Can anybody comment on strategies for building a home or small office server using entirely free hardware?
The earlier thread (here[1] and on the FSFE list[2]) about Intel and AMD never being truly free identifies platforms like ARM and other low power chips as alternatives that can be 100% free. For home and small office servers where people typically want low power consumption and low noise levels rather than raw performance, using ARM is probably quite agreeable, a compromise they may already have been willing to make for other reasons. Are there any particularly good examples of off-the-shelf solutions or how to make such servers from components? Even if CPU power is limited, can such solutions be designed for IO-intensive workloads, such as hosting NFS home directories or Maildirs? These tend to do lots of small writes, just putting them on SSDs helps a lot. Another thing that people tend to look for these days is the ability to have lots of storage for photos and movies. This type of storage doesn't need fast IO but it does generally need multiple disks for redundancy. A combined solution to both of those storage problems typically needs a pair of SSDs (for home directories) and a pair of large disks (for media collections) and if there is going to be a spare disk bay for migrations and standby disks, it means having a box with 5 or more bays. 1. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2016-04/msg00020.html 2. http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2016-April/010912.html
