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PiBox: a tiny personal server for self-hosting (pibox.io)
277 points by erulabs on Aug 1, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 169 comments
Heya HN! We've built a Raspberry PI CM4 based SSD NAS for home hosting. We built it as a part of KubeSail.com - which is a platform aimed at making self-hosting easy and at making the technical bits (tunneling, backups, updates, etc) as easy as possible.

You may have seen plans for this about 9 months ago on HN, but we're finally in full production! I'll be booking tickets to fly out and help assemble the 2nd batch in a few days - we're effectively a two person computer company, which is a lot of fun and a crazy amount of work. Our mission is to make home-hosting a website, an app, or just personal photos a reasonable alternative to SaaS products.




Why would I pay 539 eurodollars for a pi when I could buy a reasonable consumer-grade PC for that money? or just go with an actual enterprise server, although used?


You shouldn't. A Pi (even the 8G one) is seriously under powered and lacks a hardware clock. I recently went through the exercise of setting up a Pi for a Minecraft server only have to replace it with an office desktop within the week because it couldn't handle it when my friends were on. Turned out to be an expensive lesson, the Pi is a toy for solo tinkering and nothing more.

edit: I even tried overclocking the Pi and dialing down the simulation distance in Minecraft.


This argument has been going since the Pi came out. I'd agree most people shouldn't. They should just get a NUC and save themselves the headaches. If you know what you're getting into, though, and build to it's lack of strength you can go pretty far. Current inflated prices are a hard no from me.

Minecraft servers are likely the heaviest of the ~15 services I run at home. You chose a service that I wouldn't have expected to work.

My Pi 4 4GB runs an MPD server that outputs to a HiFiBerry DAC, Zabbix and Grafana. It's done so smoothly for about a year now.

At one time it acceptably ran Nextcloud, Gitea, Matrix Synapse, Vaultwarden and a file server in systemd containers.

At another time, it replaced an old AMD e350 machine I was using for backups - the Pi 4 was faster than that old desktop. The bottleneck was the CPU load when transferring data over SSH.


Just my own preference, but I was going the route of NUC and instead landed on Protectli routers. They are meant to be routers/firewalls but work as general purpose PC's and at least at the time costed less than a NUC and have more interface options. They are air cooled and generally run cool unless doing heavy workloads but not a problem in my case. I just set them next to my HEPA filter. One can chose between CoreBoot and AMI bios and many different CPU options.

[1] - https://protectli.com/


These are rather expensive for SoHo. I would go with a carambola2 or another module from 8-devices running OpenWRT.


Those are also good options for routers/firewalls. I think Protectli is aiming for devices that can handle VPN encryption/decryption at a decent rate on their Core i5/i7 models. I only mention the Protectli devices because for me at least they were a decent alternative to NUC's and for general computing whereas some of the SoHo devices are less apt for general computing in my experience.


Right, makes sense.


I run a Pi 8GB booting from a USB3 NVMe. It runs a PiHole, plus acts as a WireGuard server so I can VPN into it permanently on my phone and actually get useful adblocking on the go.

I also run a Navidrome instance on it and use Subtracks on Android so I can get all my music whilst out and about.

It also runs a Mopidy server so I can play music at home over the proper speakers using Mopidy Mobile.

It also acts as a DDNS informer so that I can always get home when my ISP decides to change my public IP.

It also acts as a SSH gateway and runs a RDP instance on it. I did used to use it as a desktop device and a Moonlight/Steam desktop streamer but now the PC is in the same room, and a Pi400 is downstairs with the TV. That runs much cooler.

All in all a great useful device and not sure how I'd live without it.


hi there, I plan to do this pihole + wireguard setup in the very near future, do you have any advice or reference material you used in setting it up? Would be incredibly helpful. Thank you!


There's official docs on how to do that here https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/wireguard/overview/


I use the Pi4 passively cooled using an aluminium enclosure. If the form factor is not important to you, the Pi400 runs far far cooler (and faster) because it has a large heat spreader inside it.

For the NVMe, I got an Icybox NVMe enclosure because the other enclosures were problematic. I was using a "SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVME PCI-E M-Key Solid State Drive External Enclosure (Fits only NVMe PCIe 2242/2260/2280)" - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07MNFH1PX

I ended up replacing it with a "ICY BOX M.2 NVMe Enclosure for M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD, USB 3.1 (Gen 2, 10 Gpbs), USB-C & USB-A Cable, Aluminum, Black" - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07JJXCSC4

The ICY BOX actually supports booting from it unlike the SSK so I managed to ditch the microSD card too. Here was my enquiry on the forum about it: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=307291

Once you're set up with Pihole running on it and can SSH into it, installing Navidrome is easy - just follow the installation guide at https://www.navidrome.org/docs/installation/linux/.

For Wireguard installation, I used https://github.com/pivpn/pivpn

I also use a Wireguard UI (which stores its configuration in a different place to the "stock" Wireguard installation in the pivpn above): https://github.com/ngoduykhanh/wireguard-ui

There are some rules to permit incoming traffic on Wireguard in and out: Post up: iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

Post down: iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

For DDNS, I just run a cron job that connects to a free plan on https://freedns.afraid.org/. They have a bash script to use - very simple.

I run Wireguard on my phone as an "always on" VPN which connects to the domain registered at the DDNS service, so I know that mydomain will also go home.

To get DNS working over the Wireguard, you may have to change the Pihole settings to "permit all origins" for DNS requests.

For incoming traffic at my home, the router port forwards the appropriate Wireguard port to the Pi (on its static address). The Pi is not set as a DMZ or anything.

Enjoy!


So you got a Pi and dumped an CPU-intensive, famously single-threaded game server and called it a useless toy when it didn't work.

It like trying to tow a trailer with a dirt bike and complaining when it doesn't move.

The PI as a server shines in running low-to-medium power services and having a low entry and upkeep costs.

I run a Plex server, Gitea server, samba filesharing and qbitorrent on a 4gb rpi4 and it just sit there and chugs along using like a tenth of the power a normal computer would, taking almost no space, making no noise and costing like a fifteenth something like a NUC would.

And as a bonus, if it ever does go kaput I can just get another rpi4 and the entire process of setting it all up again would take me 5 minutes max.


To be fair, Minecraft is heavy.

Doesn’t mean I’d spend this money on a pi, but I’m probably not the target.


I call B.S.: I've used those "toys for solo tinkering" in production control, monitoring, and data collection/communications applications in industrial, energy, and manufacturing settings. Sounds like you just don't know how to set up and build non-obese software.

N.B.: An 8GB rPi 4/CM4 has more memory, more storage, more compute power, and faster networking and i/o than a Cray supercomputer had in the early 90s! It's a real computer. If you can't do most of the useful jobs on the planet with that level of performance, then you just suck at software. (Yes, I know most Linux distros are Jabba-level obese these days, but still...)

Full disclosure: I have a PiBox on order, and will be prototyping a prepackaged server with it, which may well turn into a product itself.


Wow really? That seems to be a minecraft problem. I run openhab (which is a quite resource heavy java app), home assistant, influxdb, grafana and a bunch of data loggings scripts off a 4GB Pi and for a while even had the unifi controller running on it. All the scripts still run instantly and interactive use is possible without problems. I found the main reason for high load or lags is when the SD card breaks - which happens approximately every two years under such heavy use. Yes, I know you can boot from USB, but you should have a working and tested backup strategy nevertheless and I always keep a spare one around.


ARM servers on the cloud doesn't seem to be as performant as their x86 counterparts with similar specs and same workloads (I've tried AWS, Oracle, Hetzner, Scaleway- when it had one), I think it largely comes down to the software optimizations.

Where as, I continue to use several ARM home servers consisting of Pi's and Jetson with smaller workloads and applications made for them.


With the current electricity prices in Germany you'd be paying around 30 €/month for a 100 W always-on server. And enterprise servers idle at around 200-250 W, so there's that.

Compare that to a RPi that idles at ~5 W.


The markup is massive though, aren't raspi something like 40 USD? Are you really getting another 500 worth of value from this?


aren't raspi something like 40 USD?

They seem to be using the 8GB RP4, which is currently around 100€. Also it comes with a 2 TB SSD for storage which is probably another 150-200€. A 2 port SATA backplane/adapter is probably 20-50€, Power supply, fans and wifi/bluetooth antenna is maybe an additional 30-50€. Even the cheapest case will set you back another 10-20€. So all told the markup isn't as bad as you're making out. Still an open question if it's worth it or not though.


FYI, the high-priced PiBox config includes TWO each 2 GB SSDs (which you can stripe and/or mirror), so the price is not really at all unreasonable when you consider the cost of the drives alone are about half the asking price. And just try to get a high spec (8 GB) CM4 these days: Most places are quoting 52 week (indefinite) lead times. The PiBox team managed to negotiate delivery on a big enough batch of these to do their first production run. Color me impressed.

FWIW, I've got a PiBox on order (w/o the drives), and I think the price is VERY reasonable. (No relationship other than waiting customer.) The PiBox "mainboard" that hosts the CM4 has much better I/O capabilities than a garden variety RPi 4. I'm actually going to be using mine for a small, light NAS and application server, and I'm confident it will work well.


There is a serious shortage of Raspberry Pis, sold out everywhere. Here, they are using the Pi 4 8GB, which is normally 75€, but expect to pay double if you want one now.

They also sell the box without the Pi, SSDs, antenna and fan for 150€, it is up to you to decide if the price is justified, I think it is a bit on the expensive side but not unreasonably so. But if you intend to DIY the same configuration they are selling for 540€, you won't get that much cheaper.


>With the current electricity prices in Germany you'd be paying around 30 €/month for a 100 W always-on server. And enterprise servers idle at around 200-250 W, so there's that.

Where are you getting these measurements from? A "consumer-grade PC" idles at a few watts[1]. "enterprise servers" might idle a bit higher but nowhere near 200-250W.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-M90n-Nano-D...


> Where are you getting these measurements from?

I made them myself with a kill-a-watt. The consumer grade PC's idle at ~60W, meanwhile the Dell PowerEdge R710 I have here with me idles at ~250 W.


There are combinations of ATX motherboards and CPUs that idle at around 30 W.

However, the easiest way to have low idle power is to use a NUC-like computer.

Many models consume between 5 W and 10 W during light load at the wall plug, while those with the highest power consumption use between 10 W and 15 W at the wall plug, during light load.

The fastest SBCs with ARM cores that can be found at a reasonable price are comparable in speed with Intel Jasper Lake, but Raspberry Pi uses obsolete Cortex-A72 cores, which are 2 to 3 times slower.

Even a 7-year old NUC-like computer from Intel/Gigabyte/Zotac etc., with a "Core" CPU, e.g. a Skylake U, is much faster than anything with Jasper Lake or with Cortex-A76 or older ARM cores.

While a new NUC-like computer is more expensive, an old one might be as cheap as a Raspberry Pi, while being much faster.

During the last 20 years, I had a permanently active 24x7 server, which hosts a large number of services, e.g. firewall, router, NTP server, DNS server, DNS proxy and cache, e-mail server, Web server, Web proxy and cache, file server, etc.

The first server which did all that used the fastest Pentium 4 and it had an average power consumption of over 200 W. The current hardware of the server is the 5th version since the beginning. At each upgrade, the average power consumption has been cut into half. The current server consumes around 10 W and it uses an Intel NUC with a Coffee Lake U CPU, together with 4 USB to Ethernet adapters, to provide 5 Ethernet ports.

I have experimented with various ARM-based SBCs, but when old NUCs are available, repurposing them is a higher-performance solution.


I've got an IBM x3500 and a Dell R720 sitting here, both idle around 50-80 watts on my kill-a-watt. Not sure what you're on about.


Well, the dell R710 is like five generations behind. This translates to 10+ years, saving power wasn't important back then.


Nah, enterprise servers often can idle 200W+ easily. I know from experience.

Current Dells pull that much without even an OS installed, just sitting idle at a boot screen.


I'd assume that computers with an OS installed consume less power, because the OS can tell the components to switch to a lower power state.


You wouldn't, it's just a "cool" little project. The only advantage this has over a normal server that I can think of is size and power consumption.


And even the thin mini PCs have fairly low power consumption these days. I got one with dual gig ethernet for $150, x86_64, works great. Similar ones for $100 you could easily hang a few large drives off of.

Install a base OS, then docker compose a few services. Or buy a half dozen and deploy k8s.

Boom, "A cheap tiny personal server self hosting" (with COTS parts).


What did you find? I'm looking for something like that. Should be good for a router.


That's what I'm using mine for!

I'll make a post with the parts list and software install steps in a month or so if it would help anyone out. I bought https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09GK2QSY1, and a few alternatives, and I'm going to benchmark their performance under heavy load (using a much studlier machine to generate traffic).

These mini PCs are getting to be _really cheap_. Cheap enough that my home infra is moving towards a tiny mini PC ($100 or less) attached to every pair of monitors, keyboards, and the network, and a central server to do actual work.


Another option is to buy a used "thin client". 1/10th the price, very similar power usage, small size. Some of them got room for a drive or even a quad intel nic (via pcie)


Turn-key. Buy this and use it, if I understand what they're offering correctly. Hopefully with more privacy than is likely with current offerings. If you're capable of implementing this with cheaper hardware it's probably not for you, but maybe someone you know?


What is a eurodollar? I thought the prices on the website were in Euros?


Not OP, but I think the joke is that 1€ ~= $1 now so they can be thought of as a single currency.


OP: Yes, that, euros or dollars, well, "the common currency" and also a reference to the cyberpunk game :)


Well, in this case the distinction is actually useful because in Europe you will be charged more for this product as they show the price without VAT on the main product page - when you try to check out they will add VAT.


I dont think the saynig it knows this but Eurodollar is a real concept

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eurodollar.asp#:~:text=....



While the parent poster did say "eurodollar", I don't think he's talking about prices of computer components in terms of "U.S. dollars held in time deposit accounts in banks outside the United States".


Oh, I had no idea it was an actual term! :o


If you need low power? If you don't care about power consumption, being fanless, small, then yeah, you will find better bang for buck.


Recently Raspberry Pi got so expensive. I'd rather buy second-hand Thin Desktops off ebays. I ordered Lenovo ThinkCentre m720q in spring and they serve me well. $300 with x86. I can add however much RAM or hard drive I'd like (32G RAM + 2*1T SSD).


I too was thinking of building a Pi4 cluster but I just couldn't justify the inflated price. I just ended up buying several HP Elitedesk from eBay that had NVME storage, OOB management and plenty of ram.

There's a whole movement on these 1L pcs: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...


I’m always at a loss at home. At work we treat everything as cattle. Nodes get provisioned at boot, we have gazillions of them, and they are all managed. (On a different physical lan, mind you.) redundancy of state is provided on the software level by the database (s).

At home getting a similarly redundant setup is time, space, and energy consuming. Moreover, most of the home tooling does not have distributed data built in so we need to have a distributed fs or nfs. This brings a whole next level of maintenance and heartache that I simply do not want at home.

Consequently, I run one machine and make backups of the config and hope I can restore it when things go south.

Does anyone have better ideas?


I’m a lazy sysadim at home, here’s what I do.

I run proxmox on my server at home and provision with VM images, like we did in the ancient times. I take regular backups of any extra storage I attach.

I can restore any individual box in an hour or two. It’s no high-availability but it’s good enough for home.

I also have an image for docker-compose like the sibling comment and run anything that “just works” in docker that way.

Someday I might write some lazy terraform to better separate the concerns of VMs and infrastructure, but it’s not a priority.

Proxmox is, in the scheme of things, pretty easy to use. If you can manage instances and images on a VPS you’re most of the way there.

Edit: I also have half a dozen shell scripts that do some basic setup things. These would be replaced by terraform if I ever get around to that.


Everything I run on my home server is through docker (compose). The data directories are mounted via NFS on my NAS - that data gets backed up to Amazon Glacier (in case my house burns down or something) + an external HDD plugged into the NAS.

This already solves a lot of issues imo. If something goes down it's not the end of the world. If the machine dies all I have to do is mount the NFS shares and run the compose files.


I have 3 computers and stuff my files in onedrive and github + various less important cloud services. I can just log on to onedrive on a new machine if one of them dies. I have 2 aging thinkpads that work «well enough» for most uses, including the kids’ homework (which is on google something). Since I have multiple, I can tolerate one dying.


I couldn’t use one of those in my home, they’re simply too noisy.


This. I got an HP Elitedesk g4 (i5-8500) a while ago, enticed by the small size but desktop-tier performance, and support for dual NVME + SATA drives.

I figured it would be great for my needs as a transportable PC, instead of a laptop; it was much cheaper.

Boy, do I hate it. It has this whiny fan noise than never stops. And if the CPU needs to do the least bit of work, the fan ramps up even more.

Otherwise, it's a nice little computer. Also, the newer generations – I think starting with gen 6, which look different – seem quieter. They probably realized that having a fan rattle around isn't great.


Our platform started as a "Bring your own computer!" - and AMD64 was much more popular then than ARM64 (for our users). Unfortunately, just saying "bring your own computer" is a technical barrier for lots of people (even sysadmins who just don't feel like doing work at home) - which is why we built a sort of "all-in-one" box


i certainly appreciate that a suitable hardware model is available for sale, but i would want to be able to run the system on my own hardware too. booting from USB and running install is not to much work.

the problem for me would be to spend the time to find a suitable device to run this on. if i happen to have one, great, but if not i'd probably rather buy yours than so my own research.

personally, what i am looking for is a portable version of this, that runs on a battery so i can use it tethered through my phone, or even with its own sim card.

for home use i would prefer the ability to put at least two regular 2.5" disks because those SSDs are still expensive at large sizes


I see, kubesail right? Interesting. I’ll look into that.


Is there some tips or example Bash script that you should to cut down power usage? I have an ITX board with mobile i5 that is perfect for this purpose, but the power draw seems a bit high for something that only have to be fast as a Pi, though reliability wise the thing do seem better.


This is because of the chip shortage. It’s really a shame.


https://rpilocator.com/ will show you where rpis are for sale, I was able to get one from adafruit a few days ago by following their Twitter account because when they come available they go fast


It's been impossible to reliably identify a person's location based on their IP address for years, so why do companies insist on trying?

Tell me where you ship to and what the costs are. If you're going to make me jump through hoops to figure this out, well, your product is probably not good enough that I'll bother to do so!


> It's been impossible to reliably identify a person's location based on their IP address for years, so why do companies insist on trying?

from a technical viewpoint, yes, it's totally nuts.

from a business viewpoint, it solves a hole lot of problems very cheap. i.e. good enough


Agreed.

I have opened and I am met with "We can't ship to %MY_COUNTRY% yet, but we are expanding quickly".

I also wonder why some sites claim they can't ship into here. Virtually all of the post services of the world do ship into this country for years and years yet some sites specifically exclude it.


We did this because we want to guarantee an excellent experience. While the Kickstarter was open to every country, kickstarter backers know to expect long lead times and needing to pay their own import duties. We have agreements with a distributor for all countries in the EU, and are very close to having ones in Canada and the UK.

Postal rates vary by country, and we've experienced more lost packages in some countries than others. Along with 30-45 day shipping times for most international packages.

Having a distributor lets us guarantee inexpensive 2 or 3 day shipping, paperwork free VAT, and easy returns for a much smoother experience overall.

Hope this makes sense!


So it's either an excellent experience or no experience at all?

Yeah, I totally understand your point of view. Perhaps I would myself not ship to my own country due to the business issues you have mentioned. Still sucks.


The costs of shipping? Import taxes or tariffs? High rates of DOA or returns?


Cost of shipping: Tell the customer it will be expensive.

Import: That is paid by the reciever? I have to pay import for things from abroad.

Returns: Most companies tell you to arrange shipping yourself.


Perhaps high rates of DOA might explain, yes.


I can understand not shipping everywhere, at least initially. Most power supplies work everywhere these days, but you have to ship the proper power cable. You also have to worry about customers getting sticker shock if you're not able to explain the customs fees (let alone shipping costs).


I'm in Europe.

And customers in my country are quite aware of the custom fees. And this works for millions of other suppliers.


Where in europe? We ship to all of EU, and just started taking orders manually for UK. Send me an email and I'll see if we can take your order. We're a startup so we really are expanding as quick as possible :)


Ukraine. No order, just my very first impression on the website, which basically says "you can watch but you can't touch"


There's no need to correctly identify any specific person's location. It suffices to determine location of your hundreds of thousands of users with, say, 80% accuracy, to reap the business benefits.


Identifying the country a person lives in would be reasonably accurate. ISPs are generally country specific and have a known range of public IPs.

It's been well known since the creation of www that users attention spans are non-existent and they will leave a page if they don't see the information that interests them within seconds.


Great job! HW preconfigured for less technical users is a great need. The auto backup and tunneling solution fill the gaps still existing in other solutions. I don't know how you managed to wrangle the RPI supply. I will recommend this to one of my friends.


I built a Pi server not too long ago, and had it host my personal knowledge wiki for things that I needed to remember. I was very proud of it.

Eventually though, I realized that having a screen and a keyboard is critical for how I was using it. I may not always have a machine on the network that can SSH into the Pi server. So I eventually settled on using an old laptop instead. Much more performant, and if the network goes down, I can still access the information easily.


Congrats to KubeSail team!

I tried the software product a while ago and it wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but it was pretty cool. I could totally see myself recommending it to people (admittedly it’s somewhat niche so the opportunity hasn’t come up). The hardware is a little pricy for someone who is pretty competent with electronics, but seems great for people who want someone all in one. That said, it looks so well done that if CM4s become easier to get I might still purchase one.

Their goal of “personal server” is something I eagerly wish was mainstream, and I always try out products that try to actualize it if the price is right. I had a small issue getting it set up on a random pi I had lying around, and erulabs/others were super helpful in discord! They have extensive docs for getting set up with your own hardware, which was great. The reason i stopped using the product was two fold: k8 seems like too much for personal use- writing my own KubeSail templates was just too verbose. The other issue is that I wasn’t a fan of their cloud hosting and cloud gateway solution - it works well enough but a personal server that needs a cloud server just wasn’t what I wanted. If I needed to rely on an outside server (you do unless you wanna open ports) I’d rather vpn to the box with eg. Tailscale than rely on the gateway. Which may be more secure too(?).

Getting a web gui for a self hosted cluster was really nice, and the templates they put together really lowers the entry bar to start self hosting. I’m really impressed with the selections they chose, since a huge chunk of them I saw and went “ooh I should try that out”. Kudos to the team for putting it together. A feature suggestion: some sort of identity/auth integration which can help with household stuff (eg a hosted app that KubeSail injects your identity into). Could be useful for families and SMB clients.

Ps. I had a good time reading through their non-documentation blog posts too.


For those who want to host their own servers and aren’t afraid to manage their own networking, we provide a tunnel service called Hoppy Network. It allows you to self host anything from mail servers to web servers, by assigning you a static IP address over a WireGuard tunnel. We forward all packets, including IPv6 and ICMP. We have great uptime (>99.9%) and great IP address reputation.

https://hoppy.network


Cool service! I've been wondering about something like this.

The pricing seems a bit high though, considering $8/month could also buy a cheap VPS with more than 1TB bandwidth (Contabo VPS, for example, offers a whopping 32TB outgoing traffic at $7/month.)

Perhaps I'm not the use case or target market, but something like this does appeal to me -- I just don't see why I'd pay for a wireguard endpoint, when I could get a VPS with a public IP and run the tunnel myself.

Sorry if too critical, I was metaphorically "reaching for my credit card" when I read "static IP over wireguard tunnel", before attempting to sanity check the prices.


How does this solution compare to Dynamic DNS services like DuckDNS? How about overlay networks like Tailscale?

My initial impression is that it solves a similar problem to DuckDNS (“how can I get a static, public IP for a machine on my residential LAN?”) using technology similar to Tailscale (WireGuard tunnels as a service).

Perhaps egress/public routing is the big advantage over Tailscale? Tailscale focuses on creating a trusted perimeter so all your devices can talk to each other securely. It doesn’t have an external gateway for other people to access specific devices within that perimeter. I think their business model / architecture may actually preclude this feature… they use their hosted service primarily for peer discovery, most traffic is routed P2P.


Dynamic DNS solves a similar but different problem. As the name says, it focuses on DNS. It doesn’t solve the “I get a static IP” and instead accepts the IP won’t be static and focused on identifying and updating the IP as needed. Basically it sets a DNS record for your routers WAN IP. You would need to punch holes and do port mapping and all that jazz.

Hoppy appears to solve this problem by providing a static endpoint to route traffic over.

Tailscale eschews the public internet altogether, while providing Tailscale-network static IPs.

Tailscale is the most strict/limited as you mentioned (not all devices can address into it) but the most secure (since each device has to be included and there’s no public internet).

Hoppy seems next on secure/convenient list where anything should work but you have to use public internet.


Half OT, but... I want to have a backup on another site, at an family member. Like the 3-2-1 rule, 3 copies, on 2 different medium and 1 off site.

For the off site backup, I want a cheap solution and was thinking of an rasberryPi with an connected usb-hdd and then the rPi connected to a family members wifi-router that I could connect to over the internet and do my backups to.

My question are: 1 - What solutions are there to make encrypted backups to a rasberryPi from windows? I don't want to encrypt all files with encrypted 7z files and transfer them (it is an mess), but just to have a solution so I can choose the unencrypted files and folders and then the software encrypts them on the fly and transfer them over to the rPi.

2 - The optimal solution would be to have the rPi usb-hdd mapped as an network drive or similar in explorer. But would that be possible with the first requirement that all files must be encrypted on the fly? 1 is more important than 2.

3 - I have read that a rPi not can handle a connected usb-hdd because it will take to much power than the rPi can deliver. Does there exist an dongle or something that you could connect one or two usb-hhd to the rPi and the dongle is connected to the powergrid and gives the usb-hdd the power they need and then the dongle is connected to the rPi but only transfer data? Or is there any other solutions?

Sorry for maybe stupid questions. But I have no clues here, what to search/look for or even if it is possible. Thanks in advance for any feedback.


Like the sibling comment: I also have a raspberry pi and 3.5" USB external drive with it's own power supply.

I tried a 5TB 2.5" SMR HDD powering it off the raspberry pi for a while and it worked for maybe a year and a half. Then all of a sudden starting the Sync Process for Resilio sync would cause the drive to drop out. So I upgraded to the 8TB 3.5.

Resilio sync may meet or requirements but not exactly. Resilio syncs the folders between two computers, but you don't have to sync everything. Things that don't get synced get placeholders. So it's the best of both worlds. Fast for what you use because it's local, takes zero space for what you don't. Similar to Google Drives new streaming feature, but manual and not transparent. Also for the encryption you will want the "untrusted folder setup".

Syncthing has a similar product, haven't played around with it though.

Like the other sibling comment Tailscale is great so you don't have to fiddle with your friends router. But be careful tailscale will need to occasionally be reauthenticated.

I do not recommend SMR drives for anything other than archiving. Cheap but very slow. I think it took a week to back up my 500GB MacBook.


i'm basically running that setup: rpi, external usb, encrypted backup.

- i'd recommend attaching an external 3,5 disk that comes with its own power supply, that way you don't have to worry about power, it's cheaper and you have more storage.

- For backup i am using borgbackup. it does encryption and deduplication. you can also backup several machines to the same repository if you want to. i'm using it for several use cases, it's rock solid, never had a problem.

- you can safely use borgbackup over ssh if you want to do remote backup. just forward the ssh port on your friends router and use dyndns if they don't have a static ip.


3 .. power HDD

You can use a powered USB hub.

Also. Remember the old 2,5” external USB HDD y-style cables that had an extra USB 2 plug (connected with a thinner cable with just 2 wires for the power and not data) that you could plug into a second USB sockets so the disk draws power from 2 ports? Maybe such thing still exists for current USB disks.

You can then plug the second plug into a standard USB charger for smartphones or similar.


Well, if you do buy the PiBox, it supports two 2.5" SSDs, which should do you unless you need a LOT of backup. I've found Duplicati works quite well across mixed Windows/Linux backup scenarios, and it can also push your backups to cheap S3 compatible storage either locally or out on the Net.


I recommend using Tailscale to connect to the box securely. Your usage should fall comfortably within free tier limits. (It has 20 devices iirc.)


A problem with small form factor NAS boxes is that, you have to use SSDs or 2.5” HDDs that have limited storage capacity (~ 2 TB). The SSDs limit bulk storage and increase the price.

From pricing perspective, a two bay synology NAS is $300. You can add a lot of good cheap NAS storage.


> 2.5” HDDs that have limited storage capacity (~ 2 TB)

Bonus points for those usually being SMR, which is atrocious if you want to run ZFS and need to resilver the pool.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr...


Exactly. I searched a lot for a small form factor ZFS backup server. The vast majority of mini PCs don’t expose a PCIe or eSATA expansion slot. You can connect HDDs with USB, but USB connection is not preferred with ZFS.

The mini PCs can contain dual SSD, but, as noted, the storage is limited and the price is high.

The closest options I found are: RockPro64, Odroid HC4, AsRock Deskmini X300, ZimaBoard, RPI CM4, each having own problems. One may build one from an mITX motherboard, but frankly that may also cost about a TrueNAS mini (which is quite large). Synology boxes are nice, but I want ZFS!

If someone knows a small low power system for a ZFS backup server (like a passively cooled SBC or PC with sata port that can be used to connect HDDs placed outside box due to size limitation, or at least something that is portable), including a DIY build, I would love to take a look.


What I've found as a good compromise is "small-form-factor" pcs, like the HP *desk SFF.

They usually come with mostly full-size components, so they're quiet, take regular DIMMs, etc.

I have an EliteDesk 800 g2 SFF which can take, OOB, three 3.5" drives and one 2.5". If you chuck the optical drive, there's space for a second 2.5".

If you're not afraid to take a dremel to it, the original 2.5" can be modified to house a 3.5" and you could probably stack one or two more 3.5" under one of the existing cages.

You'll also probably want to stick some fans in there somehow with all the drives, but there's space enough. It doesn't have enough SATA ports, but you can find half-height PCIe controllers.

---

If you don't want to hack on a case, the most compelling I've found is using one of those MBs with integrated intel CPU. Some of them should be powerful enough for ZFS and can take PCIe cards. You can put all this inside a Fractal Design Node or something similar.


Here: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3vZJpH

For $455, you can buy an i3 CPU, motherboard with a 2.5G NIC, 16GB RAM, case and power supply to handle 4 spinning disks and an NVMe M.2. Is it tiny? No. It is, however, good enough to be your primary server for anything not ridiculously compute-intensive, 5-10x faster than the Pi, with 2-4x the RAM and much better bandwidth.

You trade off physical size and electrical power -- but if you want 4 spinning disks, that's going to be the same across builds. In return, you get repairability, upgradability, and probably better cooling.


> 16GB RAM

You had selected a 2x16GB kit there.

But you can go even cheaper if you only need storage:

$80 GIGABYTE B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI AM4 AMD B450 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 HDMI Mini ITX

$60 AMD Ryzen 3 1st Gen - RYZEN 3 1200 Summit Ridge (Zen) 4-Core 3.1 GHz (3.4 GHz Turbo) Socket AM4 65W YD1200BBAEBOX

And half the memory, so $40

So $180 vs $320 for CPU+RAM+MB.


Unfortunately, the Ryzen 3 1200 -- as with most Ryzen chips -- doesn't have an integrated GPU. You would need to find some sort of video card and occupy your single PCIe slot.

A properly designed server motherboard would have a basic VGA port and an IPMI port, but buying those retail bumps up the price ridiculously. The NUC-style machines always have integrated video, sometimes really good (non-gaming) video, but offer only a single SATA port and a single M.2 slot.


It's just something I've found in a quick search. Current availability differs from the place to place but it's not a big broblem to find a CPU with G suffix.

My point - you can find a slightly older solution for less than $200, if you are okay to take some time to find it.

'Server' requirements are moot when we are talking about an extremly budget solution.

And honestly, as a person who extremely benefited from the existence of BMC/iLO/iDRAC - it is not that required for some cheap ass storage solution at home.

Like okay, you did wired another ether link for a BMC, installed OS aaaand... if something wrong with the box it is almost always requires to be near it to resolve the issue.

Edit: personally I have some low power GPUs laying around what can be used for the initial setup.

It was easier when you could fit some S3 Trio card on any machine, but still..


Interesting build. With NVMe for OS and fan/heat sink, probably closer to $600.

I was also thinking of a similar build with an ASUS Prime MB, eg, 660M-A D4.

I find two 3.5” HDDs enough for a mini NAS. NAS storage is cheap, I can populate with maximum capacity.

Helios64 was good. But they stopped making the product.


Great timing! As far as I can see, you cannot buy Raspberry Pi CM4s anywhere right now. But your Product does look good. I am not convinced of your value proposition but wish you best of luck. Getting more data away from the gigacorps is always a good thing


It can be hard to express the value proposition. For a lot of people, it's a media server with some really neat torrent related apps. For others it's a photosharing box that doesn't share photos with anyone you don't want it to. Others buy it because it's a tiny Kubernetes cluster, and they want to learn real tech skills with their hobby.

But honestly, it's also a computer. It's the dream machine (1). What was the value proposition of the personal computer? What we're proposing is the personal server. Billions of folks run the client-side of the internet - but only a tiny elite class of us know how to run the server-side?

If I get hyperbolic and kool-aid drunk, just know it's because I'm quite passionate about this. The blockchain folks talk a lot about "distributing the web". We're simply distributing web servers.

For now though - it's a neat box to run Photostructure or a Ghost blog on :)

1. https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine


Neat gadget/site! I think people have concerns around value proposition when you sell the box for hundreds of dollars and say it's good to host a Ghost blog on.

I would probably advertise something bigger because FWIW I host a blog on a $5 pi fronted by Cloudflare (free).

These look really nice and clean though, wish you the best!


Off topic, but I think that stripe.com page you've linked to is the most beautifully designed modern webpage I've ever had the pleasure of scrolling. It's the 3d objects that move ever-so-slightly along with my cursor passing over them that does it for me.


Very cool. How are people clustering with these? Do you know how they are setting up their laptops etc. as control nodes, buying pis as control nodes, or something else? Is there out of the box capability to cluster with nodes from cloud providers?


The pibox runs as a master and worker at the same time - and most folks just use them as individual servers (if they have two "clusters", they're just clusters of one server each). We really want to lean into improving this in the future! Several power users have complex setups with a PiBox acting as the master for a number of other servers (and our UI and software mostly just works even with multiple nodes). Under the hood, it's really just k3s - our software is designed to work with any Kubernetes cluster, so things all mostly fit together naturally!

I'd love to make it really easy for users to cluster nodes together. 100% on our roadmap if we can get there!


Great explanation. Thanks. Very exciting!


> What was the value proposition of the personal computer?

Balance your checkbook and keep recipes!


You can install Actual Budgets and Tandoor Recipes on a PiBox super easily :D

https://kubesail.com/template/erulabs/actual https://kubesail.com/template/PastuDan/tandoor-recipes


What does value proposition mean? I’ve heard the term a lot but never understood it.


Why someone would want to buy the product. Value is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and it’s not always what the maker expected.


A value proposition is the story of why this product or service is worth more to you than the price being asked.


You can think of it as answering the question, "Why does the humankind need this product to exist?"


Very few things can clear this hurdle, and even less so the sorts of things that tend to come up on HN. Very, very few industrial farming topics come up on here for example.

Perhaps a more apt framework would be, "What's the reason someone is giving you money for this product?"


Why don’t people use the word “value” then? Why “value proposition” and not just “value”?


I assume it's because "value prop" is VC lingo which is a prompt to founders to give their customer "elevator pitch", and we're on community forum that's motivated by VC perspectives & lexicon, so those get broadly appropriated by many participants.


"value proposition" is about how you demonstrate the value.


They come back in stock almost every week, keep an eye on https://rpilocator.com - and maybe subscribe to their twitter if you want instant stock alerts.


Chiming in to say that if you're using this to buy a Pi from AdaFruit make sure to register an account with two-factor auth before you get the chance to buy. They require this to deter scalpers, and they'll run out of stock before you're able to finish the process if you haven't already done so.


I just checked and as if by magic, yep, there are some CM4s (in Germany). I've been looking to pick up a couple more Zeros though and haven't seen those in stock in months.


It's my understanding that the Zeros are very low priority for production, so you might be waiting a while for those. Since you're only allowed to buy one per order anyway they're not actually that useful for much.


Hmm, that was such an instant buy, I literally read the site for a minute and clicked buy.

Perhaps a mistake, but looks like a very good platform for home thingies, one that I’ve been looking for some time.

Incidental question: how reliable are consumer SSD drives for backup drive use? How much am I setting up myself for failure if I skip raid and just have the one?


Absolutely not to bash the offer (looks pretty nice!), but IMO the biggest obstacle towards self-hosting is not the lack of appropriate hardware, but the dreadful combo of IPv4 + symmetric NAT shoved down the throats of us mere mortals (contemptuously dubbed "consumers") by ISPs (which I really think is not their whim but a directive from above to reinforce the monopoly of the state on the world's information flow, which implies surveillance, censorship and data harvesting).

Simply not being able to just run a server with ports open to the outer world on a home connection is one of the nails in the coffin of freedom.


This is what the software side of our startup does! Checkout https://kubesail.com. The pibox is our hardware - but the software (which runs on any pc) solves the tunneling, backups, and other issues. You got the nail on the head here!


With the same or even cheaper price, you can get a much more powerful and enterprise grade refurbished rack server on eBay.


Yes, but you'll also need space for a rack and contend with noise, heat, and electricity usage.

Don't get me wrong -- I love my Dell R730xd but it's definitely a commitment.


Fujitsu TX100 s3, TX120 s3, Dell ML110, HP microserver series are little towers, quietish (you can change out the fans to make them practically silent).


or a much faster quad core laptop


"Finally, a NAS that lets you use a standard operating system that you're used to, like Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS." So this isn't really for non-technical users. But still very cool!


I know a few pretty non-technical people who use Ubuntu as their daily desktop. Kind of puts me to shame really.


    5 Bay PiBox
    Coming soon!
    - 5 Full-Size Hard Drive Bays
Is the pi even powerful enough to run the workloads that require 5 drives? On my NAS the only thing that manages to saturate the drives is a direct copy. In all else the CPU and RAM is the bottleneck.

If it is for redundant storage, zfs will be quite limited by the 8 gib ram.


Depending on what they do on a NAS, even ZFS might be fine with 8 GB, especially if they won't take advantage of caching (say it's for a media library or backups). Don't know if ZFS encryption can be accelerated on a PI, that may be a bottleneck.

It could also be useful as a ZFS snapshot send target. That uses little RAM and doesn't need ZFS encryption (if your source dataset is already encrypted).

---

edit: regarding ZFS RAM usage, the below is from my ZFS NAS, with out-of-the-box ZFS settings:

    > free -h
                   total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
    Mem:            15Gi       8.2Gi       7.2Gi        12Mi        96Mi       7.0Gi
    Swap:             0B          0B          0B


Yes okay. Indeed as a simple file/snapshot server over network this should be enough. But this is meant to run all kinds of apps on it. For example plex, in many cases that will transcode the video. One could do without the cache when using SSDs I suppose.


I wish Kubernetes was mentioned somewhere. Presumably a company KubeSail builds this atop Kubernetes? Yes no maybe so?


Yes! We’re built on top of Kubernetes and piboxes ship with our agent preinstalled.

We sort of have two personalities: pibox is the hardware and some people hate the idea of it being bundled with software: they just want a tiny Linux server. But all piboxes have a default image with https://kubesail.com preinstalled. It displays a QR code on the screen for easy setup :)

Ideally - no one needs to know it runs kubernetes. We’ve had success as an awesome little home lab but we can’t expect every user to learn greek!


What does Kubernetes accomplish in a self-hosting environment?


Good question. Container orchestration seems unneeded when you want to run max 1 of everything, but maybe there is more to it.


Being a ultra-normal extremely well-documented extremely robust ultra-popular platform folks can expect to have some familarity with and/or grow into? What were your thoughts if any here, or couldnt you find any reasons?


You’ve described your opinion of Kubernetes. What does it actually accomplish in this use case? For example, a toaster accomplishes toast in a way that a deep fryer can’t, even though they are both very useful kitchen devices.


When you read things online, they'll actually be semi useful to what you have at home, if you use this. Thats the 101.

Unlike literally every other random assemblage of jazz you might possibly stumble into- which will be neither a toaster nor an air-frier, but some weirdo alien device a couple handful of earthlings have seen- you'll have a hope of getting better with this broadly known system. Otherwise, it's a: "Great! You went with Xin! It has flaky documentation, no one uses it on prod, but look at all the great boxes it says it can tick! And it's so much simpler!"

There's many many good pieces about, sure. But for real, there are zero assemblages, zero meta-solutions that let individual computing problem/answers slot in, as compared to Kubernetes. There's nothing remotely as meta-versatile. That's the use case, that which defines it against everything else: it's meta architecture that works to define how we'd get answers to any architecture problem. It's a viable answer to every system setup, unlike everything else which has narrowed, winnowed concerns.

You try to brush off, saying, it's my opinion here. That's a small slight, but generally, there's just nothing remotely of interest to the public anywhere near as broadly capable, that serves anywhere near a wide of range of concerns, that is anywhere near as flexible. (Counter-example me!) There's a variety of other piecemeal ideas out there- Hashicorp has a constellation of ideas that are all pretty good & which one can assemble. Doubter's gonna doubt, but the core premise of kubernetes- an all-purpose malleable api-server that records shit, operators that make the shit real, is an intelligble solid consistent base that underpins so much more, unifies & makes sense of computing so much better, so profoundly generally, across such a broader range of big & small computing, than anything else has remotely neared, that it is obvious & clear to those who try this better/general/pro-social/well-adopted paradigm of systems to be a repeatable, knowable, clear, enunciated & learnable way, that there's really no other platform appliance is worthy of mentionable compare.


You objectively stated your opinion about the usefulness of Kubernetes, and did not answer the question at hand. It is not rude to point that out.

If you do not have an answer to “What does this accomplish?” that includes a simple answer that maps to the word “accomplish” it’s perfectly acceptable to move on!

I’ll repeat my toast analogy: A toaster accomplishes toast very well in a way that a deep fryer does not. It isn’t usually suggested that anyone even attempt making toast in a deep fryer for reasons that are obvious to most people that have used one.

You’ve been asked “Why the toaster?” and your answer is “paradigms” ?

I can’t make a paradigm in a toaster.

Edit: To make sure I don’t elicit more information about Kubernetes in general, I want to clarify that the original question was about using Kubernetes by the creators of this project, within their intended use cases.


A platform/paradigm is a tool for building appliances/answers.

Out of the box, there are a bunch of builtin kube applicances/answers: Kubernetes runs processes/containers, network configuration, storage, and load-balancing/ingress. Adding vpn/wireguard, logging, metrics, whatever else have you will follow the same templates & ideas. But I think we're down to counting trees (number of builtin objects/appliances) rather than grokking the forest (that there's a general api-server-aka-state/operator dual concept that works everywhere, with many abundant appliance/use-cases slotting in & operated on the same way) when we myopically focus on individual use cases. And ignore the system.

> If you do not have an answer to

I think I did! I suggested a general, all-purpose, well known flexible system applicable everywhere. It just didn't click for you.

And in counter, please- requesting again- answer what you would suggest in lieu of Kubernetes please. So far you've had only negative, degrading, downputting things to say, and I'd like to see you try to make a positive cases for something, sometime, anytime, so we might have some reasonable comparison to assess & reason over. Alongside your destructive negative criticism, offer some positive examples of what you think does better, offers a clearer example of accomplishment. So we can compare & assess, have a field of play rather than only you taking shots against the champion forever. If you don't have any counter-examples, I'm not sure how we can keep discussing the worth of this system/paradigm!


Imagine you walk into a kitchen and someone is plating a decent-looking (at first glance at least) piece of toast. They could have used an oven or a toaster oven or a broiler or a traditional toaster, flamethrower, Bic lighter, or Superman’s laser eyes.

They are all theoretically good ways to make toast.

You ask: What did you use to make your toast?

They respond: A toaster.

As a bit of banal, passive curiosity you think “Why the toaster in particular?”

And then somebody shows up calling you a toaster hater


Once again you havent actually responded to anything I've said but have applied your "Rude dude sportin’ a radical ‘tude" bio attitude to belittle. Can you be more direct? This obtuse scorn you are heaping is hard to find real points to sift out & handle in it.


I’m sorry that you don’t like the joke in my profile. I have not made any negative comments about you or Kubernetes. I think we just fundamentally disagree about what qualifies as an answer to my question.


For whatever it's worth, this is exactly why we use Kubernetes. The original idea behind our startup was to help sysadmins / programmers learn Kubernetes in a useful / friendly way. We've pivoted quite a bit to focus on self-hosting, but the original idea is still there: We try extremely hard to use and expose to users only industry standards so they can learn real tech skills instead of just how to use our UI. Our UI tries really hard, for example, to give a `kubectl` equivalent to whatever view you're looking at at the bottom of the screen.

I will say however, that we've entirely stopped defending that it runs Kubernetes. There is a subset of people who hate that or want to debate it endlessly. It's not germane to what we're trying to accomplish - it's just a small benefit to a niche group of users. We could have just as easily based ourselves on Docker instead.


What's the point of this weirdly aggressive reply? I'm not familiar with Kubernetes and wanted to know what it accomplishes so I could consider using it on my setup over what I have now. Get ahold of yourself.


You're an Eternal September problem. A discussion starts getting technical, has specific content, & then all the new people come jumping in to the technical thread wanting to get filled in again from the start. The thread devolves into a less & less specific & interesting & unique discussion & turns into rehashing what the basic common knowledge is.

You might not like my phrasing, but asking you what you saw, what possibilities would arise to you is a general & sincere question & you being so mortally offended at being challenged doesn't feel fair either. It would have been interesting to see you either try to guess, or put in 3 minutes of looking around & state more clearly what was unapparent about how these might be related. I was hoping you'd work to carry a little water in the discussion, to help illuminate what your mindset was, after a little trying.

> Get ahold of yourself

This is weirdly aggressive.


What? There was clearly no discussion, since my reply was made directly to your comment. I have a self-hosting environment that works well for me, but I would like to know from someone (presumably) more knowledgeable if Kubernetes would be helpful. Clearly I was wrong to assume that you, like a normal person, wouldn't mind sharing your knowledge with someone genuinely interested.

What an embarrassing shit show over an innocent question you could've simply ignored if you didn't feel like answering.


I gave you a slate of really good reasons for this. You're bring overdramatic. My initial ask, & further suggestion, that you try to say what does or doesnt make sense to you, is not the personal assault you keep taking it as.


Nothing you’ve said has been intelligible. The actual creators of PiBox have posted saying essentially that they used Kubernetes because that’s what the team was already working with and preferred personally, while adding that other people might want to use other software for similar reasons.

In my toaster analogy, when asked “what did you accomplish with the toaster?” they responded with (I’m paraphrasing here) “A better toasting experience for the PiBox team because of our existing toasting skillset” more or less.

It was a response that was easily distilled into a single sentence and moved past. Somehow they conveyed that without calling people “haters” or “problems” and I genuinely think that is because that poster had a good grasp of Kubernetes and its use cases.


I can understand that after this whole back and forth, but for your consideration, "What were your thoughts if any here" isn't exactly something you say to a stranger and expect them to not read it as an insult. Especially if it comes right after an affirmation ending with a question mark, in a "it's so obvious, how do you not know this?" tone.


I’m kind of confused by GP as well. This is far and away the most angry I’ve seen someone get on this website outside of political discussions, and I still have no idea what they’re actually talking about. So far it’s been “Ask a simple question, receive a wall of jargon mixed with personal attacks.”

I’ve done some searching and there are plenty of friendly and informed people on Twitter that are able to answer questions about the pros and cons of Kubernetes if you search #k8s and #kubernetes. I have learned not to ask rektide any sort of question for obvious reasons.


I'm waiting excitedly for the 5 bay.


Sorry if this is newbie question but do I have to keep this at home or is there someone who will let me plug into their power and bandwidth for peanuts?


You might be able to find a local colo provider willing to host your box, though probably not for peanuts. A long time ago I worked for a MSP that hosted a client’s G4 Mac Mini in their colo cabinet on shelf space that would otherwise be wasted.


Sorry if I missed them but I couldn’t see any company details on the site.

Could you say some about who “we” are in this context?

i.e. where are you based, personnel, long term goals, etc.

I think you have an interesting project idea here. I’d consider this as a replacement to my home NAS when it becomes available in the UK. Good luck to you.


This looks really good. I think I'll wait for the 5-Bay and see if the CM4s are easier to get by then.


Hope you can ship to more countries , including mine of course !


Why don’t you just buy a regular server for $500? many run silent. In fact I have a cluster of 9 servers (nodes) running in my bedroom


A friendly reminder that BCM2711 despite being 64-bit doesn't have the optional Armv8 crypto extensions. But when all you have is a hammer...


I could buy an MSI Cubi with an i5 chip for this price. I can at least upgrade the ram later with a Cubi.


I am excited for the 5-bay. Perfect little zfs backup machine.


Remeber FreedomBox?


I was thinking the same thing. They are still around. The hardware is less polished, but cost only 69 euros (including the A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 board) and their software is very sleek.


And all the other alternatives. This is a crowded space.


Please do list alternatives! Beside FreedomBox and PiBox, I don't know of anything in the same space.


This previous comment of mine names a few: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679164

(there's a lot more)


I was talking about hardware, but thanks.


Do you plan to sell only the SATA extension?


Your FAQ is missing the most important entry - why it's terribly expensive.


I bought one. If you really look at what all you're getting, it's not expensive at all - in fact, I think it's something of a deal (esp. given supply chain constraints and the value added by their mainboard i/o, case, etc.) I've been CTO for nearly a dozen companies and have access to world-class PCB and mechanical prototyping facilities and staff, and even with all that, I decided that buying the PiBox was cheaper and better than rolling my own.

I hope they're making enough margin on these things to keep going, as I'm really pretty impressed with the company and its people so far - I really want these guys to succeed!

And as an aside to those who say the Pi is underpowered and not capable of serious work, I'll note two things: 1) You're wrong (search Cray in comments above), and 2) That was the argument against Linux 20 years ago. Like Linux then, the RPi will succeed in the end because it provides an open standard platform, and although it is not best at anything, in aggregate, it is getting better much faster than the competition.


Just want you to know your comment made our day over here - thank you! We genuinely have made it has cheap for customers as possible. Balancing the cost versus what we need to survive and keep the doors open is quite hard, and I think we've learned why there are so few hardware startups!

Re: Pi Power - it's quite amazing how many well-behaved apps you can run on an 8GB pi. Some self-hosted apps that are written in Rust and Go these days use 3mb of memory, it's amazing! There will always be that particular game server that makes power users want more, but that's life!


Glad to make a difference. Thanks for building the PiBox, BTW. It looks to be a great product, and I'm looking forward to getting mine soon. (Since you've said y'all are assembling them here in Texas, I'm hoping my shipping is quicker, since I'm here in Austin!)

I've done a few hardware startups, and while they're definitely a much bigger PITA than straight software, they're also more rewarding because they create a lasting tangible artifact of value. (And because you mostly can't fix your screwups by pushing a new build or patch, so you just have to do a better job up front.)

I agree with you that standard servers are really valuable, and hope this convergence of open hardware and software architectures is how that concept can gain traction and momentum in the marketplace. And yeah, these little computers are really capable of quite a lot of real world work!


My guess would be "so that they make money", which is important in some context.


Of course, but the Pi got so popular because of its low price (it's neither open nor particularly powerful etc.). This unusually high price tag needs some justification.




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