Ideas/wishlist

[Miles Raymond]

I thought there was already a posting/thread for wishlist of GnuBee 3, but I couldn't find it.

I'd actually like to see a GnuBee mini, a tiny board with ethernet (maybe PoE support?) USB-C for power/data, and a 12V SATA (for 3.5" drive) on the back, to turn any single 3.5" drive into its own NAS. I think MediaTek's MT7622 could probably do this, it's a dual-core ARM chip with a single SATA port support, and conflicting info on whether it has onboard gigabit support or 2.5Gb/s support or only 5 ports of 100Mb/s.

[Jernej Jakob]

https://groups.google.com/g/gnubee/c/CLz1gJh6lXs/m/j8-JUNJFAAAJ
and follow-ups in that thread

Your wishlist could probably be satisfied by existing SBC's already so
I don't see the point in making a custom Gnubee with just that. As I
said in https://groups.google.com/g/gnubee/c/CLz1gJh6lXs/m/HDXS7QGcAQAJ
I personally think more value would be in providing a complete product
(either in kit or assembled form) built around whatever is suited to the
task, even better if it's a SBC already made by someone else. I don't
want to have a bare SBC board laying under my desk naked and exposed
with drives and wires just laying on the floor. Okay, if you want a
mini NAS with just one drive and network (wired or wifi?) you could
design your own board. But it's not easy, it's a lot easier and takes
less time and work to just take an already working SBC.
The MT7622 also wouldn't be enough for my needs as I want to run a
borgbackup server on it which requires a more powerful CPU and more RAM.
I'd also want something that can take at least 4 2.5" drives, better 6
or more.
One big void in the current SBC market is a low-power SBC with ECC RAM
that is not Intel or AMD. I think the market for a SBC with a SOC with
FOSS firmware and ECC RAM would be huge for things like ZFS, home
hosting services with databases and everything benefitting from ECC.
The current market has nothing with FOSS firmware to offer. Except
maybe the PCEngines APU which can be custom-ordered with ECC RAM, come
with an AMD APU that I'm not sure if it has FOSS firmware or not, at
least it comes with coreboot.

[Miles Raymond]

Yes! Thanks! That's the thread! Kinda hard to find when just looking at titles, and even the Google Groups search was failing me.

What you're describing sounds more powerful like a different product than what GnuBee was meant to be. One of the main attractions to GnuBee (for me) is it's bare-bones, no cables, simplistic framing, storage-first design.

In a similar vein, I was thinking of the GnuBee mini to be a compact single board that plugs directly into the 3.5" sata drive without cables, and has ports for ethernet and power on the other side. No case necessary, just a simple board. I haven't found any SBC designed like this. Sure, there are many different SBCs to choose from, and even a few that have SATA ports built in, but none that support 12V 3.5" drives through direct power. That would mean a mess of cables.

Thanks for the info on borgbackup - that looks pretty interesting and a pretty nice thing to have around. I'm reading through the man page and it seems to be more heavy on the client side than the server, but I suppose that depends on which system is initiating the backup.

[Jernej Jakob]

I know what you mean, a SBC like that would be useful for some things.
There can be more than one version of a NAS optimized for different use
cases, so your use case might be different than mine, so there would
of course need to be two different designs and products for them.
There's not a one-size-fits-all if you want something as small and as
optimized (cost-reduced) as possible.

Regarding borgbackup, I've been told the server process loads the
entire repo indez into memory. My backup worked fine for a couple of
months but as the number of archives increased at some point backups
started to fail as I had no swap configured and the oom-killer
activated. I then added a swap partition and it's been fine since,
though I can imagine it slows it down a lot, swapping with the slow
disk speed the GBPC2 has.
I think for borgbackup 1GB or more RAM is needed for a backup with a
lot of archives.
https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/internals/data-structures.html#indexes-caches-memory-usage
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/7023

But I really want to use ZFS as its send and receive functionality is
even better for backups than borg. It does not need to scan the entire
filesystem, deduplicate, compress and encrypt at each run. If you use
ZFS's built-in encryption the source data can be already encrypted, and
then with sanoid or a similar tool you can snapshot and only transfer
the snapshots. So you get incremental backups that are already
encrypted at the source.
But of course ZFS needs a lot of RAM too and ECC is highly recommended
so that's why I think there's a big void in the market for such a SBC
that could run ZFS reliably.

On Wed, 28 Jun 2023 22:59:51 -0700 (PDT)

[Miles Raymond]

Ah, yeah, I see what you mean. Perhaps that might fit in with GnuBee 3, and still keeping the simplistic design it currently has. An upgrade to the PCB with a SoC which supports ECC and more RAM would be much appreciated for the ZFS scenario.

[Miles Raymond]

I kinda found a 'GnuBee mini' in the form of https://openwrt.org/toh/blueendless/u35wf which can run OpenWrt from its tiny 16MB flash. It kinda serves a similar purpose, with a lot less performance.