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?
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.
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?
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.