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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Since you mentioned MLC, maybe you have some suggestions for eg used server grade disks? Would the Rpi be able to run something like the Intel datacenter SSDs eg S3700? The power loss protection is really something I would like to have, especially in a homelab scenario. Or any other notable MLCs with larger capacities? I am having trouble finding a good list sorted by max potential storage.










  • I know what you mean. Most people mean well, some are a bit too aggressive, but probably also mean well. I honestly sometimes roll my eyes when I start reading about tailscale, cloudflare tunnels etc. The main thing is not to expose anything you don’t absolutely need to expose.

    For access from the outside the most you should need is a random high port forwarded for ssh into a dedicated host (can be a VM / container if you don’t have a spare RaspberryPi). And Wireguard on a host which updates the server package regularly. So probably not on your router, unless the vendor is on top of things.

    Regarding ansible and documenting, I totally get your point. Ten years ago I was an absolute Linux noob and my flatmate had to set up an IRC bouncer on my RPi. It ran like that for a few years and I dared not touch anything. Then the SD card died and took down the bouncer, dynDNS and a few other things running on it.

    It takes me a lot of time to write and test my ansible playbooks and custom roles, but every now and then I have to move services between hosts. And this is an absolute life saver. Whenever I’m really low on time and need to get something up and running, I write down things in a readme in my infra repository and occasionally I would go through my backlog when I have nothing better to do.


  • One word of advice. Document the steps you do to deploy things. If your hardware fails or you make a simple mistake, it will cost you weeks of work to recover. This is a bit extreme, but I take my time when setting things up and automate as good as possible using ansible. You don’t have to do this, but the ability to just scrap things and redeploy gives great peace of mind.

    And right now you are reluctant to do this because it’s gonna cost you too much time. This should not be the case. I mean, just imagine things going wrong in a year or two and you can’t remember most things you know now. Document your setup and write a few scripts. It’s a good start.








  • Oh okay that’s a lot of power. For reference, I just set up an old Haswell PC as a NAS, idling at 25W (can’t get to low Package C states) and usually at 28-30 running light workloads on an SSD pool. My plan was to add a 5 disk cage and at least 3 HDDs, with Raidz2 and 5 disks being the mid term goal. Absolutely unnecessary and a huge waste. I settled on less but larger disks, and in mirror I can get 12-18 TB usable space for under 500€. Less noise and power draw too.


  • Look for 5W idle consumption boards + CPU combos which go down to package C6+ state. HardwareLuxx has a spreadsheet with various builds focusing on low power. Sell half your disks, go mirror or Raidz1. Invest the difference in off-site vps and or backup. Storage on any SBC is a big pain and you will hit the sata connector / IO limits very soon.

    The small NUC form factors are also fine, but if your problem is power you can go very low with a good approach and the right parts. And you’ll make up for any new investments within the first year.