than usual desktop/server setups. The disparity in this is entirely unsurprising to me.

Much as we, software engineers, would like to treat the hardware as abstracted away, in many cases it is most definitely not.

That said - your expectations are reasonable, it’s just that everyone else is goobying shit up.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


Dick Nipples posted:

I mean it’s the intersection of people that look at RPi and think “tiny computer! Treat it the same as usual Linux distro” and embedded hardware.

Building for embedded scenarios is a different game than usual desktop/server setups. The disparity in this is entirely unsurprising to me.

Much as we, software engineers, would like to treat the hardware as abstracted away, in many cases it is most definitely not.

That said - your expectations are reasonable, it’s just that everyone else is goobying shit up.

Yup! "pi" in the name makes me feel like it should have an embedded mindset. It's why I have generally stuck with an underpowered nuc running several things instead of a fleet of pi's.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast


brains posted:

the problem is the switchover logic/circuit; it's non-existent in the powerbank because that's not what they are designed for, and even a slight undervoltage during a power loss is what causes the problems with corruption. like others have said, you can do it, you just can't assume unattended stability like you would for a dedicated NAS or server, because at some point or another the power will dip or shut off and the pi won't boot back up.

Totally fair, it was just a passing thought

lordfrikk
Mar 11, 2010

casual lamer


Paul MaudDib posted:

You can get microserver-style chassis.

Also, there are mITX versions if you want them too. Check out the Asrock Rack X570D4i-2T or whatever.

Thanks, this looks really nice. I know some people posted before in this thread photos of their U-NAS builds and it's probably the best candidate for what I want to do. I wonder what's the availability nowadays.

fake edit: out of stock, hopefully they'll restock soon

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


lordfrikk posted:

Thanks, this looks really nice. I know some people posted before in this thread photos of their U-NAS builds and it's probably the best candidate for what I want to do. I wonder what's the availability nowadays.

fake edit: out of stock, hopefully they'll restock soon

the build quality is not the best, the rubberized front is easy to scratch and a couple of the drive tray LEDs have died, but it's nice and compact.

wolrah
May 8, 2006
what?


H110Hawk posted:

I apparently unreasonably expect something called pihole that's been around for years now to have a very low i/o footprint due to the same reasons that are listed here. Nothing but basic config documents should be persisted to disk. Databases can be downloaded per boot. Stats can be lost on unclean reboot. If you desperately want to it could be persisted on clean reboot.
Pi-Hole is a terrible hack in a lot of ways, and this is one of them. As far as I can tell they don't actually even have a "distro" of their own, it's literally just software you install on top of a standard Raspbian install using a "pipe curl to bash" command line that's a horrible idea in its own way.

I have no idea why it's so popular and do not encourage people to run it. It's just HOSTS file based ad blocking on a larger scale.

NihilCredo
Jun 6, 2011

iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt



It's popular because some people apparently have a lot of crippleware at home that won't let you touch their DNS configuration but will still try to show you ads.

If all your electronics run non-crippled Linux / Windows / Android you have no need of pihole.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006


wolrah posted:

Pi-Hole is a terrible hack in a lot of ways, and this is one of them. As far as I can tell they don't actually even have a "distro" of their own, it's literally just software you install on top of a standard Raspbian install using a "pipe curl to bash" command line that's a horrible idea in its own way.

I have no idea why it's so popular and do not encourage people to run it. It's just HOSTS file based ad blocking on a larger scale.


NihilCredo posted:

It's popular because some people apparently have a lot of crippleware at home that won't let you touch their DNS configuration but will still try to show you ads.

If all your electronics run non-crippled Linux / Windows / Android you have no need of pihole.

I tried it out for this reason, I grew bored of it because it's a constant cat and mouse game of it not working subtly. My impression of pihole is similar to above in general.

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!

Grimey Drawer

H110Hawk posted:

I tried it out for this reason, I grew bored of it because it's a constant cat and mouse game of it not working subtly. My impression of pihole is similar to above in general.

I'm running it in a docker...seems to work well. Certainly doesn't cause any headaches for me.

Dick Nipples
Feb 27, 2011

Clear alcohols are for rich women on diets.


H110Hawk posted:

I tried it out for this reason, I grew bored of it because it's a constant cat and mouse game of it not working subtly. My impression of pihole is similar to above in general.

Smashing Link posted:

I'm running it in a docker...seems to work well. Certainly doesn't cause any headaches for me.

I mean adblocking is always cat and mouse. That said I’ve been happily using nextdns.io. I also still have browser adblockers too.

NextDNS.io has been blocking a lot stuff from these gooby ass IOT outdoor cameras I have

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

The advantage is only having to deal with it on one device, and not having to manage a small army of adblockers on different devices. I'd have 5 different OS/browser combos I'm currently managing, and it's a pain. A central ad-blocking appliance has a lot of attraction because of that all by itself.

phosdex
Dec 16, 2005



Tortured By Flan

WD is going to add a Red Plus line that is CMR. Gonna assume this will come with a price premium.

https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/

Zorak of Michigan
Jun 10, 2006

Waiting for his chance

They only have so much pricing power, even now, so hopefully it will be a marginal bump.

D. Ebdrup
Mar 13, 2009



phosdex posted:

WD is going to add a Red Plus line that is CMR. Gonna assume this will come with a price premium.

https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/
Red Pro is already CMR-only and sold at a premium. What the fuck, WD?

Henrik Zetterberg
Dec 7, 2007




So, sneak performance-leeching technology into current product, then add a price premium to current product without performance-leeching technology. Sure WD, ya dicks.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

I'd wait to see what they do with prices before lambasting them too much: on the 8TB+ range it looks like just a naming rebadge, since there won't be any "WD Reds" of those capacities. The Red Plus 2-6TB of course are gonna cost more than their SMR WD Red counterparts, but that's reasonable given the extra expense (comparatively) of CMR.

But yeah, if they start selling the normally ~$275 10TB Reds as $350 Red Plus drives, I'mma be mad.





Well, no, I won't, because only businesses and institutions buy Reds at retail price these days. As long as CMR drives are still being used in the shuckable externals, I don't really care much.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast


NihilCredo posted:

If all your electronics run non-crippled Linux / Windows / Android you have no need of pihole.

Ding ding ding

CopperHound
Feb 14, 2012



HalloKitty posted:

Ding ding ding
Is non crippled Android specifically referring to jailbroken? I can't find a way to create a custom hosts file stock Android.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast


CopperHound posted:

Is non crippled Android specifically referring to jailbroken? I can't find a way to create a custom hosts file stock Android.

Well, Android is "jailbroken" in the iPhone sense just by checking one thing in the options (installing applications from other sources), but I'm guessing you're referring to rooting, yeah. It needs to be rooted to write to the hosts file.
I use AdAway, which I keep updated from F-Droid.

NihilCredo
Jun 6, 2011

iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt



I use DNS66 (also from F-Droid) which installs itself as a VPN, so it basically works the same as a pihole except locally, and doesn't require root. Of course I also have uBlock Origin on mobile Firefox.

Fabulousity
Dec 29, 2008

= (Displacement through a hetero medium) / Time


Nap Ghost

Has anyone seen this yet?




Of course something like this could only be spawned in 2020.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Hopefully they learned some lessons from the Kingston HyperX RGB.

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