I’ve decided to replace my older mini-pc (intel celeron) running as a server, due to load issues and wanting something a bit more robust. It’s currently hosting a zfs media library volume (it’s main duty) with jellyfin as the media server. It has a few minor infrastructure duties too, nothing to put any load on anything though.
After reading and reading and reading, I have concluded that zfs was a poor choice on my behalf with too much overhead and no real reason to be used (for me). That lead me to thinking about mdadm or btrfs to do something like raid level 5 with the new hardware (and drives). Then I thought about well, if I’m thinking btrfs, it would probably be best to be on a rapid release schedule instead of a static distro for the server.
With that given, am I at least partly insane to consider an arch-based distro, ie Cachy (which btw, I have used as daily desktop driver for at least a year now) for a server? I did that for about a year with EOS, but concluded that zfs out of kernel tree didn’t fit well there. There is something to say for being intimately familiar with Arch-based distros and issues (from the desktop).
Thoughts anyone on the Cachy side?
No, if you can maintain it well (e.g. not updating everyday) and do backups, running any kind of distribution for a server should be fine. FYI, all servers in CachyOS use either CachyOS or Arch
I will try to confine myself to a weekly update for the server vs the umpteen times a day I update in my desktop (yes, absolutely must get all updates ASAP).
I’ll give it a whirl in pairing down the package list of course too, with no desktop or perhaps sway with a minimal set of GUI apps. I don’t actually run anything on the server but services, certainly no desktop apps.
Thanks @naim .
I’m finally being forced to learn btrfs (been kinda wanting to for a couple of years).
Ok, since the server is taking so long to come from China (sigh, darn Chinese New Year), I finally spun up a VM to see ‘kinda’ what a server load on Cachy would look like.
Installing minimally and having Sway available, the disk usage is only 5 GB (will probably have to add a little bit more to that for a few apps) and memory usage is around 300 megs. Quite doable as that install size will reduce somewhat the updates.
Thanks, I’m looking forward to building the real thing.