> compact home cloud

Can we just start calling them servers again?

The distinction in actual usage between using cloud, server, and homelab to describe their setup seems to be rooted in their purpose.

* Home Lab :: Running a partial/full enterprise IT stack for fun and education.

* Home Server :: Running primarily internal services like file storage, backups, media streaming, home automation, maybe some light networking.

* Home Cloud :: Running primarily external services on the public internet to replace 3rd party SaaS services. More often than not this is done with a VPS provider rather than physical hardware in your home.

So maybe you find the terminology annoying since everything is cloud these days but it's genuinely useful to us folks in the forums. You can also call "home cloud" selfhosting if you find it less jarring.

I am not sure that is a great distinction. A server is traditionally serving some resource, usually to multiple people. The idea behind 'home cloud' is to host 'slice' of a server yourself. Something that used to be hard because of the cost of hardware, making hosting only a few 'sessions' expensive.

Of course hardware hasn't been expensive for probably a decade or more. Today it is almost entirely a software problem. Or more precisely how to create independent quality software when many developers are employed by large corporations and no one wants to pay for development. I am not sure much is happening on that front.

if you run a "home cloud" on a raspberry pi 2/3/4 or an orange pic or something else entirely and it fails, will your "cloud" go down with the hardware?

If does go down then it's not cloud, no matter what hardware you're using.

In general, my rule of thumb is: what's the upper limit, the capacity or your wallet?

If the limit is the capacity, then it's HA.

If the limit is your wallet, then it's cloud.

My synology nas emails me every time it is down and every time Amazon or Comcast are down.

Last I checked, Amazon had the fewest 9s of the three (going back a few years...)

Dont break their delusions that "the cloud" is the prefect place were there is no down time, no security issues...

If you pay enough money to run things on their computers all problems are solved. it is only when you self host that is the problem :)

I see value in what you call home cloud. It has a lot of potential for distributing things and giving control of data back to people. Is there a place where I can follow developments like this?

Also, it seems like Western Digital would be an ideal player in the space since they want to bring processing to data storage via RISC-V.

Synology is probably the biggest player in this actually. They sell NAS hardware you can just add software to, with a selection of "home cloud" software of their own.

I don't see proprietary hardware+software bundles counting as a way to "give data back to the people".

On the hardware front I'll plug the project a friend of mine is working on[0]. As far as self-hosted software goes, the file sharing/sync section[1] of awesome self-hosted is great (the whole list is great).

[0] https://rootprojects.org/hub/

[1] https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#file-sharing-...

Unless your server offers some form of slicing of resources (containerization / virtualization) then it's difficult to describe it as a cloud in anything other than a buzzword.

I agree with you and appreciate the granularity that the distinctions afford.

Would you please recommend one of these forums?

I think most ISPs don't allow servers on residential, so one would be better off using a home cloud. Preferably one with blockchain to disrupt blocking or throttling.

Most ISP’s don’t actually care if you host a small server for a low number of users. As they shouldn’t.

Seperately, you’re not going to fool anyone by calling a server something else. (Not that “home cloud” is a bad term, but I think everyone realizes that still constitutes a server.)

> Seperately, you’re not going to fool anyone by calling a server something else.

If we had the logs I'd bet money that someone Googled "home cloud" to see if that would somehow get around hosting a server behind residential.

I'd also bet that even more people nodded "knowingly" while reading my sentence about blockchain.

I had an Exynos 5422, and when it came out it was a great card, however, nowadays, it's old generation - it consumes more and it's less performing than the latest archictures (A7x).

"Double the cores" is not a valid consideration - 4+ core configurations typically have 2/4 cores (the 5422 has 4) with a high-powered architecture, and the remainder with a low powered one.

Compare for example the XU4 with the N2 - the N2 is more powerful, and yet, it has less cores (4 hp. + 2 lp.) and requires no fan.

The RPi is an interesting configuration - they have 4 high-powered architecture cores (4x A72) only. It seems it doesn't require any fan.

Of course if one requires specific chipset/components, we're talking about specific use cases, which is another story.

It does at least need a heatsink. Though it will function without it, you may get temperature warnings, and it will run hot enough to significantly reduce component life. I've also hooked an old PC case fan to the GPIO pins or a USB port, and it runs slower (5V vs the 12 it expects) but does the job fine.

To me, the RPi is the choice only because every other single board I've used had so much less support than RPi does... I have a 3B+ running retropie and it's doing okay, but if this one can also do a decent job with h265 under kodi, I'll be very happy indeed.

Ordered a starter canakit with a couple extras, and looks like I won't see it until August. :-( ... I'll probably forget I ordered it by the time it comes.

> the Odroid HC2 could also - still - be considered

Even don't think about it - shitty support from vendor. They don't care about updates in general.

They do update their repositories for officially supported SBCs.

Of couse, such SBCs have an expiry date (which is also official), but this applies to any vendor, not only to them.

Additionally, they're one of the most engaging companies when it comes to community - just check their forums and see for yourself.

Anybody done some "diff - u [vanilla] [vendor] > patch" work for these SBCs to fork their kernel? Maybe keep it up to mainline?

I've performed a `git cherry -v` out of curiosity a month ago, and there were a few dozen commits (even reverts!).

While I think pretty much any programmer could reapply them, my guess is that in the long term, one needs to know how device drivers development works, in order to adapt to the kernel changes. But I'm not a kernel dev, so the maintenance could be easier.

Are you sure? I've worked with a myriad of ARM devices, and I would say that despite their small size, Hardkernel are one of the most responsive companies when I have had issues.

I say that as both a Gentoo and Kali ARM dev

I'm sure, just check available OS images for their old boards.

Hardware vendors hardly are the best sources for OS images, except maybe for very new boards. When I shop for a board I always look if it is supported by community driven projects such as Armbian, DietPI or even plain Debian.

Take a look here if your board is supported.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

Im excited to look at the wifi on the RP4! Any word on the chipset used for that?

On a more personal note - thank you for your service.

You got any advice for pulling the aircrack_ng/rtl8812au driver from github and making it into a patch for building in-kernel? I really like having signed-module verification, but I also really want this driver.

The credits at the end of the post thank folks who worked on the CYW43455 integration, which matchs up with the raspberry expectation of being a (former) Broadcom part.

Not from hardkernel. They have decent support.

I can't read that article because Medium has decided that I have to login to do so (and possibly sign up).

Needless to say, I won't be reading that link.

Wordpress.com wouldn't have done that with your content. Just saying.

Hi, author of the piece here! You're right that WordPress wouldn't have given you a popup before you could read, for free, the article I spent a couple of months working on. It also wouldn't have provided me with any income to support creating the article in the first place.

Medium, on the other hand, does. I mean, it's not much - I get a slice of the revenue from paying subscribers', based on how much they 'applaud' my piece - but it's higher than zero. Despite this, Medium also makes it available to read free of charge for non-members - up to, I believe, a somewhat miserly three articles a month, though you can bypass this if you really must by using a private browsing window to get another three, and another three, and another three, and another three...

I've got kids to feed and bills to pay. If you really don't want to click an X on the login prompt and read it all for free, I can give you my payment details and sell you a PDF copy...

I wouldn’t know. It’s not like I’ve consumed my “fair free share” of your content, I’ve apparently consumed my fair free share of content across all of medium.

Would you accept to be requested documents when you enter the mall? Would you find normal to be stopped by a security guard that says “sir/madame, you’ve browsed enough stores for free without handing in your id card and personal data, please fill this form or leave” ?

I owe you nothing. If anything, you owe me. It’s my time that builds your audience, not the other way around.

Saying as someone that also detests medium:

- would you mind sharing how much you actually you expect in revenue from this article?

- Have you considered any other ways of monetizing it? Just an idea: if you had your own blog and registered on Brave as a content creator, you could be getting a few cents from me already.

Massively depends on performance. You get money from a subset of a subset of a subset: there's the set of the audience; there's the subset of the audience that are logged in to Medium at the time; there's the subset of the logged-in subset of the audience that bother to click the 'Applaud' button; there's the subset of the bother-to-click-Applaud subset of the logged-in subset of the audience who actually have a paying membership.

Then how much you actually get is totally up in the air. If mine's the only piece Reader A applauds that month, I get 100% of the revenue (minus Medium's cut, of course - the house always wins); if Reader B has applauded 1,000 pieces this month, I get 0.1 percent of the revenue (as do the other 999 authors.)

It's a model which is inherently insular: of the traffic that has visited the piece so far, 90% is external (and thus earns me nothing other than name-recognition) and 10% is internal to Medium. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of that 10% has applauded, and I won't know what that translates to in terms of Cash Monies until Medium calculates it and tells me. I'd be much better off promoting it to existing Medium members - such as by joining a 'publication' on Medium - and ignoring external traffic sources, but I don't want to do that.

As a ballpark, though, the answer - long in coming - is "not much, but considerably more than I'd get on Brave." The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ benchmarking piece I wrote on Medium has earned about $277 lifetime; if this earns the same, I'll have done very well indeed.

Thankfully, I'm not relying on the Medium income: I've pieces in various websites and magazines based on the same core data, which pay one heck of a lot better!

Thanks for your answer. In all honesty and taking what you said in consideration, I still believe that the Medium model should die in a fire, I won't feel bad for not supporting you through it and I hope you consider other alternatives.

I'm not sure you read what I wrote, but I have considered other alternatives: it's called "writing for magazines." If you'd like to support me without supporting Medium, you'll likely find me inside more than one bound collection of thinly-sliced dead tree at your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or bookseller.

I've even considered Brave. Hell, I've even tried Brave. According to my email archive, I signed up as a publisher in January 2018. Sadly, it's just not a sustainable model yet - which is why my piece is monetised by Medium, not Brave.

I wouldn't be keen on supporting dead tree magazines and its excessive ad-to-information ratio, newspapers that only are tangentially focused on providing good content and more focused on creating constant crisis as well or any kind of publishing industry with so many middleman that need to be eliminated.

Sorry, it is really not my intention to pile on you. I am just really tired of the current state of affairs in regards to the publishing/authoring economy. I know it is easier said than done, but we need to have more content creators that are willing to take a principled stand and stay away from these actors and start creating exclusively on terms that are more ethical.

If you're using Brave, I'm assuming you're using the browser's main claim to fame: the ad-blocking/ad-switching functionality, yes?

So, you won't support content creators who publish on a website which uses advertising.

You won't support content creators who publish on a website which allows non-members and free-tier members access to a limited number of articles a month and charges a fee, distributed to the content creators, for unlimited access.

You won't support content creators who publish in print, in magazines or newspapers.

I'm sensing a theme, here: you won't support content creators.

I would love to host my own website (actually, I host several) and write the same kind of content I do now, but how exactly am I going to feed the bills and pay my children? This is literally my job - I'm not just dashing out a quick blog post as I Segway to the London office of my cryptocurrency startup for a day of find-and-replace in the whitepaper. If I'm not getting paid for my words I'm not getting paid at all.

Brave is not the answer, I'm sorry to say. Something like Brave may be - I used to play around with Flattr, which was the same kind of micropayments model as Medium but applicable to any third-party web content, and doesn't have the ethical issue of blocking everybody's adverts but its own - but Brave ain't it, at least as it stands.

You don't want to support content creators, you want to support Brave. That's fine, but don't frame it as wanting to support content creators but only in one very specific and questionably-ethical way.

Otherwise, put your money where your mouth is: pop me a payment across, in the currency or cryptocurrency of your choosing, and I'll publish the same piece on my main website. No adverts, unless you count the cover shots of the books I've published (hey, there's another way you could support me - and if you're worried about ethics, some of them are available for free download under a Creative Commons licence!) down the side.

I used to have about ~$15/month deposited on flattr* for quite some time, and the main reason that I've been using brave is not because of its anti-ad stance but rather their anti-tracking + the possibility of a way to fund content creators.

I am also contributing about ~10€/month on patreon for different software projects and writers. I've written to more than one youtube channel producers asking them to look into alternatives so that they could take my money. The Quilette model is also something that I do appreciate.

Believe me when I say that I am more than willing to support people that create content. And depending how much you are asking for me to send you, I'd gladly take on your offer.

* story time: I got a call from an Eyeo recruiter some months ago, who was looking for people in their ad-block/acceptable ads team. It turned into a most-of-the-time-friendly discussion about how acceptable ads does nothing about the tracking of the users, so I wouldn't be interested in joining their team and me asking him to call me back only if he had some position on flattr.

The problem with Patreon - and thus Quilette, which is 95 percent funded by Patreon - is that there's a massive gulf you can't cross. Popular Content Creator who has a hojillion Patreon backers and gets $10,000 a month from 'em has no worries; person who plays about with it in their spare time and gets $5 a month can buy a beer. Job's a good 'un.

But what about the person who wants to write full time, but hasn't built the audience yet? How do they go from $5 a month to paying the bills? In my case, I didn't have to: by the time I switched careers I had enough regular clients to cover all my outgoings, albeit only just. Quit the day job, picked up some more clients, and here I am doing it full-time to this day.

If I were relying wholly on Patreon - or Brave, or Flattr, or even Medium - I couldn't have done that. Patreon isn't going to give me $300 on spec to write an article that might not do well; Medium won't front me a few grand against royalties so I can take time to write a book.

D'you know who will? The traditional publishers.

I appreciate you have a personal stance on this, but so do I - and mine comes not from the perspective of "I'd like to read this but it's on a website I don't like" but from the perspective of "if I don't get paid for this I'm literally homeless."

Actually, I have a Patreon account - https://www.patreon.com/ghalfacree - I signed up just before the new fee scheme came in to lock in the old rates, but never launched it (hence the zero backers.) Don't really have time to give it the love it would need to gain traction, either - again, we're back to the problem of not having the cash to go from zero Patrons to I-can-feed-my-children Patrons.

I am sorry but this is the point where we disagree. "I still need to make a living" is not that I would accept as an argument to justify all of the unethical issues that arise from the attention economy industry.

Yes, this means that I will actively find ways to accelerate the demise of these business. No matter how much I want to support content creators, it does not make me responsible in guaranteeing their job.

You can click the X in the top right hand corner of the popup.

It's still anooying though.

The OrangePi 3 at $40 is also pretty neat, PCIe 1x, 8GB onboard eMMC, 4x USB 3.0, Bluetooth 5, Wireless AC (pretty sure they beat Raspberry Pi to the punch on this...) and it has mainline kernel support: http://www.orangepi.org/Orange%20Pi%203/

A53 SoC, new RPi4 with A72 is going to run circles around this one.

Unless you are doing disk io and most of your CPU cycles spent on it.

Software support is lacking in this device. No OpenGL, no retro gaming with the March 2019 images. Are you configuring yours differently?

Old and new Mali GPUs just got mainline kernel support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19908741

The one downside to OrangePi systems is that they use a (semi-) non-standard DC connector (1.8mm I think, definitely not 2.1mm or 2.5mm though).

I think this is to avoid the plentiful 12v adapters that use those sizes, as you could fry the board with a bad PSU. The 5v adapters that do use those more standard sizes are generally 500mA or 1A, which is enough to (unreliably) boot and run the board.

I have been using Odroid XU4 for home server (home assistant), personal CCTV, controls IR blaster and other sensors for years, still running perfect without rebooting for months. I also have Pi 3 for Pi Hole, but honestly my Odroid XU4 is more stable than Pi 3.

I had ODROID C2, I don't know how things are now but I've returned mine as it hanged a lot and had lots of different issues. At same time I had 2x Raspberry Pi and it worked fine. This was couple of years ago.

The USB port on the Odroid HC2 is 2.0, but the SATA interface is connected to a USB3 but, as is the Gigabit Ethernet.

Furthermore, SATA and Ethernet are connected to individual USB3 busses, as opposed to earlier RPi designs where everything shared the same USB2 bus.

I haven't checked the RPi 4 specs yet, but i can imagine it's still the same layout, just a faster bus, which can be "just fine" - it should be plenty fast to saturate a Gigabit ethernet as well as the SSD/HDD IO required to do that.

For the RPi 4, they moved the ethernet controller onto the SoC, it's not connected via USB any more.

That is exactly what I've been interested in, and the information I was looking for thanks.

The USB-2-Sata interface is indeed USB 3.0. Thanks. USB 2.0 would be too slow to achieve my 100+ MB/s.

I'd love to run something like this, but I recently switched to ZFS which recommends having a lot of RAM (my NAS has 4GB). It's what kept me from going the route of the Helios 4.

That and is there really much point in using ZFS if you can't give it complete hardware control over the disk controllers?