
Upgrading my home server - walterbell
https://www.earth.li/%7Enoodles/blog/2019/07/upgrading-the-house-server.html
======
effie
For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated
tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan.
You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it.

Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very
loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have
separate room for it.

~~~
kyriakos
I have my doubts over bedroom quiet if you have hard drives in it. Ssd
unfortunately still too expensive for redundant home storage use.

~~~
tiew9Vii
I have a Fractal Design Define R5 case ([https://www.fractal-
design.com/home/product/cases/define-ser...](https://www.fractal-
design.com/home/product/cases/define-series/define-r5-black)) in my living
room at the side of my television where I sit a few feet away in a small
apartment and can not hear it unless I put my head right next to it, then I
can just about hear the case fans.

It's fitted with 4 x 4TB WD Reds, a stock AMD Ryzen 2600 cooler, Corsair
RM850x PSU and the cheapest graphics card I could find with a HDMI out, the
graphic card has a small fan. I also have a HBA card I modded adding a small
Noctua fan as they are passively cooled and designed to go in rack mount cases
where they have high airflow passing over them so get to hot in a desktop.

The case has rubber mountings for the hard drives and sound reducing material
on the side panels.

I built it to be quiet but didn't go massively out my way or spend massively
to make it quieter i.e. I choose a good case but have stock case fans, stock
cpu cooler and choose a PSU where the fan only spins up under load which I'll
never hit.

It's not to hard to build something that for all intent and purposes is silent
as long as you don't pimp it out with the latest fastest graphic cards, have
it maxed out 24/7, or go small.

~~~
bengerbil
I have the same case, similar PSU setup. My latest UPS makes more noise than
the system it's protecting.

Meanwhile, the low-end atom box attached to the TV has extra fans on it And
constantly makes noise. My excuse is that I built it about 8 years ago.

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bpye
I've been running a gen 8 microserver with a 4C/8T Xeon for the past few
years. The servers got cheap like <£200 and the Xeon was used from eBay for
not very much, IIRC £100. Stuck in a cheap 8GB ECC stick of DDR3 to bring the
total to 12GB and it currently runs NixOS.

I still haven't found anything with a comparably convenient form factor and
the remote management is pretty useful too. Can still saturate my 1G LAN, more
or less, with Samba. Other than the power draw, which I'm sure would improve
with a more modern CPU, I haven't really felt the need to upgrade.

~~~
vbezhenar
Same here. Another annoyance for me is that its fans are a bit loud unless I'm
running it in fake raid mode which requires proprietary Linux drivers. But
I've found nothing comparable.

~~~
Scoundreller
If you’re okay with less airflow, you may be able to run the fans at 10V if
you have a -5 and +5 available. Or just run a few diodes on the 12V supply to
the fan to get 0.6x voltage drops.

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p0d
I have been running an HP dc7800 sff, core2duo, as my home server for a number
of years now. I run lxc containers for Gitlab, Nextcloud, several test
environments and Plex. Highest power usage is about 60w, usually just on boot.
It has an ssd and two metal disks in raid.

It’s cronned to reboot every night which from experience keeps performance
ticking over. It cost me £25 on ebay. I bought another recently just for parts
really.

I get a buzz making the most out of old and inexpensive gear.

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thequailman
My setup: AMD ryzen tower with 32GB ram and multi port PCI NICs running
Debian. Internet comes into the onboard NIC, and I VLAN out the NICs to
downstream devices. Server itself doesn't run anything directly, instead I use
nspawn "VMs" connected to the same VLANs as necessary. I rsync to a raspberry
pi with a USB HDD at a relatives house.

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cptnapalm
At a state auction, I got a dual processor 2009 Mac Pro for $250. I did spend
a bit on extra hardware as it's a server and a multiseat desktop. It has 2 low
watt AMD GCN cards, 48 GB RAM, 2 hexacore processors, 4 SSDs and hard drives.
It's quiet and is good enough to have 1 seat playing Tomb Raider while the
other is playing Hitman while having nginx forwarding to Tomcat which starts
Guacamole which connects to GDM so I can get my desktop in a browser as well
as other more typical stuff like sshd. I read a lot of UNIX oral history stuff
and Dennis Ritchie's comments about a community forming around a single
computer always stuck with me. Now, I have something like that and am enjoying
the experience. If I can figure out how to add more seats, I'll enjoy it even
more.

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amelius
What is the best and cheapest way to make a home server available to the
internet, using a standard "home use" ISP contract? Can you give it a domain
name?

How do you deal with the asymmetrical upload/download speeds of most home
connections?

~~~
exhilaration
cheapest way is to sign up with a dynamic DNS service like
[http://freedns.afraid.org/](http://freedns.afraid.org/) \- choose a subdomain
you like. Then run an agent on your server to monitor when/if your public IP
changes - it will send the new IP to the dynamic DNS.

If you'd prefer a paid option that uses your own domain, then some providers
like Digital Ocean expose DNS settings via API. Here's a google search to get
you started:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=dynamic+dns+host+for+digital...](https://www.google.com/search?q=dynamic+dns+host+for+digitalocean)

~~~
crtasm
Afraid.org is great, note that you don't necessarily need to install any
software to use it - you're given a line to paste into your crontab and it's
setup. It simply wget/curls an update URL every few minutes.

~~~
amelius
Any reason they chose "Afraid" as their name? A name is just a name, but it
feels a bit offputting to use that in the address of my home server, tbh.

~~~
insertnickname
I don't know, but they have many different domains to choose from. I'm not
sure if you can even get a subdomain of afraid.org.

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polskibus
Has anyone experimented with BL-R for home server backup (or a backup's
backup)? Are there tools for home use that help automate the backup, keep
track of metadata, somehow handle delta backup to new discs, etc?

~~~
cyphar
I'd suggest restic for backups (it's encrypted and deduplicated automatically,
with the ability to have very simple retention policies). It backs up to
basically any dumb storage service (S3, Backblaze, Google Cloud) and you can
sync it yourself since it's just a tree of files like a git repo. For storage
on the actual machine, use ZFS or something similar so that you can do your
restic backups on an atomic snapshot.

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barrkel
I have my home server in the attic, a 4U with a bunch of drives in it running
ZFS. 4G RAM, Q6600 Intel chip - I've been running the same hardware for years.
The fan sound is unnoticeable - it's on the other side of the insulation, and
it's approximately located above my desk in my home office.

It gets hot in the attic in summer, but I've had no failures thus far (no
hardware errors from overheating, no drives died). Dust filters on the fans
need cleaning off every year or so.

I'm due to upgrade it, 4G ceiling is starting to get tight when using more
recent software.

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olavgg
On Ebay you can grab a Dell R210 II with 1240v2 CPU for 150-200 USD, it is
quiet, idles at 20 watt, 80 watt at full load and plenty of power.

If you need more cores, the Xeon D is another great alternative but costs a
lot more.

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gigatexal
For my home servers I do everything I can to have as much redundancy and fault
tolerance that I can afford and that means insisting on ECC ram to start. It’s
not a server if it’s not toting ECC ram in my book.

~~~
close04
Depends a lot on what you do with it. ECC might be overkill for Plex or some
home automation. But for a lengthy Matlab simulation it’s more than
recommended.

~~~
gigatexal
Yeah that’s true, Plex doesn’t need ECC. I’d like the NAS that serves the
media to have ECC though.

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finnjohnsen2
What a clever way that rack was - hanging like that. Love it and my head is
spinning how I should do this with both my battlestation-PC, NAS, routers and
everything.

~~~
walterbell
Vertical mount may require a change in airflow/fan direction.

~~~
finnjohnsen2
Yes, I was initially thinking the same, then I couldn't quite figure out
exactly why so?

The first thing that comes to mind is dust build-up, but that happens anyway
in standard PC chassis also.

Second is that heat goes up, which meens "forward" in the rack. So I assume
blowing upwards/forwards is smarter than blowing down/back, as you're pissing
against the wind instead of with it. Other than this second principle, I can't
figure out anything else to worry about....?

~~~
walterbell
Most rack chassis have front fans which send air to the back of the chassis,
with heatsinks oriented with direction of airflow. Air is forced from the
front to the back, passing through the heatsink fins.

If vertically mounted with the rack "front" at the top, the forced airflow
down will be in the opposite direction of convention airflow up. Fans may have
to spin faster/louder to achieve the same level of cooling.

If the front fans are reversed, the fan airflow will be aligned with
convection, but will immediately exhaust from the front instead of being aimed
squarely at heatsink fins. The intake vents at the back of the chassis will
provide sources of air, but are likely not uniformly distributed (compared to
the fans) across the width of the chassis.

For a home server that is mostly idle, there may not be much difference, but
the safest path is to run some stress tests with different cooling
configurations.

Edit: some chassis have back-to-front airflows,
[http://thenetworksherpa.com/airflow-is-
important/](http://thenetworksherpa.com/airflow-is-important/)

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Havoc
I'm gonna stick to just using my previous gen laptop as I upgrade.

Need fresh ones due to GPU so the old one is perfectly fine for server duty
still. Stick a couple USB3 docks on there & good to go

But...now I'm unsure what to do with the old old one...

~~~
Scoundreller
Part it out? I do that with my previous gen MacBook Air and usually get a good
return.

