Sinology pre-compiled/Compiling, CuBox or PI?

[iganin]

Hello,
I have been using Domoticz on two Raspberry PI for more than one year. Using RFXtrx, Currentcost, 1wire, PiFace, GPIO. I am very satisfied. Great software and good support. Planning to add Mysensors and Z-wave.
However, there is a room for improvement and therefore I have got some questions.
I hope you will help me to design more efficient configuration.
I assume that i have to move to master/slave configuration.
Q1: Does a slave use a masters's SQLite database instead of its own? Or a slave store data in two databases in parralle?
Slaves are going to be Raspberry PIs.
Master should be something more powerful. I prefer Linux.
Q2: Would be Synology 215J(i have already got it) a good option or CuBox is better?
Q3:If Synology is a perfect candidate for a master, should I use pre-compiled package or compiling myself will give me more flexibility in the future.

Thank you to everyone for help in advance.

KR
Iganin

[nayr]

Q1. It has its own database independant from the master, I configure slaves to story very little historical data (Setup -> Log History) and try to keep all writes on a ram filesystem synced with the flash storage periodically.. result is if it reboots randomly I might loose a bit of data and all the logs, but the master kept what I needed.

Q1A. You didnt ask it but your slaves are just standalones that sync its local devices a master, so everything is there locally if you want (UI, Events, Devices).. id suggest scripts/timers/events that only depend on slave devices run locally so they are still functional if they are disconnected from the master.

Q2. Its always better to use what you have avilable IMHO, or at least try first.. moving Domo is pretty straightforward so experiment and decide.

Q3. I wouldn't say perfect candidate, having to play side by side with Synology might be good or bad (do you need software and build environments newer or diffrent than provided?).. I personally see alot of merit in spreading tasks out onto dedicated hardware, helps isolate faults and prevent catastrophic system outages.. but onto your question, setup an environment to build from source.. you can follow development easier and work with developers on fixing bugs much quicker.

Sorry I didnt give you an answer you were looking for..

Ive got a 6 core phenom with 16gb ram and 20tb storage running FreeNAS with a TON of jails and a few Virtual Machines.. my master domoticz instance would run perfectly fine on that system, and infact I have a VM spun up that syncs with my CuBox so I can fire up a replacement if my CuBox goes down for any reason.

But I still love my lil CuBox, FreeNAS wants to reboot for updates all the time and with so many disks who knows when I need to take it down for maintance. You ever done maintenance on a NAS? I can be down for days after a disk failure.. Its quicker to start from scratch and restore terabytes of backups from slow tape than it is to rebuild a multi-terabyte disk array.. Ive seen rebuilds take over a week and still fail.

Plus I would never ever want to expose my NAS directly to the internet, nor anything running upon it.. My CuBox gets better uptime, has its own static routable IP, runs my home VoIP Services, and talks to an array of devices via USB Serial adapters and even stores my Security Cameras footage because its managed 99.999% uptime without breaking a sweat.

I think of my NAS as a precious little child that needs to be looked after and protected from harm, if it starts making a funny noise I am putting it on life support and performing heart surgery, uptime is hardly important.. data integrity is the mission. my Dispatch server (CuBox) is more like a rugged miner more than capable of taking care of its self and being left alone to get its job done until the day it dies.. so they are separate hardware.

After having a bunch of really underpowered machines I tried to do the whole home cloud thing with a bunch of VM's spread across two beefy servers with live migration, and redundant storage, was clunky and a pain to maintain.. it really and did not have any less critical points of failure than before.. thankfully low powered arm devices became affordable, and slowly my VM's have been migrating back onto physical hardware again,.. and life is good.. I use VM's mostly for testing/development anymore, its hard to beat some quality silicon thats dedicated to do one thing and do it very well.

[iganin]

Hello Nayr,
I did not expect so detailed explanation. Thank a lot.
I've discovered that my Synology has an issue with GCC package. Therefore I've started searching for standalone master. Can you tell me a bit more about CuBox. Do you use Debian? I love it. Therefore I would like to stick to it. I assume that an external hdd is essential?

KR
Iganin

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

[nayr]

yeah Debian Jessie on an i4Pro.. having that eSata port is large in part of the CuBox being so attractive, flash memory is not very resilient for this kind of stuff and you can get industrial grade sata storage.. usb drives are just slow, while this eSata is not blazing fast its still quicker than USB2.

my esata (4TB WD Purple) is just mounted as /home and do all my writing in there, otherwise I have it boot off a samsung pro uSD card.. Ive setup many read-only embedded debian systems in my day so I know how to do flash storage right.

eSata:

Code: Select all

# dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 17.5915 s, 61.0 MB/s

Samsung Pro Class 10 uSD:

Code: Select all

# dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 81.6165 s, 13.2 MB/s