Good day, friends. Since catching the self-hosting bug, I’ve set up a couple of Proxmox home servers with a bunch of services I enjoy.
Now I’d like to set up a server and local network on my sailboat so I can self-host servarr, pihole, and other services while traveling. The tricky part is that everything on the boat is 12V and I would rather not use an inverter, if possible. Also, it needs to be ultra-low power so I can leave it on at all times and not to deplete my batteries too much.
Criteria:
- ultra-low power
- Small form factor
- runs on 12V
- 10 TB of storage plus ability to make full local backup
- Capable of hosting servarr, audiobookshelf, freshrss, etc. via docker
- HDMI output
- Full local mirror/backup of the entire file system, including the media library.
- We will have two laptops and two Android phones to access the server, so the server doesn’t need to run a desktop environment.
I’ll have a mobile wifi router and a cellular signal booster (or maybe Starlink eventually) for internet access. Since internet bandwidth will be limited and expensive while traveling, I don’t want to have to re-download a massive media llibrary if the storage media fail. Thus, I want the media library to be mirrored or fully backed up or synced locally.
What hardware and Linux distro would you use in this situation?
i didn’t downvote but 17v on a 12v battery maybe seems a bit high. I’m more used to about 7-14% over (maybe up to 14v on a 12v batt) when charged/floating but i don’t use solar anywhere currently, and i usually work on 48v systems. i normally expect to see about 54v on a fully charged battery string (13.5v per battery x4) with the rectifiers running.
i also second the opinion of running an automotive PSU for this situation.
edit: i looked it up since i was curious, some “12v” solar panels can output between 16-20v, but it’s recommended that you would use a charge controller, especially if you have lead-acid batteries