Heya HN! We've built a Raspberry PI CM4 based SSD NAS for home hosting. We built it as a part of KubeSail.com - which is a platform aimed at making self-hosting easy and at making the technical bits (tunneling, backups, updates, etc) as easy as possible.
You may have seen plans for this about 9 months ago on HN, but we're finally in full production! I'll be booking tickets to fly out and help assemble the 2nd batch in a few days - we're effectively a two person computer company, which is a lot of fun and a crazy amount of work. Our mission is to make home-hosting a website, an app, or just personal photos a reasonable alternative to SaaS products.
edit: I even tried overclocking the Pi and dialing down the simulation distance in Minecraft.
Minecraft servers are likely the heaviest of the ~15 services I run at home. You chose a service that I wouldn't have expected to work.
My Pi 4 4GB runs an MPD server that outputs to a HiFiBerry DAC, Zabbix and Grafana. It's done so smoothly for about a year now.
At one time it acceptably ran Nextcloud, Gitea, Matrix Synapse, Vaultwarden and a file server in systemd containers.
At another time, it replaced an old AMD e350 machine I was using for backups - the Pi 4 was faster than that old desktop. The bottleneck was the CPU load when transferring data over SSH.
It like trying to tow a trailer with a dirt bike and complaining when it doesn't move.
The PI as a server shines in running low-to-medium power services and having a low entry and upkeep costs.
I run a Plex server, Gitea server, samba filesharing and qbitorrent on a 4gb rpi4 and it just sit there and chugs along using like a tenth of the power a normal computer would, taking almost no space, making no noise and costing like a fifteenth something like a NUC would.
And as a bonus, if it ever does go kaput I can just get another rpi4 and the entire process of setting it all up again would take me 5 minutes max.
Doesn’t mean I’d spend this money on a pi, but I’m probably not the target.
N.B.: An 8GB rPi 4/CM4 has more memory, more storage, more compute power, and faster networking and i/o than a Cray supercomputer had in the early 90s! It's a real computer. If you can't do most of the useful jobs on the planet with that level of performance, then you just suck at software. (Yes, I know most Linux distros are Jabba-level obese these days, but still...)
Full disclosure: I have a PiBox on order, and will be prototyping a prepackaged server with it, which may well turn into a product itself.
Where as, I continue to use several ARM home servers consisting of Pi's and Jetson with smaller workloads and applications made for them.
Compare that to a RPi that idles at ~5 W.
Where are you getting these measurements from? A "consumer-grade PC" idles at a few watts[1]. "enterprise servers" might idle a bit higher but nowhere near 200-250W.
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-M90n-Nano-D...
Install a base OS, then docker compose a few services. Or buy a half dozen and deploy k8s.
Boom, "A cheap tiny personal server self hosting" (with COTS parts).
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eurodollar.asp#:~:text=....
There's a whole movement on these 1L pcs: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
At home getting a similarly redundant setup is time, space, and energy consuming. Moreover, most of the home tooling does not have distributed data built in so we need to have a distributed fs or nfs. This brings a whole next level of maintenance and heartache that I simply do not want at home.
Consequently, I run one machine and make backups of the config and hope I can restore it when things go south.
Does anyone have better ideas?
the problem for me would be to spend the time to find a suitable device to run this on. if i happen to have one, great, but if not i'd probably rather buy yours than so my own research.
personally, what i am looking for is a portable version of this, that runs on a battery so i can use it tethered through my phone, or even with its own sim card.
for home use i would prefer the ability to put at least two regular 2.5" disks because those SSDs are still expensive at large sizes
Tell me where you ship to and what the costs are. If you're going to make me jump through hoops to figure this out, well, your product is probably not good enough that I'll bother to do so!
from a technical viewpoint, yes, it's totally nuts.
from a business viewpoint, it solves a hole lot of problems very cheap. i.e. good enough
I have opened and I am met with "We can't ship to %MY_COUNTRY% yet, but we are expanding quickly".
I also wonder why some sites claim they can't ship into here. Virtually all of the post services of the world do ship into this country for years and years yet some sites specifically exclude it.
Postal rates vary by country, and we've experienced more lost packages in some countries than others. Along with 30-45 day shipping times for most international packages.
Having a distributor lets us guarantee inexpensive 2 or 3 day shipping, paperwork free VAT, and easy returns for a much smoother experience overall.
Hope this makes sense!
It's been well known since the creation of www that users attention spans are non-existent and they will leave a page if they don't see the information that interests them within seconds.
Eventually though, I realized that having a screen and a keyboard is critical for how I was using it. I may not always have a machine on the network that can SSH into the Pi server. So I eventually settled on using an old laptop instead. Much more performant, and if the network goes down, I can still access the information easily.
I tried the software product a while ago and it wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but it was pretty cool. I could totally see myself recommending it to people (admittedly it’s somewhat niche so the opportunity hasn’t come up). The hardware is a little pricy for someone who is pretty competent with electronics, but seems great for people who want someone all in one. That said, it looks so well done that if CM4s become easier to get I might still purchase one.
Their goal of “personal server” is something I eagerly wish was mainstream, and I always try out products that try to actualize it if the price is right. I had a small issue getting it set up on a random pi I had lying around, and erulabs/others were super helpful in discord! They have extensive docs for getting set up with your own hardware, which was great. The reason i stopped using the product was two fold: k8 seems like too much for personal use- writing my own KubeSail templates was just too verbose. The other issue is that I wasn’t a fan of their cloud hosting and cloud gateway solution - it works well enough but a personal server that needs a cloud server just wasn’t what I wanted. If I needed to rely on an outside server (you do unless you wanna open ports) I’d rather vpn to the box with eg. Tailscale than rely on the gateway. Which may be more secure too(?).
Getting a web gui for a self hosted cluster was really nice, and the templates they put together really lowers the entry bar to start self hosting. I’m really impressed with the selections they chose, since a huge chunk of them I saw and went “ooh I should try that out”. Kudos to the team for putting it together. A feature suggestion: some sort of identity/auth integration which can help with household stuff (eg a hosted app that KubeSail injects your identity into). Could be useful for families and SMB clients.
Ps. I had a good time reading through their non-documentation blog posts too.
https://hoppy.network
The pricing seems a bit high though, considering $8/month could also buy a cheap VPS with more than 1TB bandwidth (Contabo VPS, for example, offers a whopping 32TB outgoing traffic at $7/month.)
Perhaps I'm not the use case or target market, but something like this does appeal to me -- I just don't see why I'd pay for a wireguard endpoint, when I could get a VPS with a public IP and run the tunnel myself.
Sorry if too critical, I was metaphorically "reaching for my credit card" when I read "static IP over wireguard tunnel", before attempting to sanity check the prices.
My initial impression is that it solves a similar problem to DuckDNS (“how can I get a static, public IP for a machine on my residential LAN?”) using technology similar to Tailscale (WireGuard tunnels as a service).
Perhaps egress/public routing is the big advantage over Tailscale? Tailscale focuses on creating a trusted perimeter so all your devices can talk to each other securely. It doesn’t have an external gateway for other people to access specific devices within that perimeter. I think their business model / architecture may actually preclude this feature… they use their hosted service primarily for peer discovery, most traffic is routed P2P.
For the off site backup, I want a cheap solution and was thinking of an rasberryPi with an connected usb-hdd and then the rPi connected to a family members wifi-router that I could connect to over the internet and do my backups to.
My question are: 1 - What solutions are there to make encrypted backups to a rasberryPi from windows? I don't want to encrypt all files with encrypted 7z files and transfer them (it is an mess), but just to have a solution so I can choose the unencrypted files and folders and then the software encrypts them on the fly and transfer them over to the rPi.
2 - The optimal solution would be to have the rPi usb-hdd mapped as an network drive or similar in explorer. But would that be possible with the first requirement that all files must be encrypted on the fly? 1 is more important than 2.
3 - I have read that a rPi not can handle a connected usb-hdd because it will take to much power than the rPi can deliver. Does there exist an dongle or something that you could connect one or two usb-hhd to the rPi and the dongle is connected to the powergrid and gives the usb-hdd the power they need and then the dongle is connected to the rPi but only transfer data? Or is there any other solutions?
Sorry for maybe stupid questions. But I have no clues here, what to search/look for or even if it is possible. Thanks in advance for any feedback.
I tried a 5TB 2.5" SMR HDD powering it off the raspberry pi for a while and it worked for maybe a year and a half. Then all of a sudden starting the Sync Process for Resilio sync would cause the drive to drop out. So I upgraded to the 8TB 3.5.
Resilio sync may meet or requirements but not exactly. Resilio syncs the folders between two computers, but you don't have to sync everything. Things that don't get synced get placeholders. So it's the best of both worlds. Fast for what you use because it's local, takes zero space for what you don't. Similar to Google Drives new streaming feature, but manual and not transparent. Also for the encryption you will want the "untrusted folder setup".
Syncthing has a similar product, haven't played around with it though.
Like the other sibling comment Tailscale is great so you don't have to fiddle with your friends router. But be careful tailscale will need to occasionally be reauthenticated.
I do not recommend SMR drives for anything other than archiving. Cheap but very slow. I think it took a week to back up my 500GB MacBook.
- i'd recommend attaching an external 3,5 disk that comes with its own power supply, that way you don't have to worry about power, it's cheaper and you have more storage.
- For backup i am using borgbackup. it does encryption and deduplication. you can also backup several machines to the same repository if you want to. i'm using it for several use cases, it's rock solid, never had a problem.
- you can safely use borgbackup over ssh if you want to do remote backup. just forward the ssh port on your friends router and use dyndns if they don't have a static ip.
You can use a powered USB hub.
Also. Remember the old 2,5” external USB HDD y-style cables that had an extra USB 2 plug (connected with a thinner cable with just 2 wires for the power and not data) that you could plug into a second USB sockets so the disk draws power from 2 ports? Maybe such thing still exists for current USB disks.
You can then plug the second plug into a standard USB charger for smartphones or similar.
From pricing perspective, a two bay synology NAS is $300. You can add a lot of good cheap NAS storage.
Bonus points for those usually being SMR, which is atrocious if you want to run ZFS and need to resilver the pool.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr...
The mini PCs can contain dual SSD, but, as noted, the storage is limited and the price is high.
The closest options I found are: RockPro64, Odroid HC4, AsRock Deskmini X300, ZimaBoard, RPI CM4, each having own problems. One may build one from an mITX motherboard, but frankly that may also cost about a TrueNAS mini (which is quite large). Synology boxes are nice, but I want ZFS!
If someone knows a small low power system for a ZFS backup server (like a passively cooled SBC or PC with sata port that can be used to connect HDDs placed outside box due to size limitation, or at least something that is portable), including a DIY build, I would love to take a look.