Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).
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arjie
Classic power failure and raspberry pi with SD cards. When I last set up things for my parents, I simply imaged a bunch of SD cards and had the data stored on an external hard drive. I live in the US and they live in India and this is for their RaspBMC. With the SD cards they just swap a broken one with a new one and call it a day.
Been 12 years or so now. Went back to their home a few years ago and everything but the opensubtitles integration works. I was surprised. I could never recreate it now. Even has one of these flirc setups so the remote works.
India has unreliable power too so the SD card death was inevitable. I made a few more images and called it a day.
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onel
That was a good read.
But this is the kind of experience that makes technical people fall in love with self-hosting, but also keeps the majority of the population away.
Most of the people don't want the hassle of managing a self-hosting box.
I think a middle ground option might where someone hosts it for you, but you can also move to your own hardware at any time might be best
Venn1
My Raspberry Pi 4 has been used to run both a Jitsi and Trackmania server over the years. I never considered using the SD card since it can boot and run from a USB 3 flash drive. Later on, I picked up an Argon One case to add a SATA SSD.
Thankfully, modern Rockchip SBCs tend to come with NVMe slots.
ungreased0675
I use a Waveshare hat for my Pi 5s. It does PoE and has a spot for an SSD. What I particularly like about this setup is the single wire running to each board, looks very clean.
larrydag
I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of devices to expire.
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rjnz199
The failure everyone plans for is the disk; the failure that actually gets you is the boot media. The fix is making a rebuild boring, not making the hardware immortal.
ranger207
If you're using a USB adapter on a Pi 4 you can use raspi-config to enable booting from an external drive and not worry about SD cards at all
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mvanbaak
> I chose to enable zram for swap
swap is used when you run out of ram. using a ramdisk for swap ... You see how that doesnt make sense?
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blfr
> Not eager to ruin the evening by starting a debugging session
Use a clanker. Nothing has brought back so much joy into homelabbing for me as having LLMs handle the boring stuff.
I launch it in opencode on the system or elsewhere to ssh in (I think giving it KVM is an overkill but an option nonetheless) and tell it to fix things. Not just ask questions and generate configs. I have backups, let it rip. They have gotten shockingly good at it even when they write bash wrappers just to catch some logs.
ozim
What a great example of nice writing. I just liked reading it.
not_the_fda
The RPi Compute Module is mush better with on board flash. Completely removes the SD Flash Achilles heel of the RPi.
dzonga
this would have been the perfect era for home servers - but damn Ram is expensive.
every other component is cheap enough but not Ram.
t0mpr1c3
I've been running a CUPS server on a Pi Zero W since 2017. I suppose I should back up the SD card.
Back in the day I ran s××× coin miners off flash drives without any apparent problems.
Teslas though... ;)
taude
If i'm reading this correctly, can run Immich from a Raspberry Pi 4? That's pretty cool.
I bought all the stuff (new case, networking card and a Jonsbro N4 to repurpose some intel i7-9700 era processor and motherboard, but didn't get it setup yet, as I was starting to rethink the power consumption....
Also looking to use this rebuild as an opportunity to learn Nix.
Let me know if you all have some good article references, to point me at. I've been doing some research, but could always do more.
I may end up putting a low power NUC in the case, or something. I don't know...
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hn_throw2025
A few years ago I decided to give up on sdcards for my main 24/7 homelab server.
I keep a similar small SSD in the drawer ready for a restore and swap if the main system drive fails.
vachina
Another useful advise would be to keep your boot drive 60% used at max and run TRIM after freeing a huge chunk of files to let the wear leveling algo do its job.
And every few years reinstall the OS to free up unwritten cells.
tonymet
Lack of proper IO connector is the reason I abandoned Raspi. SD card crashes are nearly a guarantee. Total pita too since there’s no display during the BIOS.
Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).
Classic power failure and raspberry pi with SD cards. When I last set up things for my parents, I simply imaged a bunch of SD cards and had the data stored on an external hard drive. I live in the US and they live in India and this is for their RaspBMC. With the SD cards they just swap a broken one with a new one and call it a day.
Been 12 years or so now. Went back to their home a few years ago and everything but the opensubtitles integration works. I was surprised. I could never recreate it now. Even has one of these flirc setups so the remote works.
India has unreliable power too so the SD card death was inevitable. I made a few more images and called it a day.
That was a good read.
But this is the kind of experience that makes technical people fall in love with self-hosting, but also keeps the majority of the population away.
Most of the people don't want the hassle of managing a self-hosting box.
I think a middle ground option might where someone hosts it for you, but you can also move to your own hardware at any time might be best
My Raspberry Pi 4 has been used to run both a Jitsi and Trackmania server over the years. I never considered using the SD card since it can boot and run from a USB 3 flash drive. Later on, I picked up an Argon One case to add a SATA SSD.
Thankfully, modern Rockchip SBCs tend to come with NVMe slots.
I use a Waveshare hat for my Pi 5s. It does PoE and has a spot for an SSD. What I particularly like about this setup is the single wire running to each board, looks very clean.
I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of devices to expire.
The failure everyone plans for is the disk; the failure that actually gets you is the boot media. The fix is making a rebuild boring, not making the hardware immortal.
If you're using a USB adapter on a Pi 4 you can use raspi-config to enable booting from an external drive and not worry about SD cards at all
> I chose to enable zram for swap
swap is used when you run out of ram. using a ramdisk for swap ... You see how that doesnt make sense?
> Not eager to ruin the evening by starting a debugging session
Use a clanker. Nothing has brought back so much joy into homelabbing for me as having LLMs handle the boring stuff.
I launch it in opencode on the system or elsewhere to ssh in (I think giving it KVM is an overkill but an option nonetheless) and tell it to fix things. Not just ask questions and generate configs. I have backups, let it rip. They have gotten shockingly good at it even when they write bash wrappers just to catch some logs.
What a great example of nice writing. I just liked reading it.
The RPi Compute Module is mush better with on board flash. Completely removes the SD Flash Achilles heel of the RPi.
this would have been the perfect era for home servers - but damn Ram is expensive.
every other component is cheap enough but not Ram.
I've been running a CUPS server on a Pi Zero W since 2017. I suppose I should back up the SD card.
Back in the day I ran s××× coin miners off flash drives without any apparent problems.
Teslas though... ;)
If i'm reading this correctly, can run Immich from a Raspberry Pi 4? That's pretty cool.
I bought all the stuff (new case, networking card and a Jonsbro N4 to repurpose some intel i7-9700 era processor and motherboard, but didn't get it setup yet, as I was starting to rethink the power consumption....
Also looking to use this rebuild as an opportunity to learn Nix.
Let me know if you all have some good article references, to point me at. I've been doing some research, but could always do more.
I may end up putting a low power NUC in the case, or something. I don't know...
A few years ago I decided to give up on sdcards for my main 24/7 homelab server.
I now use a small SSD connected via USB3 and a slightly modified version of this : https://framps.github.io/raspiBackupDoc/introduction.html
...to take snapshots to my NAS periodically.
I keep a similar small SSD in the drawer ready for a restore and swap if the main system drive fails.
Another useful advise would be to keep your boot drive 60% used at max and run TRIM after freeing a huge chunk of files to let the wear leveling algo do its job.
And every few years reinstall the OS to free up unwritten cells.
Lack of proper IO connector is the reason I abandoned Raspi. SD card crashes are nearly a guarantee. Total pita too since there’s no display during the BIOS.
Why not get a Beelink N95 and call it a day?