Sounds like the term used by Amazon? I picked up eight 18TB “renewed” drives that have been in constant use for over a year now under a ZFS filesystem. Not a single error yet and the pool is about half full. At the time I bought them, they were about $100 cheaper (each) than brand new drives so that saved me quite a bit of money, but they were also a fairly new line of drives so there couldn’t have been much previous use on them anyway.

Something like a hard drive could generate recognizable errors in the logs, but once you get out into the motherboard or power supply, there’s simply not enough monitoring available to detect problems. You might be able to record the voltage output from the power supply rails, depending on your hardware, but that still might not tell you anything.

Then it could still be the power supply or motherboard. It takes a lot to override the hardware power switch and the power supply itself is usually one of the biggest culprits to random lockups. Beyond that I can’t offer much, I don’t know of any way to test the components unless you could afford thousands of dollars for specialized equipment. I’ve always had multiple machines available to swap parts so I don’t have a different strategy for troubleshooting.

Certainly seems like a hardware issue, but there’s no easy answer to this one. It could be your power supply, motherboard, CPU, memory, even the video card. The power-button issue makes me lean towards power supply or motherboard though (assuming you’ve verified the power button works after a fresh boot).

If you have other parts on hand (even from another running system) you could swap components until you identify the culprit. If you find it’s your power supply, make sure you replace it with a decent quality one, NOT one of those $25 units you find everywhere, or you’ll have even more problems followed by a rapid failure in another year.

Heh sorry about that. There’s also a zfs conversation going on where I had suggested disabling the ‘dedup’ option. I’ve never heard of dedupe being used in the context of the shell history, so yeah, I got confused.

I only include it because pretty much every guide on zfs setups recommends disabling it these days. I don’t believe it’s anything I’ve every had to use despite several drive crashes over the years.

I think this is the only change I’ve made that affects my history… It simply ignores multiple copies of a command when you repeat it multiple times, making it easier to up-arrow through the unique things I’ve executed.

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

Nothing wrong with used servers, that’s the only thing I’ve ever run. Ebay has provided a ton of equipment to me.

I’ve never used TrueNAS, but my experience with ZFS is that it could care less what order the drives are detected by the operating system. You could always shut down the machine, swap two drives around, boot back up, and see if the pool comes back online. If it fails, shut it back down and put the drives in their original locations.

If you are moving your data to new (larger) drives, before anything else you should take the opportunity to play with the new drives and find the ZFS settings that work well. I think recordsize is autodetected these days, but maybe for your use things like dedup, atime, and relatime can be turned off, and do you need xattr? If you’re using 4096 block sizes did you partition the drives starting at sector 2048? Did you turn off compression if you don’t need it? Also consider your hardware, like if you have multiple connection ports, can you get a speed increase by spreading out the drives so you don’t saturate any particular channel?

Newer hardware by itself can make a huge difference too. My last upgrade took me from PCIe x4 to x16 slots, allowing me to upgrade to SAS3 cards, and overall went from around 70MB/s to 460MB/s transfer speeds with enough hardware to manage up to 40 drives. Turns out the new configuration also uses much less power, so a big win all around.

A lot will depend on your preferred workflow, and since you mentioned SolidWorks I assume that means you prefer a more GUI-oriented approach. However as an alternative, if you are comfortable with more of a programming approach, you might look in to OpenSCAD. Most things are done from a more primitive standpoint in how you create each part of an object, but I like having the direct control over every aspect.

Good point, POE might be the only choice then. Although these cameras do provide x264 and x265 compression so that would save quite a lot.

You got me thinking, so I did a search and ran across this page: https://www.hanssonit.se/nextcloud-vm/ I’m not sure how old these releases are, but at the very least it might provide some hints for building your own? I’m going to keep looking to see if I can find an image built on Debian, but at least now I know some options are out there.

[Edit] I also ran across across this page which builds a VM for you using an Ubuntu machine, so I’m guessing I could probably adjust it to a Debian setup fairly easily. https://github.com/nextcloud/vm

I was considering POE as an option, and this camera does have an ethernet port (although I can’t tell yet if that’s only for configuration or if the video will also stream over it directly). I don’t really need a constant stream and this camera also provides motion options so maybe it would only send video as needed (although during a heavy storm all of the cameras would probably fire at once).

I played with Zoneminder years ago but would like to get something set up for home security. I have a full internal network plus servers and about 60TB of free storage space so there’s really no limitations to what I could set up. Ideally I’d like to just hit a local IP from a cell phone to check the cameras (and remote access isn’t really needed), so that’s where I was trying to go with my previous questions.

The software side seems easy enough, but finding compatible IP cameras has been stumping me. I see the Reolink 4K TrackMix wifi cameras on Amazon for $130, and other than a few hiccups it looks likely that this piece of hardware would work, unless anyone knows of any “gotchas” that I’ve missed? Otherwise I’ll do a bit more research and then order one of the cameras to see how far I can get with it.

Ah gotcha, so you’re not trying to to live-view the feed on them. Thanks for the camera suggestion anyway, the brand still seems to be decent enough even if they don’t support Linux.

I looked up this camera and the reviews for the outdoor model with night vision seem pretty promising. Can I ask how you are using your camera(s)? Like do you have a local server to record the data? Can you access them with a cell phone without using any special apps?

A lot of it will depend on what age of hardware you are looking for, especially the price. Last year I upgraded all my machines to Poweredge R620 servers. These are old enough that you can find a lot of options for CPUs and memory dirt cheap, and you can find them with either 2.5" or 3.5" internal hot-swap bays. The 6xx series is 1U and the 7xx series is 2U chassis. If power is a concern, I run some VM servers with around 10 VMs in use, 64GB of memory, and a pair of 12-core Xeon E5-2630L v2 processors (2.4GHz, low power) at around 84W, but there’s plenty of options to customize to your needs unless you need current-generation horsepower. The PERC controller in them can be flashed to IT mode for full control, and I run ZFS through it for some of my machines. I built these machines for around $150-200 each and picked them up from ebay (there’s a US seller I can recommend if you’re interested in going that route).

Keep in mind the R* series are rack servers, but Dell also has tower versions of the same machines available – I think those are labeled as M620?

I’m curious what you’ve heard, this is the first recommendation I’ve seen against filezilla? You certainly have to get the server side set up right for it to work, and plain FTP is a security risk, but otherwise am I missing something?

If you can work from the command line (and assuming you have a linux server) then SSH is simple – really all it does is give you a secure connection to the command line. You should get familiar with it because if something goes wrong with your server that may be the only way you can connect to it.

Next you need tools to transfer files to the server. While wget is useful for grabbing stuff from other web servers, while something like scp can get you to any host that also accepts ssh. I use this all the time to transfer files between home and work. Or you might set up an sFTP service to accept a GUI connection from a client like FileZilla.

As for what you can put on your web server… Well if you install php then you can run any php code. If you write javascript code then the web browser interprets that, so nothing to add to your server, but NodeJS code would require some installation. You also want to take some time to learn about security practices. For example if you have pages that use a database, an attacker can write a URL to gain access to your server if the code simply accepts any random input. There’s not really any limit to what can be run, but some things (like the php example) require you to install more components on your server.

Alternatively, there are also functional services you can run that have nothing to do with web pages. For example, a caldav service would allow you to host your own calendar that can be shared between multiple people or locations. Or maybe you want to start up a chat server like IRC or Matrix? Maybe you want to start a Mosquitto server for your personal IoT content? Think of it this way – literally anything and everything that makes the internet run is something you can host yourself.

There was no such thing as a default firewall, but even now when I set up a new Debian machine there are no firewall rules, just the base iptables installed so you CAN add rules. Back then we also had insecure things like telnet installed by default and exposed to the world, so there’s really no telling exactly how they managed to get into my machine. It’s still good to learn about network security up front rather than relying on any default settings if someone is planning on self-hosting.