Good day, friends. Since catching the self-hosting bug, I’ve set up a couple of Proxmox home servers with a bunch of services I enjoy.

Now I’d like to set up a server and local network on my sailboat so I can self-host servarr, pihole, and other services while traveling. The tricky part is that everything on the boat is 12V and I would rather not use an inverter, if possible. Also, it needs to be ultra-low power so I can leave it on at all times and not to deplete my batteries too much.

Criteria:

  • ultra-low power
  • Small form factor
  • runs on 12V
  • 10 TB of storage plus ability to make full local backup
  • Capable of hosting servarr, audiobookshelf, freshrss, etc. via docker
  • HDMI output
  • Full local mirror/backup of the entire file system, including the media library.
  • We will have two laptops and two Android phones to access the server, so the server doesn’t need to run a desktop environment.

I’ll have a mobile wifi router and a cellular signal booster (or maybe Starlink eventually) for internet access. Since internet bandwidth will be limited and expensive while traveling, I don’t want to have to re-download a massive media llibrary if the storage media fail. Thus, I want the media library to be mirrored or fully backed up or synced locally.

What hardware and Linux distro would you use in this situation?

  • @HumanPerson@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5•6 months ago

    They said they want a local backup so they don’t have to redownload because bandwidth is expensive. I think a RAID makes more sense. I also don’t think btrfs is a great idea for a boat. Power failures will probably be somewhat common, and btrfs is not the most stable, so I don’t think I would trust it in weird conditions. Documentation is definitely a great idea though.

    • @OneCardboardBoxEnglish
      6•6 months ago

      BTRFS should be stable in the case of power loss. That is to say, it ought to recover to a valid state. I believe the only unstable modes are RAID 5/6.

      I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 mode over mdadm RAID1 + ext4. You get checksumming and scrubs to detect drive failures and data corruptions. You also have snapshotting, in case you’re prone to the occasional fat-fingered rm -rf.