Item — HN Reader

To answer my own question, I am working on setting up a server with openSUSE Leap as the underlying OS. It's using BTRFS on top of hardware RAID 5 (with 8x 4 TB disks, giving me 28 TB total - ample storage for anything I'll ever throw at it). I'm trying to figure out DDNS with Porkbun, and I plan to use nginx-proxy-manager to handle mapping apps to subdomains.

My planned software deployment is currently up in the air; I know I'll be deploying Nextcloud, but I am also considering installing the following (some are suggestions from my friends who are in this with me rather than my own):

- Stable Diffusion (I'll need a GPU to do this) - Self-hosted LLM with Llama 2 (I have yet to figure out what is a good selfhosted web UI for this) - Minecraft/Minetest server - Matrix - Bitwarden/Vaultwarden - AnonAddy

There are probably other apps that I'll eventually install on the server that I haven't discovered yet :)

I also am hoping to get a backup solution in place, but plans for that are currently pretty nebulous. I do have a really cool idea that I need to look into though.

2 comments

The only thing I'm going to say here is that IMO using RAID5 on disks that size is basically begging to lose the entire array.

I had this happen.. twice I think, back when 1TB drives were "big" for desktop use:

A single drive suffers a fault of some kind - enough to kick the raid controller into thinking it needs to rebuild.

The controller waits for you to replace the failed drive, and then diligently begins reading the data from the other drives as fast as it can.... putting them under increased load.... until a second drive fails...

The larger the disk, the longer the restore time will be, the greater load put on the remaining disks, the greater the chance of a subsequent failure.

If you're insistent on using traditional RAID, I'd recommend either RAID10, or at a push RAID6.

But ideally I'd actually suggest zfs, and add pairs of disks as mirror vdevs to a pool.

Good advice. You threw me back into the memory bank with this!

How long are you thinking of running this? I don't meant to spread FUD or anything but it doesnt look like Leap will get more updates after the next one.

Hmm, can you provide a source for that? Anyway, as far as I know, it should be a fairly simple process to convert a Leap installation to Tumbleweed, so I'm not too concerned.

There is not too much cause for concern. As you say you can convert to Tumbleweed. I think a group of volunteers are planning to keep releasing a stable distro like Leap so things will probably turn out fine in the end.

I haven't watched it yet but this video seems to be laying out the future plans for Leap. https://youtu.be/QZuIJbiC2lk