• 13 Posts
  • 262 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 13th, 2023

help-circle





  • It’s nice because people intuit and talk about days as a contiguous daylight period followed by a contiguous nighttime period, when they aren’t having discussions about timekeeping. It’d be nice if we picked an arbitrary delineation that aligned to that.

    Wrt doing math, realistically you could just pick an arbitrary day of the year as your reference and every day begins at a multiple of 24 hours from that. No math is needed.
    I’m not looking for perfect alignment with local dawn in every location on the planet, I’m aiming for a calendar day that aligns with our intuition of the day/night cycle.
    But more than that, I’m having a silly discussion about timekeeping.






  • I’ve been going through a similar journey, and I’ll tell you want I did:

    I ended up just getting a low-end 2 bay Synology NAS, because it is cheap, and easy to set up shares and backups, and 12tb mirrored is all I needed. I was too intimidated by the prospect of configuring trueNAS correctly, and Synology walked back their requirement of using their own branded drives.

    If you want open source NAS software, then TrueNAS and OpenMediaVault are the main options. Truenas has the better pedigree afaict, but it has pretty significant requirements that mean you’ll need expensive hardware. In the end, I decided it was way more than what I needed, I wanted my NAS to be purely a NAS, and I’d do my server/cluster on different hardware.
    I almost got a HexOS NAS (fork of trueNAS SCALE with a front-end written by a bunch of ex-unraid folks to be much easier to configure and admin), but it’s still beta and I didn’t wanna wait a few months for GA, and also it has the same requirements as trueNAS, so it’d be expensive and you also have to pay for a license.

    If you go with a traditional OTS NAS, then you probably want raid 1 for a 2 bay or raid 5 if you have 4+ bays.
    If you get something like truenas that uses ZFS then you want raidz1 (which is like raid5 with one parity disk). Current there are limitations with raiz if you wanna expand it later, but HexOS folks are sponsoring a ZFS feature called Any RAID, to make expanding raidz more flexible, which will presumably make it’s way to all ZFS NASes when it is finished.

    I’m pretty early in my self-hosting journey, but so far I have a 2 bay Synology with cloud backup and a couple of shared volumes, a rasppi 5 running home assistant, a beelink ser5 running Ubuntu server for portainer, and a cheap VPS for pangolin.