[TriLUG] tips for a new, RPI-based house server

[John Mitchell via TriLUG]

You wouldn't consider Raspian?

john mitchell

On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 12:00 PM Pete Soper via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

> Dear Supremo System Designers and Maintainers,
>
> Roughly seven years ago I slapped together a Samba server on an original
> Odroid C4 (think Raspberry Pi 2, but well before that came out) running
> Ubuntu 14.04. The rotating drives were set to spin down after relatively
> short idle times and I just lived with the few seconds pause while they
> spun up (i.e. this has zero pain factor). It has silently done it's job
> while emulating a night light wrt power dissipation, but it's time to
> swap in something better before my luck runs out. I want to swap vs
> upgrade to avoid any down time or time spent with no service 'cause I
> hosed something in the middle and can't figure out how to recover.
>
> I have a 4GB RPI 4 with heat sinks and fan, a USB 3 powered hub and pair
> of 2TB USB 3 interfaced drives for a RAID 1. I may or may not use the
> old trick to have the RPI's root filesystem on another USB drive vs
> using an SD card (i.e. the SD card would be for boot loading only).
>
> The questions are what OS to use, whether Samba is still the right
> choice, and , as I may want the thing to provide local DNS caching, spam
> sink, etc, what the best combo of software infrastructure for that might
> be? My wife has to be able to access some of the storage with zero
> hassle using Windows (7 and 10) but she could live with a bit lower
> performance than what I might get with another Linux system as her
> accesses are few and far between (and she's used to Windows being dog
> slow anyway!) The RPI will have wired ethernet connection to the house
> router and I have no current plans or desires to touch the RPI 4's wifi
> or bluetooth, let alone it's GPIO et all: that's well over the horizon
> and not on the table here.
>
> Left to my own devices I'd go with Debian 10 + Samba and either bind 9
> or a more recent equivalent but without much clue about advantages of
> one or the other. This won't be a general purpose system, so, for
> example, the fact that app X won't run on Debian but does on Ubuntu is
> not relevant. All my experience for maybe 15 years has been with Debian
> or derivatives, so I'm not keen about Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, etc. The
> spam sink is appealing but up to now I've never tried one: I just use
> Adblock with my browser. But I'm both ignorant and conflicted about the
> latter, as, for example, when I visit the amateur radio classifieds at
> qth.com I don't want to disable those ads and can "pause" the blocker
> for the specific site, as those ads are the means of support and the guy
> that runs it is a personal friend. I guess I can just "white list" sites
> like these? (No idea what I'm talking about with this last question).
>
> So, what do you recommend?
>
> -Pete
>
>
>
> --
> This message was sent to: john mitchell <john280z at gmail.com>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that
> address.
> TriLUG mailing list : https://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web  :
> https://www.trilug.org/mailman/options/trilug/john280z%40gmail.com
> Welcome to TriLUG: https://trilug.org/welcome