PiBox: a tiny personal server for self-hosting

[erulabs]

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.

[dusted]

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?

[chillfox]

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.

[ghgr]

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.

[gambiting]

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.

[ianai]

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?

[ycombinete]

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

[a-saleh]

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.

[chazeon]

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).

[xedeon]

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...

[erulabs]

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

[numpad0]

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.

[jahewson]

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

[tallanvor]

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!

[hansel_der]

> 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

[egorfine]

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.

[nine_k]

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.

[calsy]

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.

[kornhole]

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.

[daenz]

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.

[vineyardmike]

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.

[rubatuga]

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

[MasterYoda]

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.

[prettyStandard]

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.

[chriswep]

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.

[ephbit]

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.

[dublin]

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.

[PufPufPuf]

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

[aborsy]

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.

[vladvasiliu]

> 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...

[dtx1]

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

[erulabs]

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

[TedDoesntTalk]

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

[LeoPanthera]

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.

[darthrupert]

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?

[ccbccccbbcccbb]

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.

[yuuta]

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

[disposedtrolley]

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.

[rasz]

or a much faster quad core laptop

[benwerd]

"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!

[stevage]

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

[spockz]

    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.

[vladvasiliu]

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

[rektide]

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

[erulabs]

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!

[Kaze404]

What does Kubernetes accomplish in a self-hosting environment?

[Snuupy]

I'm waiting excitedly for the 5 bay.

[omarhaneef]

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?

[Lio]

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.

[JustSomeNobody]

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

[kristianpaul]

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