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

[Brian via TriLUG]

I'd stop short of calling myself a "supremo" anything, but here are some 
thoughts:

- I'm pretty sure RPi /has/ to boot from SD.  So that's where your root 
FS should probably live.  If you put /var on an external drive, you 
should be able to run with / mounted read-only (this is something I mean 
to try with some of my RPi-based projects but have never gotten around 
to), thereby further protecting your root FS from mishaps.

- I'd recommend dnsmasq over a full bind 9 installation.  Should save a 
lot of space and CPU overhead.  dnsmasq also gives you dhcp.  I've 
gotten plenty of mileage out of my dnsmasq setup, from having internal 
clients resolve my public DNS hostnames to the server's internal 
interface, as well as setting up static DHCP leases for various network 
resources (printers, IP cameras, etc).

I'm pretty sure my knowledge of things like samba is dated.  I still use 
samba to share files and printers to Windows, but I couldn't say if 
there's a better choice.

-B

On 5/1/20 11:57 AM, Pete Soper via TriLUG 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
> 
> 
>