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

[shay walters via TriLUG]

I'll throw in a couple of cents worth of input...
    I have been running Samba services on my backup systems for several
years.  I recently added NFS services to them (the Samba is still there,
too), and I found that access with NFS clients is noticeably faster.  Some
things that I had gotten accustomed to failing randomly using Samba (VNC
not uncommonly, for one) have been working flawlessly with NFS.  So you
might want to consider using NFS instead of - or along-side of - Samba.  If
you have NFS, you won't need Samba unless you need to access it from a
Windows machine.
    If you get a box like the one mentioned in an earlier message, check if
it needs drives specifically designed for use in RAID.  Some manufacturers
have a series of "Red" drives that are designed for RAID.  The drives that
are designed for RAID will report an error right away (rather than retrying
like a normal drive will) and let the controller deal with things.  If you
use normal drives in a controller designed for RAID drives, you're quite
likely to end up with the whole array being lost (Unfortunately I'm
speaking from experience).  The first time a drive starts an
automatic-retry to get data from a marginal sector (soft error), the
controller sees that delay as a drive failure.  Then when it tries to
re-stripe onto a hot-spare, it's very likely to encounter another soft
error somewhere on another drive, and then your whole array is marked
offline.  I never had any luck recovering from this situation.
    My Linux box uses soft-raid - the drives are normal drives on a normal
consumer-grade motherboard, but with Linux-RAID partitions set up during
installation, and the RAID is handled in software.  I expect that this
could be made to work in Raspian, although I haven't tried.  I think it
would be a little more involved since you don't run an installer on R-Pi,
it's already "installed" onto the SD card.  So you'd probably have to do
the fdisk magic and "MD" declarations manually.

-Shay


On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 2:51 PM Brian via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> On 5/1/20 2:42 PM, Chris Bickhaus via TriLUG wrote:
> >> The guys at the Self-Hosted podcast have been talking about how snappy
> >> it is running the Raspberry Pi from an external SSD. I guess they have
> >> it booting from a small SD Card and loading the rootfs from SSD.
> >
> > On this week’s Linux Unplugged (ep. 351), he mentions that due to the
> kennel shipped with 20.04, he can boot his pi4 from usb.  He didn’t get
> more specific than that it that episode though.
>
> My knowledge may be outdated.  The last I knew anything about it, the
> Broadcom SoC at the heart of the Pi itself cannot be booted from USB; it
> only knows how to talk to the SD card when it first powers on.  This
> isn't something a Linux kernel has anything to do with, because it's
> before the kernel is loaded.  It may be true, though, that all the
> bootloader on the SD card needs to do nowadays is contain enough
> instructions to point the SoC at a USB device.  Or for all I know, the
> latest SoC might have USB boot support built in.  But that still
> wouldn't be a kernel feature; it'd be a feature of the silicon.
>
> -B
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