Good day, friends. Since catching the self-hosting bug, I’ve set up a couple of Proxmox home servers with a bunch of services I enjoy.

Now I’d like to set up a server and local network on my sailboat so I can self-host servarr, pihole, and other services while traveling. The tricky part is that everything on the boat is 12V and I would rather not use an inverter, if possible. Also, it needs to be ultra-low power so I can leave it on at all times and not to deplete my batteries too much.

Criteria:

  • ultra-low power
  • Small form factor
  • runs on 12V
  • 10 TB of storage plus ability to make full local backup
  • Capable of hosting servarr, audiobookshelf, freshrss, etc. via docker
  • HDMI output
  • Full local mirror/backup of the entire file system, including the media library.
  • We will have two laptops and two Android phones to access the server, so the server doesn’t need to run a desktop environment.

I’ll have a mobile wifi router and a cellular signal booster (or maybe Starlink eventually) for internet access. Since internet bandwidth will be limited and expensive while traveling, I don’t want to have to re-download a massive media llibrary if the storage media fail. Thus, I want the media library to be mirrored or fully backed up or synced locally.

What hardware and Linux distro would you use in this situation?

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    4·
    6 months ago

    Not directly an answer, but the CRT guy has a series of industrial computers for different environments, which could provide inspiration.

    Some of them have direct DC inputs, some have anti-vibration designs, some have massive passive cooling!

    The little guys series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP3aKEG79DM&list=PLec1d3OBbZ8LGjvbb0GQwlQxWXmI2PA88

    I think a Synology box would work for you, or a TrueNas design - you could just build out one of their motherboards in your own itx case. These are good, robust, anti-vibration, mobile low power cpus, hardware selected for robustness and minimum heat. Stick it in a cupboard and forget about it, they run containers, and vms.

    • Oisteink@feddit.nlEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      Yeah - industrial computers is the way. I would want something that can run at 60 c, and is water/dust proof. How to keep 20tb on a floating humidifier? Im not sure about this one, but swap drives often is probably a good idea.

      Do you ride salt or sweet water?

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        I’m not the OP, but you can get 8TiB SSDs, they are spendy, but doable, no spinning disks required, the benefit of using a nas based solution is you can put a bunch of cheap SSDs in

      • sailingbythelee@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        71·
        6 months ago

        I live on Lake Superior, but this server planning is for a year-long voyage from Lake Superior to New York to the Bahamas and back. So, I do need to take salt and humidity into account.