Back in 2012 or so, I reused an old netbook (an Asus Eee PC) with an Atom CPU & 1GB of RAM, installed Ubuntu Server, and used it as a home server. It handled the printer, DNS-VPN proxying for streaming, and a few other things admirably for years. (And ironically was resilient to Spectre because its Atom CPU was before Intel added speculative execution)

Eventually, the thing that kicked the bucket was actually the keyboard (and later the fan started making "my car won't start" noises occasionally). Even the horribly-slow HDD (that handled Ubuntu Server surprisingly well) hadn't died yet.

If you know where to look/are a little lucky, you can get an adequate RAID5 going for like $500-800 depending on the storage you need. I grabbed a QNAP 4 bay (no SSD caching) and 4x refurbished enterprise HDD's (14tb/ea) for just under $700 all-in last november if memory serves. Pretty reasonable for a 42tb RAID5 IMO.

That looks very interesting - will look into it, thanks.

Interesting idea... thanks for sharing.

I have two setups.

1.) A mirror with an attached Tasmota Power Plug that I can turn on and off via curl to spin up an USB-Backup-HD:

  curl "$TASMOTA_HOST/cm?cmnd=POWER+ON"
  # preparation and pool imports
  # ...
  # clone the active pool onto usb pool
  zfs send --raw -RI "$BACKUP_FROM_SNAPSHOT" "$BACKUP_UNTIL_SNAPSHOT" | pv | zfs recv -Fdu "$DST_POOL"

To prevent partial data loss I use zfs-auto-snapshot, zrepl or sanoid, which I configure to snapshot every 15 minutes and keep daily, weekly, montly and yearly snapshots as long as possible.

To clean up my space when having too many snapshots, I wrote my own zfs-tool (https://github.com/sandreas/zfs-tool), where you can do something like this:

  zfs-tool list-snapshots --contains='rpool/home@' --required-space=20G --keep-time="30d"

That's a really cool idea and matches my use case well. I just copy pasted it to another person in this thread who was asking about the ZFS setup.

Your use case perfectly matches mine in that I wouldn't mind much about a few hours of data loss.

I guess the one issue is that it would require more disks, which at the current prices is not cheap. I was suprised how expensive it was when I bought them 6 months ago and was even more suprised when I looked recently and the same drives are even more now.

I opted to use a two disk mirror, and offline the slow disk. Hourly cronjob to online the slow disk, wait, and then offline it again.

Gives me the benefit of automatic fixes in the event of bit rot in any blocks more then an hour old too.

Yeah they are HDs and are surprisingly noisy.

Think services

You can own a computer and not run any services at all. Most people do.

Deciding to run your own services, like email, means a lot of work that most people aren’t interested or capable of doing.

It’s the difference between using your computer to consume things or produce things.

It’s not clear from the blog post if the S3 is accessible from outside their home. I agree with the parent that purely local services aren’t what typically counts as “self-hosting”.

We call it self hosting because it is typically hosted by someone else, get it?

Let's not kid ourselves that maintaining 10TB with resiliency handling and other controls built in is something that is trivial. It is only trivial due to the offerings that Cloud computing has made easy.

Self-hosting implies those features without the cloud element and not just buying a computer.

How awful. It seems to be a pattern nowadays?

Some former colleagues still using gitlab ce tell me they also removed features from their self-hosted version, particularly from their runners.

If I can reassure you about Garage, it's not at all abandoned. We have active work going on to make a GUI for cluster administration, and we have applied for a new round of funding for more low-level work on performance, which should keep us going for the next year or so. Expect some more activity in the near future.

I manage several Garage clusters and will keep maintaining the software to keep these clusters running. But concerning the "low level of activity in the git repo": we originally built Garage for some specific needs, and it fits these needs quite well in its current form. So I'd argue that "low activity" doesn't mean it's not reliable, in fact it's the contrary: low activity means that it works well for us and there isn't a need to change anything.

Of course implementing new features is another deal, I personally have only limited time to spend on implementing features that I don't need myself. But we would always welcome outside contributions of new features from people with specific needs.

I've used Ceph in a home lab setting for 9 years or so now. Since cephadm is has gotten even easier to manage even though it really was never that hard. A few pointers. No SMR drives, they have such bad performance that they can periodically drop out of the cluster. Second, no consumer SSDs/NVMe devices. You need power loss prevention on your drives. Ceph directly writes to the drive, it ignores cache, without PLP you may literally have slower performance than rust.

You also want fast networking, I just use 10Gbps. My nodes each are 6 rust and 1 NVMe drive each, 5 nodes. I colocate my MONs and MDS daemons with my OSDs, each node has 64GB of RAM and I use around 40GB.

Usage is RDB for a three node OpenStack cluster, and CephFS. I have about 424TiB between rust and NVMe raw.

Yeah, this was an effort to get around cloud costs for large amounts of 'low value' data that I have but use in my other home servers for processing. I still sync some smaller result sets to an S3 in the cloud for redundancy as well as for CDN uses.

I thought zfs is doing the RAID.

Yes, it's S3 API compatible, but it's not S3. The originally submitted article title misleads by claiming it's S3. There is no valid excuse.

Okay, weird to call it S3, if it is just object storage somewhere else. Its like saying "EKS" if you mean Kubernetes, or talking about "self hosting EC2" by installing qemu.

Yeah, that's pretty standard for object storage to be S3-compatible. I think azure blob is the only one that doesn't support it.