Tiny home server project?

[Cláudio Vieira]

Hi Antonio,

Thanks for your feedback!

I’m resuming this project after a couple months hiatus.

> Yeah, documentation could be improved indeed.


I plan to document my progress, wherever it leads to! ;)

> 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).


I’ve settled on a ZimaBoard with Intel Celeron N3450 +8GB RAM +32GB eMMC.
It’s a power efficient SBC, with low power CPU, but suitable for diverse projects.
Paired with a couple SSDs it should be apt as backups server / media library.

>> 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).

I will go with HAMMER2, since it's the path forward in DragonFly.
Thanks Matt for having clarified this point and updated the website.

>> 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.

I was thinking about the master-slave data streaming of HAMMER1.
This feature is not yet supported by HAMMER2, AFAIK :(

Thanks for the pointers to ccd and vinum. My research concluded:
- ccd is very old and unsupported (?), removed from most BSDs;
- vinum is old and legacy, deprecated / removed from some BSDs.

Alternative could be natacontrol/nataraid, removed from some BSDs.
Finally, there’s lvm2, modern and supported in Linux and some BSDs.

The current status of all these tools in DragonFly is not exactly clear...
I’m inclined to experiment with lvm2, but would appreciate further advice!

Additionally, I would like to encrypt the filesystem (data and system).
lvm2 integrates nicely with dm_crypt, which is supported in DragonFly.

Am I on the right path?!

Best,
Cláudio Vieira