Custom home server built from spare parts

Custom home server built from spare parts asmat.ca

Google nagged me into this, along with every other enshittified cloud ~~provider~~ dealer. For about a year, my phone warned me that the account was nearly…

91 points•sotilrac•10 days ago•54 comments•

#home #custom #server #spare #server built #custom home #spare parts #home server

54 comments

drnick110 days ago

> So the NAS runs Kubuntu 24.04 with ZFS

My experience is similar. I no longer use dedicated NAS, firewall, or other exotic distributions. I run plain Debian, and add what I need through standard repo packages. My "NAS" is simply a Samba daemon. The same box runs countless other services including hostapd (WiFi), DNS (Unbound), an email stack (Postfix/Dovecot), multiple game servers, and Podman.

> everything else in Docker Compose

I would suggest Podman instead. It is far more secure by design (rootless) and is unable to silently alter the firewall's configuration.

Oxodao10 days ago

> is unable to silently alter the firewall's configuration

I'd like more informations about this as I'm not too familiar with firewall setup but every time I tried to setup iptables / nft it was indeed bypassed by docker. Recently I found out in the docs that docker adds a DOCKER-USER table, isn't it enough to put your rules in it to prevent the outside world to reach containers ?

unethical_ban10 days ago

I find Proxmox to be a great host. It's Debian with a bunch of helper scripts/GUI to run containers and VMs. I manage ZFS outside the Proxmox bubble and run a privileged SMB server container to access it.

Though I really don't use the server anymore and it's probably worth several thousand dollars with the RAM in it. Been thinking of using a spare laptop with external HD bays to do the same job.

marysol510 days ago

Don't know what it is with Proxmox, but I always somehow managed to break it in such a way that I can't remove the container/VM or start it...

Gigachad10 days ago

These days you can buy 4 bay USB-C hard drive enclosures which let you make a nas out of any mini pc. I 3D printed a 10 inch rack to put the mini pc, hard drive enclosure and switch in which keeps it all neat and looks kinda cool.

M95D10 days ago

USB is unreliable.

I used btrfs raid0 on USB drives for more than a year. Every month or so, a drive would disconnect from the bus and immediately redetected as another device (sde->sdf). Btrfs does not auto-recover from this. The choices are 1) reboot and scrub, which recovers the missing drive without doing a full resync, but it needs a reboot (any hosted site is offline for 3 minutes) and scrub takes a long time reading in the background, or 2) run btrfs replace which doesn't need a reboot, but the full resync takes even longer than a scrub and increases wear if it's a ssd because it wipes everything and writes all data again.

drnick110 days ago

Why not an old school case with an HDD cage that can hold anywhere between a few and a dozen drives? It would be cheaper and more flexible.

magarnicle10 days ago

I do a similar thing. It really is functionally exactly the same, just a bit more piecemeal.

sotilrac10 days ago

Interesting, I never tried Podman. Thanks for the suggestion!

mindslight10 days ago

Re names, I like "homeprod". The main goal isn't to experiment and learn, and you're not scrapping to get a pair of Cisco 2501's to study for your CCNA. Rather the main goal is providing services that support your family's larger existence, independent of the surveillance industry - the tinkering is an (unfortunately necessary) side effect.

close0410 days ago

This is an underestimated part of operating IT infrastructure at home. Something a lot of homelab builders miss. They have a homelab that mixes in the same environment and same equipment the role of delivering standard services for the house and family, with the role of experimenting and toying around.

Everyone who builds this should really have "homeprod" and "homelab". And when the experiments and tests inevitably lead to an outage, the movie streaming or photo storage or home control parts don't die with it.

ismailperim10 days ago

All homelabs need a DevOps Engineer :-D

sfRattan10 days ago

I very much like how the name "homeprod" contrasts against "homelab."

But I'm not as convinced as the article's author that "NAS" is outdated as a separate concept, just that as new people learn more about networking they rediscover why just having storage on in its own box can be a good setup. And when new people are brand new, having everything on one box is conceptually simpler, though not always optimal.

I think, in the family/household context, I like the names:

Homelab: the box/cluster you use to experiment and test new stuff.

Homeprod: the box/cluster you use to deploy stable services for family. Runs only things that have graduated from at least a yearlong successful deployment or so on homelab.

Homebase: the box/cluster you use to make ZFS pools and databases available to both homelab and homeprod (on the same network or overlay network). Basically a NAS in the older sense of the word, before homelabs started expanding its scope in casual use.

Famadmin: the sysadmin for the family (i.e. "you" in the three items above). The person to whom, as you say, "providing services that support your family's larger existence, independent of the surveillance industry," is a matter of deep principle. And well put, BTW.

mindslight9 days ago

Putting aside the awesomeness of the term homebase, what exactly differentiates the base from the prod? Aren't those ZFS pools just production? Or something like an MQTT broker that supports home automation - you're likely running experimental devices/services over that as well, right? And to the extent that experimental MQTT or NAS traffic could inadvertently disrupt the production services, you could separate those out if you really cared. But that would still just be lab and prod.

Maybe the division is more apparent if you're using containers, and/or have more of a social group to communicate support levels to? Personally I'm just using NixOS and am still at the stage of "I'm going to reboot the router now, it might take ten minutes or it might take days" [0]

If we don't need this distinction, then perhaps "homebase" could actually make more sense than "homeprod" ? Slightly different connotations, less putting on a show for lots of people but more homey like for a small family?

[0] from a technical perspective I'd love to separate the router out onto its own machine, but I want fast wireguard/openvpn/TOR/etc so it's a VM on a larger machine and I'm not really looking to expand my power consumption footprint to another large machine. I suppose I could split it out to two routers, one with straight NAT+wireguard and one with openvpn/TOR/etc, then the main could run on its own low-power box.

sotilrac10 days ago

Absolutely, I was running the server on my main desktop before this, and it was super stressful. One of the main drivers was to move things to something more stable. NGL, I still experimenton it though...

MayeulC10 days ago

I am most interested in that DC power supply. I bought a similar one recently (rgeek brand on aliexpress), but haven't yet dared to connect it yet.

I'm wondering what:

- the failure mode is if it can't provide enough current.

- How to properly test it under a fake load

- If these tiny power cables can really handle 150 W (this is 12 A at 12V). I don't have such a powerful 12V PSU, so I am thinking about adding capacitors to handle transients.

I imagine that it is really built to handle transient peaks to 150 W, with a more reasonable baseline.

Anyway, if anyone knows a good knowledge source for these PSU, I'd be interested.

My initial motication for going with these was:

- hopefully increase my PSU efficiency

- less cable clutter

- hopefully power it from a small DC UPS (there are plenty of "router" UPS sold on the market, though the power rating is a bit low, 18-36 W usually).

M95D10 days ago

I have a RK3588 SBC with 5 HDDs and with a good ATX power source it draws about 24-26W from the wall socket. I tried replacing that with a 5A 12V DC power brick and the power usage increased to 28-30W.

Measurements are not accurate, but comparable. I used a Tasmota smart plug - the same one in both cases.

MayeulC9 days ago

Thanks for the data point, and the vote of confidence. I do not have the best setup to measure power draw (I just broke my dedicated smart plug), but it it may also increase power draw in my case (20 to 30 W, ERYING M-ITX 12500H + 2 nvme SSDs). Your numbers are impressive for 5 HDDs, are they 3.5"?

Anyway, it may be a transient that I am measuring, as the PC turns off during the boot sequence, after the CPU fan starts revving up. My 5A PSU may not be enough, I'll try limiting the TDP and the power brick.

sotilrac10 days ago

The parts linked on the post are performing well. If you size them well, the main issue you can run into is inrush current when powering up. You may need a soft start circuit. I know I'm at the limit and may need to add a soft start if I add more fans.

MayeulC9 days ago

Thanks for the feedback! A triggered power-on seauence for drives and fans makes sense, though I feel like this could also be solved by putting a couple of large capacitors on the 12V power rail (those need to charge as well, obviously, which might be an issue on startup).

Lammy10 days ago

> The rest of the upgrade came out of my junk drawers. Two DDR4 sticks from an old laptop take the memory to the platform maximum of 32 GB

Realtalk: make sure you are religious about testing your RAM if you're going to run ZFS with non-ECC RAM. I'm not going to say “don't do it”, but know what you're getting into and how to protect yourself from this failure mode.

It's unintuitive, but ZFS will actually modify your files on disk as a side effect of a read-only operation if blocks get read into bad RAM and checksum mismatch compared to the blocks on disk.

This happened to me in 2013–14 with some bad PC3 10600 in my 2600K desktop FreeBSD system, and it rotted a bunch of my most frequently accessed files. I was able to figure out what was going on once audible blips started appearing in all of my favorite most-listened-to music, then I learned about `flac -t` and was able to confirm the rot thanks to the fact that FLAC files embed an expected MD5 digest in their `STREAMINFO` block. `man flac` sez…

“In test mode, flac acts just like in decode mode, except no output file is written. Both decode and test modes detect errors in the stream, but they also detect when the MD5 signature of the decoded audio does not match the stored MD5 signature, even when the bitstream is valid.” (emphasis mine)

  [Lammy@popola] flac --test "Floating Door - Hypersomnia in loop - 12 templeOS.flac"
  Floating Door - Hypersomnia in loop - 12 templeOS.flac: ok

  [Lammy@popola] metaflac --show-md5sum "Floating Door - Hypersomnia in loop - 12 templeOS.flac"
  d9ccdc78cfa45dda01b38198575b4f56

  [Lammy@popola] flac --decode --stdout --silent --force-raw-format --endian=little --sign=signed "Floating Door - Hypersomnia in loop - 12 templeOS.flac" | md5
  d9ccdc78cfa45dda01b38198575b4f56

After that experience, I moved my ZFS storage to a dedicated system — first on an Atom C2750 board and later (and currently) an Atom C3758, both with ECC UDIMMs. (Stay away from the C2xxx series tho; they are all doomed to CLK-circuit-degradation death which repairing only prolongs but does not prevent)

sotilrac10 days ago

Author here: I've been taking a lot of interest in data corruption and preservation lately. Definitely will look into this. Thanks for the pointer!

ghostly_s10 days ago

I've noticed 3d printing people have this annoying habit of posting pics of their projects in just low enough res that you can't assess what the surface finish actually looks like. From what I can tell this "pebbled" finish looks uncommonly nice, I wonder if that's a byproduct of the glass fiber material or some post-processing.

sotilrac10 days ago

Saving that precious GitLab Pages storage . I really liked the finish of the ABS GF from Bambu Lab. It matched the original case finish pretty well out of the printer. However, the glass fill is a bit scary; you can feel the fibers poking. I wiped it with a sturdy rag to remove the loose fibers.

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