Have been thinking about a New Plan for moving my rack-mounted servers home (i.e. abandoning Intel expensive kit for ARM SBCs).
The new plan consists of a PINE64 ClusterBoard fully populated with SOPINE cards and, here's the surprise, an external NAS (e.g. a Synology DS918+) serving the "big stuff" over NFS.
The SOPINEs would boot from SD and then the real data would be over GBit Ethernet on the NAS.
Why? I cannot find a decent ARM SBC or system with dual SATA for softraid.
@cynicalsecurity The external NAS is not a surprise to those aware of Mythic Beasts' Raspberry Pi Cloud: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi .
Note also that they netboot to avoid any SD card reliability issues and for performance and easy management. Reliability and management easier to deal with on a home server rack, though.
Tangentially, I find this intriguing: https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2018/01/22/qubes-air.html
@edavies which is a concern I am thinking of mitigating using eMMCs or, perhaps, something off the USB of the SOPINE.
Ultimately I might actually go to netbooting, after all I know how it works "historically"…
Regarding Qubes Air I have a particularly dim view of Qubes in the first place. Removing Xen, after glorifying it for years, and trying to make it work "in the cloud" seems like an attempt at monetising which, of course, they are entitled to. Just "not me".
@cynicalsecurity Re Qubes: I don't think they've glorified XEN; they've said they think it's the best hypervisor for now but always emphasised it wasn't intrinsic to their architecture. Pretty sure the “cloud” that paper is talking about would be intended to be a private one; the diagrams show the internet off in the corner, not between the user and their computers.
@cynicalsecurity Yep, I'm aware of the Pi proprietary-blob problems making life difficult for the likes of the BSDs. Those Mythic Beasts Pis are just a nice example of a rack of small ARMs running off a NAS. Good for the niche wanting a small dedicated server but an interesting pattern for other applications, too.
@edavies your reply made me smile… we're back to my old network with a SparcStation 10 serving smaller SparcStation 1s & 2s via bootp :)
I don't know how much I've tooted about it but I'm a believer in the dumb(ish) terminal and the big server except that, unlike the cloud idea, the server should be yours, not someone else's.
The Pi Cloud is close to what I want except it uses the Raspberry Pi which does not meet my requirements and that it is in the cloud. SD cards are indeed fragile…