Don't forget to think about how to keep the salt air from corroding the electronics. Either build a spare or two that you keep sealed in plastic, or find an airtight case with an integrated heat sink or something.

Edit: you might want to look into conformal coating and dielectric grease (for the connectors) as well, although I don't know enough about that to competently give advice beyond the mere suggestion.

I'd recommend avoiding spinning disks and going all ssd if possible.

You can get 12v in atx power supplies.

You may want to consider something like a Lenovo tiny with a few large ssds.

This sounds like a job for a raspberry pi 5 with an m.2 hat for storage, software is a less important choice here, so ubuntu's raspberry pi flavour would be my choice. Just make sure you give it power in a form it likes.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won't need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don't do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

Post this in a piracy community and it goes full circle

There are a lot of atom or mobile i3/i5 powered mini PCs that actually are powered with a 12v brick, in fact most of the industrial ones are. Small form factor, passive cooling, can play media for you and usually comes with 4x 1/2.5gbit Ethernet, so it can double as a router/switch. Usually 10-15w power draw.

Go to AliExpress and simply search for minipc and make sure it has a SATA connector for your hard drive.

Get a PicoPSU for automotive use (there are two varieties, one that needs stable 12v and another that can run directly off a battery with varying voltage).

I always liked the idea of the small Lenovo ThinkEdge Servers, I just never had a usecase. Maybe these would work for you.

You've gotten a lot of good answers, so I'm going to do some out of the box thinking - maybe it will spark a few ideas.

Goal:

• self hosted server on boat

Issues:

• size
• power
• corrosion

So if I were going to do this myself, I'd start with a pelican or other similar watertight container. We don't want the equipment getting wet, and we don't want it exposed to the salty air.

I'd probably pick a usff computer, like a dell 9020 or maybe a framework motherboard. To get the storage, I'd get one of these to add multiple sata ports to the computer. Then its a matter of getting a bunch of ssds and powering them. I think the 12v goal is going to be too restrictive, most laptops need 19v to charge, so I'd just bite the bullet and get an inverter. If you're really tight on power you could go with a pi, but the framework motherboard/usff both use mobile processors, and shouldn't draw too much while idle.

Any wires that pass though to the case should be made through waterproof bulkheads.

Personally I'd nix the HDMI out requirement. One more port to keep track of and it complicates the self hosting. If you want it for media streaming to a TV then I'd recommend a roku and just run a jellyfin server on the computer. If you want it for server debugging I wouldn't bother running it out of the case.

The last thing I'd do is figure out cooling. For this I'd probably create some sort of closed loop heat exchanger from the case to either the outside air or the lake/ocean itself. This could be as simple as a pump running water through two radiators, one in the case and the other outside or just dumped overboard. If you know your power usage ahead of time you might be able to get away with a peltier element, dumping the heat outside the case.

I'd probably put this all on its own power system, get a solar panel, battery, inverter, etc. It could even get topped off by the boat's system if it needs extra juice.

Also whatever you do, I'd figure out a way to ensure you're giving your system a clean and steady 12v.

I would recommend something like a Pi as well, but it looks like you're going to have to take it down to 5v. Maybe a NUC might be better.

But if you really want 20 TB, you'll need to buy two drives at least 10 TB, and you'll want them to be SSDs for the low power requirement. So that means you'll need a device with two SATA ports, because I don't think anyone makes NVMe drives that big. Oh, and be ready to pay a few thousand for each drive. Also you'll want to keep one drive offline, in an ESD bag in a dry bag. So maybe one will be USB.

But for real low power, I'd suggest just plain turning it off. Booting doesn't take that long any more. Or maybe suspend to disk, if you can find a system that supports it.

But overall, I would suggest reevaluating how important these things are to you. Generally, lots of electronics and nomadism don't go together. Have you considered books? I'm sure you can find people to swap with when you're in port.

What hardware and Linux distro would you use in this situation?

The distro isn't likely to be a factor here. Any (non-super-specialized) distro will be able to solve issues in about the same way.

I mean, any recommendation is going to just be people mentioning their preferred distro.

I don't know whether saltwater exposure is a concern. If so, that may impose some constraints on heat generation (if you have to have it and storage hardware in a waterproof case).

Not directly an answer, but the CRT guy has a series of industrial computers for different environments, which could provide inspiration.

Some of them have direct DC inputs, some have anti-vibration designs, some have massive passive cooling!

The little guys series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP3aKEG79DM&list=PLec1d3OBbZ8LGjvbb0GQwlQxWXmI2PA88

I think a Synology box would work for you, or a TrueNas design - you could just build out one of their motherboards in your own itx case. These are good, robust, anti-vibration, mobile low power cpus, hardware selected for robustness and minimum heat. Stick it in a cupboard and forget about it, they run containers, and vms.

I think you have a taste vor expensive Hobbies 😜

What hardware does not run on 12 V?

Define ultra low power. Given the 10 TB + mirror (why?) I assume at least 2 HDDs have to spin. So at least 20 W total? I mean they can spin down, but leaving the system on 24/7 seems a bit far fetched, even if it only consumes 1 watt (0.1 A load, 2.4 Ah per day).

I'd like to design a similar off-grid system. What do you have in mind for mobile wifi router and cellular signal booster?

For hardware, I would go with sata ssds for storage. I also would recommend a separate boot drive as it makes re installing without loosing data a breeze. You could go with a new processor from intel or amd, and make sure it has onboard graphics. You should also go into the BIOS, enable xmp (always do that. It's free performance), and look for power saving settings. You could go for arm, but most arm computers lack expansion options and that can mean you use USB for drives which is unreliable. I think dc atx power supplies are a thing, but I know nothing about them. I would recommend doing ext4 and a raid, ideally 6 or 10. That will give you stability (from filesystem issues) and good reliability. I know RAID is not a backup, but in this case it may be what you want. RAID is for uptime, and it would be able to usually buy you enough time to finish your trip, or you could even have spare drives onboard and fix it while you're out in like 10 minutes. Also, I would highly recommend researching how to power it well. Starting an engine can mess with the power and could fry a computer. I don't know if a dc ups is a thing, but if it is, get it.

For software, use whatever you want, mostly. I always use debian for servers, but proxmox would probably be fine. You can use powertop to make sure it runs efficiently.

For backup, maybe a blu-ray drive? I think you would want something that can withstand the salty environment, and maybe resist water. Thing is, even with BDXL discs, you only get a capacity of 100GiB each, so that's a lot of disks.

What about an offsite backup? Your media library could live ashore (in a server at a friend's house). You issue commands from your boat to download media, and then sync those files to your boat when it's done. If you really need to recover from the backup, have your friend clone a disk and mail it to you.

Do you even need a backup? Would data redundancy be enough? Sure if your boat catches fire and sinks, your movies are gone, but that's probably the least of your problems. If you just want to make sure that the salt and water doesn't destroy your data, how about:

1. A multi-disk filesystem which can tolerate at least 1 failure
2. Regular utilities scanning for failure. BTRFS scrubs, for example.
3. Backup fresh disks kept in a salt and water resistant container (original sealed packaging), to swap any failing disk, and replicate data from any good drives remaining.
4. Documentation/practice to perform the aforementioned disk replacement, so you're not googling manpages at sea.

This would probably be cheapest and have the least complexity.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

[Thread #833 for this sub, first seen 26th Jun 2024, 18:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I run a NUC and a few other network things off a 125W elcheapo $20 bestek(?) inverter off the house battery.

Sure it gets converted twice but actual watts wasted are minimal in a low power scheme, and the juice is cleaner in the end.

And consider DIYing a big house battery. The cells are cheap now. I built a 1200Ah LFP bank just because it fit nicely in the compartment. Then throw some solar at it.

And for backup, just get a large spinning external and plug it in occasionally to sync a copy. Put it back in the Tupperware for cold storage.

Ed: why the downvote?