jmtd → log → NAS upgrade

After 5 years of continuous service, the mainboard in my NAS recently failed (at the worst possible moment). I opted to replace the mainboard with a more modern version of the same idea: ASRock J4105-ITX featuring the Intel J4105, an integrated J-series Celeron CPU, designed to be passively cooled, and I've left the rest of the machine as it was.

In the process of researching which CPU/mainboard to buy, I was pointed at the Odroid-H2: a single-board computer (SBC) designed/marketed at a similar sector to things like the Raspberry PI (but featuring the exact same CPU as the mainboard I eventually settled on). I've always felt that the case I'm using for my NAS is too large, but didn't want to spend much money on a smaller one. The ODroid-H2 has a number of cheap, custom-made cases for different use-cases, including one for NAS-style work, which is in a very small footprint: the "Case 1". Unfortunately this case positions two disk drives flat, one vertically above the other, and both above the SBC. I was too concerned that one drive would be heating the other, and cumulatively both heating the SBC at that orientation. The case is designed with a fan but I want to avoid requiring one. I had too many bad memories of trying to control the heat in my first NAS, the Thecus n2100, which (by default) oriented the drives in the same way (and for some reason it never occurred to me to rotate that device into the "toaster" orientation).

I've mildly revised my NAS page to reflect the change. Interestingly most of the niggles I was experiencing were all about the old mainboard, so I've moved them on a separate page (J1900N-D3V) in case they are useful to someone.

At some point in the future I hope to spend a little bit of time on the software side of things, as some of the features of my set up are no longer working as they should: I can't remote-decrypt the main disk via SSH on boot, and the first run of any backup fails due to some kind of race condition in the systemd unit dependencies. (The first attempt does not correctly mount the backup partition; the second attempt always succeeds).