Need advice, building a small server for city-library-Devuan mirror

greenjeans · 2025-06-10 16:42:24

Hey friends, so am in the planning stages of possibly building a small server for my city and it's library, we are tiny, around 120 residents, small library around 5000 volumes or so.

The server would host the city's website (small and fairly static) with sub sections for the library and a couple of small museums in town, and info on reserving spaces at our local parks and portals to pay local bills. Would also house an archive of city records and such. The library section would have the database we are in the process of creating, and also host some royalty-free ebooks residents could download.

In addition, it would serve as a full mirror for Devuan, repository and iso-releases and such.

We have fiber, so bandwidth is great and no data-caps. Price is an issue because of our small budget, but the traffic would be small.

I have a preference for AMD CPU/GPU's as they generally play much better with linux than Nvidia does. I got online and asked AI for a build list, and the below is what it suggested, was hoping some of you more experienced folks might take a look and critique/tweak the list?

Any and all suggestions would be helpful, we are on a tight budget and i'm donating my time for free as is my wife on this project. I'll need probably a lot of advice on software and deployment when it comes time, but first things first I want to really nail down a good build list and submit the numbers for approval from the city manager and mayor. Here's the list:

### Custom-Built Server Recommendations
Building a server gives you flexibility to optimize for cost and specific needs. Since you’ve built desktops before, this is feasible, though it requires more research for compatibility. Here’s a recommended parts list for a budget server (~$500–$800):

- **CPU**: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G ($120–$150)
- 6 cores, 12 threads, 3.9 GHz base. Efficient, supports ECC RAM (with compatible motherboard), and has integrated graphics (no GPU needed). Suitable for web hosting, file serving, and mirroring.

- **Motherboard**: ASRock B550M Pro4 ($90–$120)
- Supports ECC RAM, 1 NVMe slot, 4 SATA ports, Gigabit Ethernet. Micro-ATX form factor fits compact cases.

- **RAM**: 16–32 GB ECC DDR4 (e.g., Kingston Server Premier, $80–$150 for 16 GB)
- ECC RAM is critical for ZFS and data integrity. 16 GB is enough for your current needs; 32 GB future-proofs for more VMs or containers.

- **Storage**:
- **OS Drive**: 500 GB SATA SSD (e.g., Samsung 870 EVO, $50–$70) for Devuan OS and web server.
- **Data Drives**: 2x 4 TB HDD (e.g., Seagate IronWolf or WD Red, $100–$120 each) in RAID 1 for archives and Devuan mirror. RAID 1 mirrors data for redundancy.

- **Case**: Fractal Design Node 804 ($100–$120)
- Compact micro-ATX tower, supports multiple drive bays, quiet cooling for a library environment.

- **Power Supply**: 400–500W 80+ Bronze (e.g., EVGA 500 BR, $40–$60)
- Efficient and reliable for low-power builds. Avoid overkill PSUs to save energy.

- **UPS**: CyberPower CP600LCD (~$70–$100)
- Protects against power outages, provides ~300W backup for 10–15 minutes.

- **Total Cost**: ~$550–$800, depending on storage and RAM.

Thanks!

Eeqmcsq · 2025-06-10 18:53:15

Two thoughts, based on maintaining my own PCs at home over the years.

* Who's going to maintain the server if something goes wrong? Example: If the server gets fried by lightning, who knows how to rebuild the server and restore the data from a backup? Who will make the backups?

* I've learned the hard way that SSDs aren't great for long term data storage, especially with static data (files that don't change). Based on what I can figure out from research, the SSDs memory cells suffer from voltage drift over time. So it gets harder to read old data, because the SSD controller has to work harder to determine what a cell's voltage level is, which determines the data bit values. This leads to slower SSD read speeds. In theory, the drift can get so bad that the data bits would be misread, thus get corrupted.

So you might want to ask a sys admin how they manage and maintain servers with SSDs in a work environment, especially with servers storing lots of static data. Are there SSDs that will silently refresh these memory cells and keep the read speeds and the data bits from degrading? Or do they go through regular hardware refreshes, so they end up replacing their whole server every few years, including the SSDs?

Last edited by Eeqmcsq (2025-06-10 18:56:35)

greenjeans · 2025-06-10 20:13:09

^^Good thoughts, thank you!

To your points/questions:

1. I'm not tied at the wrist and ankles to anything on that list, especially not SSD's, if anything that's the component I question the most.

2. I'll be the maintainer. I live literally half a block from the building that houses the library, city hall, and the fire/ems folks, I have my own key to the place. So i'll be doing the backups on a regular basis, my thought was to set up another pair of HDD's, air-gapped and not powered up when not in use as just simple storage for the backups.

Long-term my evil genius plan is to convert this whole place to a sanctuary-city for Linux, powered by Devuan (with a little Vuu-do here and there). I've already converted a number of locals to Devuan from windoze, and they really like it so far.

Eeqmcsq · 2025-06-10 21:20:56

That backup plan sounds similar to what I'm doing at home for my work PCs. I have an HDD + SATA-to-USB3 dock, and I connect this to my work laptop once a week when it's time to back up the laptop's SSD by cloning the SSD to a file, something like "dd if=/dev/sdx of=file.bin". I wrote my own script to do most of the dirty work, including checking the backup HDD's file system for errors, deleting old backups if there isn't enough space, and constructing a date/time for the backup file name.

One difference in your proposal compared to my home PCs is that my OS is also on a RAID1, so the OS can withstand a drive failure. That's saved me the time of having to reinstall and reconfigure the OS when one of the drives failed.

I think that's the limit of my home experiences that can apply to your project. From a brainstorming perspective, other issues that spring to mind are:

* Handling multiple client requests: If multiple client requests causes a lot of disk activity on the OS disk, maybe an SSD IS needed for the OS.

* Web page design: These days, web pages must be designed for mobile users, since everyone has a phone. I have no knowledge of modern web design.

greenjeans · 2025-06-10 22:04:49

Handling multiple client requests might indeed be the logic behind the SSD rec, though I seriously don't expect a lot of traffic...i'm flexible though, if we do go with an HDD instead of an SSD for the OS and it's not up to the task we can swap it out.

The RAID idea for the OS drive is compelling, have to think about that one a bit, my first instinct (and what I do at home) is roll up a copy using Refracta Snapshot, then if anything craps out it's just a 10 minute install to get back up and running.

Yeah I haven't put together a website in years, not looking forward to that part, but that will be a few months from now anyway, first priority is getting it set up and serving. I do have some friends though in that field that might help me out when it's time. I really miss the old Yahoo SiteBuilder to be honest, it was actually a great quick WYSIWYG editor for throwing up sites fast.

fsmithred · 2025-06-11 11:33:47

You can install to RAID with the cli refractainstaller, but it won't take 10 minutes. It would probably be more like 15 minutes. RAID1 will prevent downtime, and you can make a cron job to check the drives and send you email and/or text message if one fails.

Update on these instructions - it says that partitions must end in a non-zero digit and that's no longer true. I fixed it long ago. You can use md0 and if you do lvm you don't have to end the lv name with a digit. (e.g. /dev/mapper/nodigitshere would work.)
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2323

steve_v · 2025-06-11 13:08:15

Eeqmcsq wrote:

I've learned the hard way that SSDs aren't great for long term data storage, especially with static data (files that don't change). Based on what I can figure out from research, the SSDs memory cells suffer from voltage drift over time.

I've learned the hard way that *all* readily available storage media is subject to this kind of bitrot, and the only viable solution (besides exotic media like etched sapphire) is file and/or block checksums, regular readability tests, and sufficient redundancy for the inevitable repairs...
That means ZFS or BTRFS for anything important, with regular scrubs.

I've had all manner of RAID failures and filesystem corruption over the years, but I haven't seen a single damaged file in the decade+ I've been running ZFS on Debian/Devuan...
I do get the occasional:
"One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error... Applications are unaffected... Determine if the device needs to be replaced... Repaired [x]M in [y] hours with 0 errors"
type mail though, because all disks suck.
"desktop" disks suck hard, "green" disks suck harder, and "laptop" disks suck hardest of all. You get what you pay for, server (or "NAS") grade storage is worth every penny in reducing both risk and aggravation. Goes for HDD, SSD, or NVME, the price/performance/reliability triangle is the same.

greenjeans wrote:

I have a preference for AMD CPU/GPU's as they generally play much better with linux than Nvidia does.

GPU brand is utterly irrelevant for a webserver... having a GPU at all is irrelevant for that matter, the vast majority of webservers just use IPMI KVM or serial console.
Unless you need a GPU for media en/decoding or ~~AI nonsense~~ wasting energy, put those PCIe slots to a more constructive use like HBAs or more NICs.

There is a pretty good argument for AMD over Intel on the CPU front though, namely getting ECC support without the Xeon tax.

My take on storage would be ext4 on an (md)RAID1 of small SSDs for the OS and anything that doesn't play nice with COW filesystems (like the database if you CBF with filesystem tuning), and ZFS (mirror or RAIDZ) on 2 or 3 "NAS" grade spinners for data.

None of this is a substitute for backups of course, you should have those (and test them regularly) too.

As for other hardware, I'm not up with current pricing so I don't have any specifics, but in general: ECC memory and plenty of it, a not-bargain-basement motherboard, and somewhere to put at least 2 (preferrably 4 or 5) drives.
Everything else is negotiable, CPU load serving mostly static web content will be bugger all and disk latency won't matter much if you have enough RAM for a decent cache.
You'll want a quality PSU and a UPS with monitoring properly configured as well of course.

Last edited by steve_v (2025-06-11 13:36:52)

greenjeans · 2025-06-11 19:24:34

^^^ Yep that validates what i've been reading, that ZFS is a must on the storage drives. And Nginx instead of Apache was mentioned many places as being the better choice. But now we're talking about software and i'd like to keep this thread just about the hardware choices, i'll have a lot of questions later about software.

The list in the OP doesn't have a GPU, the integrated graphics are probably fine. But you did mention media transcoding, and that may be something i'll need to do here and there. It's ridiculously slow to do so on my APU-equipped laptop, would be nice to have something faster.

So the concensus seems to be do RAID1 for the OS too...interesting, not something I would have thought of.

One big question: Is this gonna work without EFI? Because I do hate it so.

steve_v · 2025-06-11 19:52:55

EFI/MBR is a BIOS thing, grab the manual for the board you're considering. If it mentions "legacy" mode/CSM, you can likely still use MBR boot.

greenjeans · 2025-06-11 20:20:36

^^Oh that part I know already, I misspoke. What I meant to say was I wonder if it will be a software issue going forward if I used a non-uefi system to start with if the board will support it?

Altoid · 2025-06-11 20:29:30

Hello:

greenjeans wrote:

One big question ...

I can feel your pain from way down here. 8^°

Food for thought:
From your OP I gather that $$$ is a limitation and a very understandable one.

As you know, I run my Devuan system on a ca. 2007 Sun Microsystems Ultra 24 WS.
Doesn't ever skip a beat and it is the best IT purchase I ever made.
The box is built like a tank, way ahead of its time when it came out and still was 10 years later.
You don't get hardware like this anymore.

Why not consider an older, high quality box to populate with enough RAM, SAS controller / drives and a pair of 4port Gigabit cards?
I think that is where you will get the best bang for your town's money.
And no EFI ...

eg: a Sun Microsystems Ultra 40 M2.

2x AMD 3.0 GHz Opteron dual-core processors + 32 GB of DDR2-667 ECC
2x 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet ports
8x SATA / SAS HDD slots
2x PCIe x16 graphics slots
2x PCIe x8 expansion slots
1x PCI 33MHz, 32-bit slot

It probably has (like my U24) pins for a RS-232 port, which has to be enabled in BIOS.
Could be quite useful.

You can probably get a basic one for a good price and populate it according to your needs.

eg: run it with no monitor, use 1x PCIe x16 slot for a four port GbE card, 1x PCIe x16 slot an 8 port SAS controller and boot from a SSD drive on an adapter in one of the expansion slots and you will still have 1x PCIe x8 and 1x PCI 33MHz 32-bit slots for whatever else you want to stuff in there.

Just my 0.02 ...

Best,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (2025-06-12 01:28:14)

Dutch_Master · 2025-06-12 04:52:46

Nobody ever got fired for buying a Dell. Same goes for HP, IBM and Lenovo.

Despite having my daily driver PC on AMD hardware for the past 25 yrs, I'd suggest you'd hunt down an older workstation (Intel 10th, 11th or 12th gen CPU) for cheap, maximize RAM, add 2-4 HDD's for long term storage in RAID 1, 5 or 6, a 1TB NVMe SSD for the OS and any VM's you'd like to run.

As for the OS: Although Devuan can do all the tasks you planned for, I'd suggest being practical and consider specific NAS-OS's like HexOS, TrueNAS Scale, UnRAID or ProxMox instead. Yes, they use systemd and as much as I despise it, realistically that's not going away anytime soon. As your only online portal for your community, downtime due to having to tinker with a manual Devuan setup isn't really acceptable. You'd also need to consider online risks: you may not consider your community a target, online criminals will have a field day hacking your machine and turning it to making them money whichever way they want. Devuan simply doesn't have a GUI tool that makes configuring it suitable for online use, like HexOS is for TrueNAS. The project lacks the resources and realistically, it's not gonna happen anytime soon, even if someone steps up developing the required functionality for it today.

ralph.ronnquist · 2025-06-12 06:52:24

Very peculiar opinions you are voicing there. Especially I would consider "GUI tool that makes configuring it for online use" being a quite oxymoronic phrase. It's kind of like saying: "but he is friendly to the kids". Of course, I voice my opinion here.

steve_v · 2025-06-12 12:40:07

greenjeans wrote:

I wonder if it will be a software issue going forward if I used a non-uefi system to start with if the board will support it?

Highly unlikely. The only software that cares about UEFI/MBR distinctions is the bootloader and whatever is installing/updating it, and I don't see GRUB or LILO dropping MBR support any time soon.
If it ever did come to that, converting an installed system to UEFI isn't particularly difficult anyway.

The more likely scenario is that at some point you will need to replace the motherboard, and find you have to pay a premium for one that still supports MBR boot.

What you *need* UEFI for is booting from (almost all) NVME drives, and that is a technical/architectural limitation... So as storage moves in that direction, sooner or later you will have to adapt.

Also worthy of side-note is that resizable BAR (or whatever $GPU_vendor is calling it these days) support in BIOS is currently being used as a wedge to push people toward UEFI. There's no technical reason for one to require the other, but that's what consumer board vendors (and more to the point, Microsoft) are doing.

Dutch_Master wrote:

I'd suggest being practical and consider specific NAS-OS's like HexOS, TrueNAS Scale, UnRAID or ProxMox instead.

Why? We're not talking about a home NAS here, and using a turnkey NAS distro adds precious little of value to a webserver.

Dutch_Master wrote:

online criminals will have a field day hacking your machine and turning it to making them money whichever way they want

If you are an idiot and run compromised or misconfigured services, sure. Or you could... *shock* read the Debian security manual.
I know plenty of people (myself included) running public webservers on general-purpose GNU/Linux or BSD distros, none of them have been pwned, and I call FUD.

Dutch_Master wrote:

Devuan simply doesn't have a GUI tool that makes configuring it suitable for online use, like HexOS is for TrueNAS.

Devuan is exactly as "suitable for online use" as Debian, and both can do everything TrueNAS does if configured appropriately.
Debian powers vast numbers of webservers and has for decades, whether it has an easy-mode "GUI tool" or "setup wizard" for a given role is neither here nor there. "Universal operating system" and all that.

I'm not knocking TrueNAS mind, it's a fine distro... Claiming that it's somehow more reliable or more secure than Devuan because it has a graphical wizard though, that's kinda ridiculous... As is shelling out $199 per box for HexOS beta, the mind boggles.

Last edited by steve_v (2025-06-12 13:14:14)

yurimodin · 2025-06-12 14:53:10

As a lifelong AMD guy I am going to go against the grain here a little bit and suggest a 12th-14th gen Intel on sale at Newegg with a B series motherboard(be sure to get a chip with an iGPU). Darn near every time I try to run Consumer level Ryzen hardware as a server I get bit in the A__ by some ram or motherboard quirk.

All that aside KEEP YOUR SOFTWARE SEPARATE FROM YOUR DATA. Have your OS on a separate drive or raid array than your data. JMHO I would setup timeshift on your OS drive and at least a RAID1 on your data possibly a RAID10 but that might be overkill. And then have some old POS machine in the corner with a RAID1 or just 2 drives doing nightly RSYNC backups from the main server.

What I do at work is I have a spare drive in our server getting RSYNCED 5 days worth of our critical data to the secondary drive, I then have that POS machine in the corner with 2 drives making 2 copies (no need for raid) and that machine RSYNCs nightly up to RSYNC.net

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn · 2025-06-12 15:53:57

think i have some thinkstation S20 workstations that i believe are pre-uefi if you would be interested in good serviceable free stuff.

naturally there would be some S&H unless you're close enough for a pickup/delivery/meet-in-the-middle-exchange. what is your zip?

greenjeans · 2025-06-18 12:04:55

^^^ That's incredibly kind my friend, i'll have to think about that one.

Unfortunately I seem to have come down with the flu late last week, and it's still hammering me really hard, so all my projects are on hold for the moment as I barely have the energy to type.

Haven't been this sick since I had pneumonia 25 years ago.

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn · 2025-06-18 12:18:31

hope it's not covid

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/06/new-covid-variant-swiftly-gains-ground-in-us-concern-looms-for-summer-wave/

Last edited by stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn (2025-06-18 15:01:22)

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#1 2025-06-10 16:42:24

Need advice, building a small server for city-library-Devuan mirror

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