[conspire] Home Servers

[Nick Moffitt]

On 19Mar2024 02:59pm (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
> I mean, I'd like for there to be a market segment of computers tailored
> for, and marketed as, home servers.  As such, they would need to be
> silent, relatively small / unobtrusive, have fast I/O, support mirrored
> storage, support fairly high amounts of RAM (32GB+ in 2024),
> have perfunctory/minimal video console, and be based on whatever 64-bit
> CPU best suits those constraints.

>From your fingers to the manufacturers' eyes!

My ideal home server would be something roughly the size of the longer M.2 drives, perhaps allowing me to strap two storage devices (one on each side) to one low-heat, low-power, high-RAM CPU with decent networking.  Heck, build a snazzy backplane so I can farm up a dozen of the things for lots-of-containers work if you really want, but I do not care one whit about how fast any individual processing path is beyond "it shouldn't be worse than my laptop from 10 years ago".

And of course, it should run mainline kernels flawlessly.

> That product segment continues to be unserved.  The closest thing is the
> HTPC (home theatre PC) market, typically mini-ITX boxen.  And even that
> is only an approximate fit, as HTPC host tend to be a bit heavy on CPU,
> hence heat and (often) noise.

It's kind of astonishing how "I want to record 32-bit audio voiceover tracks at home, and don't want ANY FANS WHATSOEVER" goes unserved.  The Raspberry Surveillance Police Board Number 5 now comes with active cooling as almost standard, and the really cool hacker boards are all decidedly underpowered, or are aimed more at a microcontroller use case (which is fantastic, mind, but it's not what I was hoping for).

I've probably got to swallow my pride and order one each of the Radxa, Mango, Blueberry, Orange Pi zero-format boards for testing.  Those seem like about the right level of RAM and such, but they also strike me as the sort of over-engineering that can lead to heat-driven burnout.  I can't find anyone's "I ran one non-stop on server loads for 9 months, and here's how stable it all was" reviews: they're all "ooh cool look I just installed their custom patched kernel on this thing, and now I have a desktop!!!"