🎊 Home Server
Sunday 3 December 2023
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hardware server sideproject ZFS archlinux youtube_video

This document describes the reasoning for building a home server machine. It is sometimes called “Home Lab”. However, I won’t use this term as it has been loaded with more concepts and expanded in scope. so I’ll refer to what I want as a “Home Server”. a machine that works 24/7 and support some use cases.

Use Cases

This machine should support the following use cases

  • Holds backups for my VPS server. now backups are at 127GB for “Who is popular today” database over the past 11 days.
    • Auto backup VPS every day
  • Holds family documents and photos. (~57GB)
    • Phones should be able to push new photos to it
    • Family machines should be able to browse and download files and photos
  • Support VPS in administrative tasks
    • Works as a logging server
    • Monitoring and alerting
    • Control Hue lights

Not a use case

Constraints

  • Silent
  • Lowest power usage possible
  • Lowest temperature possible
  • Smallest size possible
  • Priority is to reuse parts I have

Guidelines

  • Learn something new
  • Minimal. no bloat

Security

  • Data at rest encryption

Storage reliability

  • 1 Disk failure
    • Data redundancy to cover for 1 disk failure
    • RAID 5 (tolerates 1 device failure) or 6 (tolerates 2 devices failure) will cover this case
      • LVM has built-in raid
      • ZFS also can do both LVM and RAID and LUKS job + it’s a filesystem. doesn’t need a filesystem over it like LVM does
        • It’s a bit technical to get it to work with Linux
  • Whole system failure
    • Off-site backup to cover for whole system failure

Unused hardware

I have some hardware at home that can potentially be used

  • Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop 9th Gen
  • Samsung 640GB USB hard desk
    • Shows signs of age. some bad sectors are reported in its SMART report
  • PC case of:
    • 8 TB HDD Seagate Barracuda compute
    • 1 TB NVME
    • 32 GB RAM
    • Nvidia RTX 2060
    • Ryzen5 3600 3.6GHz 6 cores (6 core x 2 threads)
    • NZXT H510i case
    • Mobo: ASRock B550M pro4 micro ATX

Consequences

  • Reduce the VPS server instance, reducing the cost per month. offloading this cost to the hardware cost, maintenance, and power consumption.
  • Alerting/Monitoring which doesn’t exist right now for my side projects
  • Should help me try some software like Grafana, Loki

VPS potential cost saving

  • Current machine Hetzner CPX51
    • 16 AMD CPU
    • 32 GB RAM
    • 360 GB DISK
    • 20 TB traffic
    • 65 EUR/Month = 780 EUR/Year
  • Current Disk usage: 278 GB - 127 GB Backups = 151 GB
  • Memory usage is around 16GB
  • CPU util is at 35%
  • Memory and CPU can be downgraded to 16GB and 8 CPU
  • CPX41 from Hetzner satisfies Memory and CPU and has 240 GB storage with 29.39 EUR/month, 352.68 EUR/Year
  • cost saving per month = 65-29.39 = 35.61
  • cost saving per year = 35.61 * 12 = 427.32 EUR

Minimum Specifications

Half of the VPS and all the data we have now is the minimum

  • 3 disks for RAIDZ1 (ZFS), or RAID5
  • Total disk capacity: 184 GB (exactly the current data size)
  • CPU: 8 CPU at 2.4 GHz (half of current VPS CPU)
  • Memory: 16GB

Reasonable Specifications

More reasonable hardware based on the minimum in the previous section and taking into account the future need

  • 3 disks are fine. 4 disks to implement RAIDZ2/RAID6 can allow more resiliency
  • Total capacity should be over the combined storage of personal systems: 5 TB
  • CPU and Memory are fine at minimum

Hardware

Solution 1

  • 4 disks
    • 1x8TB old disk
    • 2x8TB new disks
    • 1x1TB SSD: boot disk
  • Direct Attached Storage (DAS) box with at least 5 bays (4 for disks and 1 for replacement for disaster recovery)
  • Use the Lenovo laptop as a CPU for the DAS
  • Zigbee Dongle to control Zigbee devices (Philips Hue lights)

Benefits

  • Replacing the laptop with a more powerful system at any time without losing the data or installing the system
  • avoided booting from the ZFS pool by adding the SSD
  • Can connect to the network over wifi or ethernet cable

Solution 2

  • Reuse the PC case
  • 2x8TB new disks
  • Zigbee Dongle to control Zigbee devices (Philips Hue lights)
  • Notes

Issues

  • will need a monitor/keyboard/mouse to unlock the encrypted disk on boot

Benefits

  • Each component is replaceable
  • PCIe slot and 2 NVME M.2 slots on board
  • M.2 Wifi slot on board

Hardware Options

Hardware bought

  • 2 Baracuda computer 8TB x 131.89EUR (Amazon)

  • ConBee II The Universal Zigbee USB Gateway 39.95EUR (Amazon)

  • 3 SATA cables 5.79EUR (Amazon)

  • Total: 309.52 EUR

  • Budget remains from cost saving: 427.32 - 309.52 = 117.8 EUR

Offsite backup

to_be_decided

  • Max total storage 15TB

Power consumption

to_be_decided

Noise level

  • I found the setup is noisy a bit at night
    • 2xNoctua NF-A12x25 to replace the NZXT fans = 32.90EUR

System

  • Boot into ArchIso and load ZFS

    • Booting error: “failed to parse event in TPM final events log”
      • Disable TPM from UEFI setup: Security Device Support

  • Black screen after booting

    • Nvidia issue: added nomodeset to kernel options

  • curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs/master/init | bash

    • no networking networkctl shows configuring
    • removed the cable from the USB dock and connected it directly to the machine

  • Create ZFS pool

    • zpool create -o ashift=12 -o autotrim=on -R /mnt -O acltype=posixacl -O relatime=one -O xattr=sa -O canmount=off -O compression=lz4 -O dnodesize=legacy -O normalization=formD -O mountpoint=none -O encryption=aes-256-gcm -O keyformat=passphrase -O keylocation=prompt -O dedup=on zroot raidz1 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-<id>
    • compressed, encrypted, deduplication, raidz1
    • Archlinux AUR script is marked as out of date, can’t find kernel version

  • mkinitcpio fails as libcrypto doesn’t exist https://github.com/archzfs/arc…

    • install openssl-1.1 package

  • after reboot with zfsbootmenu it loads the kernel and asks for the password then stops

    • loaded the live USB again and changed zfs set canmount=on zroot/ROOT/default
    • Generate fstab /etc/fstab
    • set zfs set org.zfsbootmenu:commandline="nomodeset rw loglevel=4" zroot/ROOT/default

  • 🎊 Finally booted to the new system and logged in to my user

  • Network is not working

    • configure systemd-networkd for static IP

  • DNS is not working

    • enable systemd-resolved

  • installed Openssh, allow my user and copy SSH key then disabled password login

  • installed docker, docker-compose, rsync, python3

Booting using SSH

  • Clone zfsbootmenu

  • Run ./contrib/remote-ssh-build.sh

  • sudo cp build/vmlinuz.EFI <disk>/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI

  • dracut-network.conf should include something like ip=<IP>::<gateway>:255.255.255.0:homeserver:[<mac>]:none rd.neednet=1

  • ssh permission denied

    • authorized_keys had wrong owner chown root:root dropbear/authorized_keys

  • system asks for password again

    • Setup system initramfs to include the passphrase file to stop second passphrase prompt

Software

  • Basics
    • SSH
    • Docker compose
    • python
    • rsync
    • powertop
    • lm-sensors

Containers

Benchmarking

Using Unix Benchmark

   BYTE UNIX Benchmarks (Version 5.1.3)

   System: : GNU/Linux
   OS: GNU/Linux -- 5.18.6-arch1-1 -- #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed, 22 Jun 2022 18:10:56 +0000
   Machine: x86_64 (unknown)
   Language: en_US.utf8 (charmap="UTF-8", collate="UTF-8")
   CPU 0: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 1: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 2: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 3: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 4: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 5: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 6: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 7: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 8: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 9: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 10: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   CPU 11: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (7189.9 bogomips)
          Hyper-Threading, x86-64, MMX, AMD MMX, Physical Address Ext, SYSENTER/SYSEXIT, AMD virtualization, SYSCALL/SYSRET
   17:12:05 up 32 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.33, 0.20, 0.18; runlevel

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Run: Wed Jul 26 2023 17:12:05 - 17:41:50
12 CPUs in system; running 1 parallel copy of tests

Dhrystone 2 using register variables       52901528.7 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Double-Precision Whetstone                     9173.2 MWIPS (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Execl Throughput                               7207.1 lps   (29.3 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks        315773.4 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks           80529.9 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks       1171845.0 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
Pipe Throughput                             2703933.8 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Pipe-based Context Switching                 316754.7 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Process Creation                              10246.4 lps   (30.0 s, 2 samples)
Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                   6614.6 lpm   (60.0 s, 2 samples)
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                   3543.6 lpm   (60.0 s, 2 samples)
System Call Overhead                        3146084.4 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

System Benchmarks Index Values               BASELINE       RESULT    INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables         116700.0   52901528.7   4533.1
Double-Precision Whetstone                       55.0       9173.2   1667.8
Execl Throughput                                 43.0       7207.1   1676.1
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks          3960.0     315773.4    797.4
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks            1655.0      80529.9    486.6
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks          5800.0    1171845.0   2020.4
Pipe Throughput                               12440.0    2703933.8   2173.6
Pipe-based Context Switching                   4000.0     316754.7    791.9
Process Creation                                126.0      10246.4    813.2
Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                     42.4       6614.6   1560.0
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                      6.0       3543.6   5906.1
System Call Overhead                          15000.0    3146084.4   2097.4
                                                                   ========
System Benchmarks Index Score                                        1593.8

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Run: Wed Jul 26 2023 17:41:50 - 18:13:01
12 CPUs in system; running 12 parallel copies of tests

Dhrystone 2 using register variables      452528054.3 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Double-Precision Whetstone                    95126.5 MWIPS (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Execl Throughput                              36518.9 lps   (29.7 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks        687753.1 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks          175226.1 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks       2643789.0 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
Pipe Throughput                            22267414.7 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Pipe-based Context Switching                2332771.7 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Process Creation                              88665.5 lps   (30.0 s, 2 samples)
Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                  44352.6 lpm   (60.0 s, 2 samples)
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                   5034.3 lpm   (64.5 s, 2 samples)
System Call Overhead                       13947317.3 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

System Benchmarks Index Values               BASELINE       RESULT    INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables         116700.0  452528054.3  38777.0
Double-Precision Whetstone                       55.0      95126.5  17295.7
Execl Throughput                                 43.0      36518.9   8492.8
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks          3960.0     687753.1   1736.8
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks            1655.0     175226.1   1058.8
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks          5800.0    2643789.0   4558.3
Pipe Throughput                               12440.0   22267414.7  17899.9
Pipe-based Context Switching                   4000.0    2332771.7   5831.9
Process Creation                                126.0      88665.5   7036.9
Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                     42.4      44352.6  10460.5
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                      6.0       5034.3   8390.5
System Call Overhead                          15000.0   13947317.3   9298.2
                                                                   ========
System Benchmarks Index Score                                        7436.9

Optimizations

  • Add a read cache disk sudo zpool add zroot cache /dev/disk/by-id/<disk-id>
  • Disable sync writes for faster writes sudo zfs set sync=disabled zroot

After upgrading CPU

  • Nvidia graphics didn’t work with archlinux+zfs so I had to remove it instead of risking an upgrade of the kernel that may break ZFS module
  • The CPU doesn’t have integrated graphics to I upgraded to Ryzen5 5600G
  • The motherboard needed a firmware update to support it
  • I made a mistake and didn’t install the fan on the CPU to save time
  • The CPU overheated during the firmware upgrade and the motherboard didn’t start anymore'
  • I had to replace the motherboard with another of the same model
  • The motherboard worked
  • starting up fails with dracut because it didn’t find the same network mac address!!!
  • I had to compile the EFI image again of zbm and start again
  • the network on the new system is not enabled so I had to enable and add static IP
  • I had the config in /etc/systemd/network/20-wired.network and the interface was enp6s0 the new motherboard device name is enp3s0 why is it different? I have no idea

Youtube

Title

[Arabic] 14TB Archlinux Linux ZFS Home server Build | ارتش لينكس 14 تيرابايت سيرفر للبيت

Description

شرح تفصيلي لمشروع ارتش لينكس سيرفر للبيت واختيارات الهاردوير والسوفتوير والمميزات التي تم اختيارها مثل ZFS, Zigbee gateway, Docker containers, Self hosted services
معلومات تفصيلية عن المشروع: https://www.emadelsaid.com/Hom…
المشروع على جيت هب: https://github.com/emad-elsaid…
ZFS archlinux arabic home_automation RAID

References

Backlinks

See Also