Honestly, are there any HDDs that can really reach 6gb/s speeds? I haven’t seen any that could reach 3gb/s. My current array is all running on SATA-2 backplanes, but with 8 drives in the raid it clocks out at 460MB/s sustained (bytes, not bits). Considering my previous NAS could barely reach 70MB/s on a 6-disk array, I was quite pleased with the new setup.

Your server needs to have a static IP address. Once you have that, and have your DNS service set up, then you should be able to update your domain(s) to point to the new DNS. This new server doesn’t have to be your primary DNS entry for the domain(s), but it should be one of the first two entries. And that’s pretty much all you need to get started.

One other consideration is setting up the master/slave status of your DNS servers so you only have to make updates in one spot (helpful to ensure everything stays in sync). This isn’t a requirement, it just makes your life easier.

I think my suggestion would be to use the PC as a dedicated firewall, but you will need at least two ethernet ports for that (one to connect to the ISP router, and the second for internal network). This lets you learn network security and control the traffic that can actually get to your other computers. You could also set up KVM to start running virtual machines here. The idea with a VM is to keep services separate and isolated, so like one VM to manage security cameras, another VM to host a game server, another one to host sonarr/radarr/jellyfin… etc.

When you are able to expand, your second physical machine should be your NAS. Get your storage space started, share it over NFS or samba, and move your backup/security camera/sonarr VMs over to this machine for direct access to the larger storage space. Pay attention to system usage and move your VMs to balance the cpu/memory resources. Eventually you may want to get a third machine dedicated more for hosting the game servers, maybe a web server to view the security camera feeds, or whatever.

You mentioned backing up Wikipedia… Have a look at the Kiwix project, you can already get access to regular backups for a lot of information sites.

Why does everyone think the term came from Star Wars? I know it was used in steampunk before then, and google suggests it goes back to a 1958 article about robots. Sorry, not trying to be pedantic, just feels like a lot of people give Star Wars unjust credit for things they didn’t actually create.

You might check if a simple CPU upgrade would get you there. I previously ran some 2005 Poweredge servers that came with a Pentium D processor, and it cost me something like $8 from ebay to upgrade to a Xeon and start running KVM.

Keep an eye out for people trashing perfectly good desktop machines because Windows 10 is being retired.

If you want a server that “does it all” then you would need to get the most decked-out top of the line server available… Obviously that is unrealistic, so as others have mentioned, knowing WHAT you want to run is required to even begin to make a guess at what you will need.

Meanwhile here’s what I suggest – Grab any desktop machine you can find to get yourself started. Load up an OS, and start adding services. Maybe you want to run a personal web server, a file server, or something more extensive like Nextcloud? Get those things installed, and see how it runs. At some point you will start seeing performance issues, and this tells you when it’s time to upgrade to something with more capability. You may simply need more memory or a better CPU, in which case you can get the parts, or you may need to really step up to something with dual-CPU or internal RAID. You might also consider splitting services between multiple desktop machines, for instance having one dedicated NAS and another running Nextcloud. Your personal setup will dictate what works best for you, but the best way to learn these things is to just dive in with whatever hardware you can get ahold of (especially when it’s free), and use that as your baseline for any upgrades.

But why doesn’t it ever empty the swap space? I’ve been using vm.swappiness=10 and I’ve tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I’m not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I’m not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space – which adds to my confusion about the differences).

Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn’t all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?

And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.

If your card has an x4 pinout, then it probably needs the additional bandwidth. Plugging it into an x1 slot (if it was possible) would slow down the network traffic. Get a better motherboard with an x4 slot on it so you can use the hardware you want. or find something else that will fit your computer.

Honestly even the 1Gb quad port card I have requires an x4 slot, although I saw some dual-port 2.5Gb x1 cards on ebay. Maybe you could just use two of those?

Yeah? OK well it’s certainly worth taking a closer look at, and I was also doing some reading on Yacy. I’ve run one in the past called mnogosearch, with a lot of customization, but it would be nice to get into a community project like this.

But is it decentralized? Do the results from multiple spiders get added to give everyone the same quality searches or do I need to scan the whole internet myself?

[edit] I was looking at this earlier and couldn’t find the info. Started searching again just now and found it immediately… of course… (The answer is YES)

Yep, that’s exactly what I was looking at (https://github.com/searx/searx). As I said, it was a QUICK dive but the wording was enough to make me shy away from it. For all the years I’ve been running servers, I won’t put up anything that requires the latest/greatest of any code because that’s where about 90% of the zero-days seem to come from. Almost all the big ones I’ve seen in the last few years where things that made me panic until I realized that oh, if your updates are more than a year old then none of this affects you. And the one that DID affect me had already been updated through a security release.

I just did a quick dive into this and have some concerns. SearX appears to no longer be maintained and was last updated three years ago. SearXNG was forked to use more recent libraries but there were concerns that those are not always stable or fully vetted. There were also concerns that SearXNG did not follow the same concerns for user privacy. It’s a shame that SearX shut down, that one actually sounds like a project I would have jumped on.

Man what are the odds??? I just finished the last episode today too! I’ve been dragging along on this last season because, ya know, last season and all, but it did certainly end with quite a bang.

More drives also equals larger power consumption so you would need a larger battery backup.

It also means more components prone to failure which increases your chance of losing data. More drives means more moving parts and electrical connections including data and power cables, backplanes, and generated heat that you need to cool down.

I’d be more concerned over how many failures you’re seeing that makes you think smaller drives would be the better option? I have historically used old drives from ebay or manufacturer refurbs, and even the worst of those have been reliable enough to only have to replace drives once every year or two. With RAID6 or raidz2 you should be plenty secure during a rebuild to prevent data loss. I wouldn’t consider using a lot of little drives unless it’s the only option I had or if someone gave them away for free.

Just for some real-world comparison, I set up a new NAS earlier this year using a rackserver, SAS cards, and eight 18TB HDDs configured like RAID6 (actually using zfs-z2). I played with a few different configurations but ultimately my write speeds reached around 480MB/s because of the parallel access to so many drives. Single drive access was of course quite a bit slower. Because of this testing I knew I could use cheap SATA2 backplanes without affecting the performance.

So basically, do a lot of testing with your planned hardware to get the best throughput, but a single HDD is going to be your single biggest bottleneck in anything you set up.