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 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…
@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.
