Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

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Eh, why Pandora's box? It's true I didn't give tons of details though.

...Is there any other option than Linux for a server OS? Like, practically? I know there are a bunch of others but speaking about everyday classic needs... is there really a choice?

Budget -- I never did mind paying $1000 instead of $150 but it has to be worth it. I don't want to sheepishly buy the latest and greatest, especially after seeing many times in my programming career how a very modest machine (when properly tuned) can be a very decent server that can last you all the way until you need rented dedicated servers in several data centers.

(Example: I gave up on the idea of an OpenVPN server on an RPi 3 after making a research on the expected bandwidth. It would be too small.)

Thanks for the recommendations! Writing them down (not joking).

I was half-joking, of course, and what I meant is that it’s an optimization problem with multiple dimensions and tons of trade-offs. E.g.,

- low power or performance? - ease of use vs. tunability? - closed vs. open-source?

For the server OS, your choices are practically either Linux or FreeBSD (FreeNAS is based on the latter). If you don’t need zfs for NAS, OpenBSD becomes another interesting option - assuming the hardware is supported, is rock solid and easy to administrate, but may have some learning curve.

Tinkering with something like RaspberryPi is not a bad idea - you will spend $50 or so but will learn a ton and in the process will understand your own requirements better. However, if you want NAS, I recommend buying a server-class hardware (like T30 mentioned above) and invest time in understanding how to use zfs and do reliable backups, assuming your data is valueable. I personally don’t think you should aim for lower power for NAS with any serious amount of data.

Sounds like a lot of learning I have to do.

I am not opposed to it; everything gets more and more hijacked to closed gardens so I feel more of us should go the extra mile and find out how open-source things work.

Just not sure when will I be financially secure enough for it.

Thank you, I am definitely writing down everything written in the thread. I will get to tinkering at some point.

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