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

[Pete Soper via TriLUG]

Thanks, Shay. Windows access isn't optional. So the $64 question is 
whether Samba and NFS can oversee the same glob of files and make them 
available to clients reliably? I have a conservative definition of 
reliably (e.g. nobody has ever even heard a rumor of corruption with 
this use case). Hopefully this is really a question of how reliable the 
underlying filesystem is, and I guess that's another question. I'd like 
to stick with ext4 with the RAID management on top, but maybe that's not 
ideal for this sort of thing?

-Pete

On 5/1/20 4:38 PM, shay walters via TriLUG wrote:
> 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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