I am currently running IPFire as a firewall/router/NAS/QoS gizmo at home. Very modest setup on very old HW, Atom330 board with 4 SATA channels and 4GB RAM (3.5GB usable).
I migrated a 1.4TB node (on a 1.5TB HDD) to it, and my barebones Storj setup seems to be working OK on bare metal. I am running the binaries directly from CLI, since there isn’t even a docker package available for IPFire.
Repurposing elderly but perfectly functional HDDs for Storj on said setup makes some sense to me, since it is running 24/7 anyway (minus the occasional IPFire upgrade), and Storj payouts are (barely) enough to cover the additional electricity cost of spinning extra drives.
All “green” and fine AFAICT, but does such recycling make much sense from Storj’s perspective? The drive(s) would be relatively slow, and my upload speed isn’t great either. Only upside is, what with QoS, I should be able to guarantee the minimum 5Mbps upload requirement at all times.
I do have a bit more powerful bits of retired HW handy, but if this “hospice” concept of mine is outright undesirable for Storj even as a redundancy, I might just as well do a graceful exit.
If it makes sense for you, financially, then run it. Recycling old useless hardware is a good idea, in fact none of my PCs are younger than 10 years old and the disks are used but only 3-5 years, except I bought a new 20TB disk just for storj a while back
Edit : huh, that new 20TB disk was in Nov 2022, so not so new anymore lol
For a large number of smaller drives like that the only idea that resonates in me is to buy an open docking station and use them as if they were floppies or tapes: removable storage, normally not even powered. There’s plenty of software that can help organizing content. Keeping them on 24/7 is a waste of electricity.
For a single drive or so, there’s usually that old desktop for retrogaming you want resurrected. It will not complain that the disk is small or slow. I was giving away small drives to help friends do so.
Fortunately, my electricity is dirt cheap for now, cheap enough to run old HW like I mentioned before. Speaking of old stuff, my (also Linux-based) VDSL2 modem/firewall/router/wifi box is no longer eligible for upgrades, so I beefed up my security by dumbing the box down to what amounts to a modem/switch/wifi AP, and set up IPFire for security.
Unsurprisingly, I narrowed my choices down to pfsense and ipfire, then chose ipfire because I have a little bit of Linux experience but big fat zero FreeBSD experience. I am no security expert, nor do I feel qualified to judge between those two, all I can say is that so far (~1 year) I haven’t had any particular urge to try pfsense just for the sake of trying.
The obvious aside, dynamic DNS works, Samba works, QoS works, I even managed to use it as a VPN server… barely. The lowly AT3IONT-I Deluxe just doesn’t seem to pack enough oomph to yield satisfactory VPN bandwidth. Anyway, all that from browser GUI, SSH CLI is for funky stuff like Storj. Barebones, haven’t figured out how to set up Storj as a service, but I don’t mind starting Storj manually, once in every blue moon or so.
Apparently there is one funny side to this particular setup tho:
