New Server Update: New Specs and Setup

 

Nothing lasts forever, and technology doesn't stand still.  Though resilio-sync still works find on low-end machines, what I has was the lowest of the low end.  While the processor speed wasn't so important, having faster USB is a plus, and physical hard drives are a ticking time bomb.  

Since the existing machines failed and have to be replaced anyway, it makes sense to replace them with something a bit better, even if still slightly outdated technology.  

First, there is the replacing of the one of the existing Epson Endeaver servers:

Current Server:

Epson endeavor NP11

Atom 230 1.6Ghz

RAM: 1Gb

 Storage: 320 Gb / 1 Tb HDD

Setup: Bare Metal

New Server:

Intel NUC DN2820FYKH

Geekbench 965  1697

RAM: 8Gb

Storage: 1GB mSATA SSD

Setup: VMWare

The more powerful processor, while not strictly necessary, will actually help save power.  Calculations will complete more quickly and leave the processor idle more of the time.

The RAM will also help performance for Resilio-sync and enable the use of VMWare.  

This server has been purchased, and arrived.  Sadly, it *only* has mSATA, and larger mSATA SSD drives are quite expensive at this point - so I will hold off on upgrading the SSD for now.  

I have prepared a 64GB USB memory stick, and loaded VMWare ESXi onto that.  This means that it is ready to go once I finally do acquire the SSD.  

1. Using VMWare instead of bare metal does make the setup slightly more complicated - but it also means that you can so more debugging, maintenance, etc. from remote without a monitor.  As long as VMWare boots, you can do everything else from the remote console.  For example, you can always connect the install ISO to the linux VM and boot into emergency mode.  You can also boot older kernels, etc., without needing to connect a keyboard and monitor to the machine.  Further, if you ever want to make any risky changes, like upgrading the linux distribution, etc., you can take a snapshot first so that you can easily restore in case it doesn't go as planned.  

2. I highly recommend setting up VMWare on a USB stick, as this makes swapping out the drive easier later.  You can remove the SSD, put in a new one with no need to reinstall VMware.  

For the other server, I am using the Asrock Beebox I already have, but repurposing it from a light duty desktop machine to a Resilio-sync server.

Notes:

1. I might still use it as a remote desktop machine, so I upgraded the RAM to 16GB.  

2. VMWare ESXi has some minor issues on this machine - but this mainly just means I can't use the local shell.  The biggest drawback of this is not being able to see the IP address on the screen - however this can be set to DHCP in VMware and assigned manually on my router via MAC address so that I will always know what it is.  

3. This machine has both mSATA and normal SATA.  I upgraded the mSATA to 480GB, and the normal SATA to 1TB.  resilio-sync sits on the 1TB drive, and everything else (ISOs, desktop linux, etc) sits on the 480GB drive.  VMWare ESXi was installed on a USB stick just as with the NUC.

It is interesting to note that these machines are almost exactly the same size, but the Beebox is better in almost every way.  It has USB C and USB 3, and it has a normal SATA port.  

Both of them are more than sufficient for my purposes, however.  

I am surprised to see so few options for larger drives in the mSATA space, as I would think there are a lot of older machines that people want to upgrade.  

Setup difficulties

As mentioned above, I am using the 1TB drive on the Beebox for Resilio-Sync.  I decided to use the latest LTS release of Ubuntu Server (20.04) for this.  Unfortunately, I had issues almost from the start.

The first issue was that I downloaded the ISO from Ubuntu's web site, and uploaded it to VMWare, but it just wouldn't boot.  Come to find out, it was the ARM version.  It turns out that if you download the ISO from an M1 Mac, then the Ubuntu site automatically serves you the ARM version.  In fact, clicking the "other version" link still didn't show the intel version.  After trying to 10 minutes to find the AMD64 ISO file, I gave up and I ended up downloading from another PC - which worked fine.

When you install, it defaults to ext4 and LVM.  I would have preferred BTRFS and no LVM.  There is an easy option to turn LVM on and off, but no easy way to say "use BTRFS for everything".  Sure, I could have manually switched certain partitions to BTRFS, but I was scared that doing so might affect things like GRUB.  In the end I decided to keep the default EXT4 for now, and I thought "If I am going to use EXT4, then I may as well use LVM".  

This turned out to be a bad idea, as for some reason, the default partition created was only 200GB.  This filled up quickly and started causing errors, so I had to resize the LVM, and then resize the ext partition.  It wouldn't let me do this online, so I had to boot into the install ISO and use the shell to do a bunch of stuff manually.  Incidentally, the resize2fs command needs to be run on the LVM device instead of the /dev/sda3 device, so in this case - using LVM really just made things more complicated with little advantage.  

I can imagine many home users would install Ubuntu, keep the defaults, and then wonder why their drive seems to be filling up much faster than it should.  

The nest issue I found was many cases of an error in syslog.  

"multipathd[651]: sda: add missing path"

This required adding a new parameter to the VM on the VMWare side: 

disk.EnableUUID = "TRUE"

Given that VMWare does ask you what OS you are installing, I would expect this should be handled automatically in an ideal world.  

In order to set Resilio Sync to start automatically upon boot, I also has to issue yet more commands.  (you can find these on the resilio sync forum).