Tiny home server project?

[Antonio Huete Jimenez]

On 3/12/22 0:36, Cláudio Vieira wrote:
> Hello DragonFlyers,
> 
> I'm a newcomer to DragonFly and thinking of a nice project to experiment.

Welcome!

> Maybe an extra small server to run a couple services, kind of an appliance,
> for home and family use, like a backups server or a media library...
> 
> What could be the minimal / recommended hardware requirements?

It really depends on what you want to run exactly.

> 
> There’s not much info on the web about tiny servers using DragonFly.
> Perhaps I’m on the wrong path here or was just unlucky not to find it.
> Shared stories and pointers to similar projects would be appreciated.
> 

Yeah, documentation could be improved indeed.

> I know the one true answer is “it depends”! :)
> 
> Let’s take an example, say a tiny home backups server with 1TB storage.
> Starting with a single board computer (SBC of type x86_64 of course),
> how much RAM would be needed or recommended?

For a backups server and/or a media library probably the cpu/memory 
requirements are going to be minimal (some low power cpu + 2 to 4GB RAM 
will work just fine).

> 
> Some SBCs have internal storage (e.g. eMMC) that could be used to
> install DragonFly, but they risk wear out. Alternatively, maybe DragonFly
> could be loaded (even from a USB stick) and run entirely from RAM?
> 

Yes, in fact one of our installation media (if not the preferred one) is 
to write the image to a usb stick. With regards to running on RAM, we 
don't have that as far as I can tell.

> It seems the HAMMER file system would be a perfect match for this use
> case. Would you recommend 1 or 2, since some features are divergent?
> 

If you need to stream out your data you probably want HAMMER1 as its 
snapshots can be sent across networks to another HAMMER1 filesystem, 
that's something HAMMER2 doesn't have. But nowadays, there are 
alternatives for a regular filesystem to be backed up elsewhere (i.e. 
rclone to B2 or S3).

> Concerning data storage redundancy, for sure it would be easy to attach
> a couple drives (HDDs or SSDs) and set them in “mirror” mode or similar.
> 

In this are we're lacking. Although we have vinum or ccd, in my opinion 
the only real RAID-1 you can get is via a hardware raid card.

> What about backup of the backups (e.g. offline or offsite)?! It seems
> HAMMER would be helpful for this too, but I’m not sure how…
> 

See my earlier comments about rclone.


> Would it be possible to connect a secondary HAMMER drive (USB)
> on demand and sync it automatically with the main drive?

Yes, you can certainly do that but you'll have to do it with 
rclone/rsync/etc since hammer2 can't replicat itself to another hammer2 fs.

> 
> Thanks,
> Cláudio Vieira


Cheers!