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After setting up our first secure linux repo at work I had the thought of adding some more at branch office locations. Initially, I wondered if it would be possible to take a raspberry pi to host the ubuntu server, but soon came to the conclusion the Veeam agent service is not likely to support ARM. I wanted something small we could drop in a locked server closet and push copies out overnight.

So where I have ended up is running/testing this on my home lab: Secure linux repo setup on an old SFF x64 Celeron machine that was decommissioned with the Win 7 EOL. It’s equipped with 4GB RAM, gig ethernet, and a 5TB WD USB 3 drive. Loaded up community edition on my Win 10 Hyper V install and loaded the agent on the host desktop. Disabled IPv6 on the Veeam app server and my agent installed desktop to alleviate some veeam proxy connection errors occurring mid-job and away we go. I’m also running backups from my standalone Hyper V host. 

Being able to use something this sophisticated at home seems like a great home lab backup operation and is a testament to the versatility of the Veeam solution. The reflink enabled drive should really stretch the capacity on the USB drive and I’m getting transfer of like 90 MBps. Perfect for sending overnight encrypted backup copies across a gig wan connection to an immutable repo when I end up setting this up at work.

Anyway I thought this was a cool option for repurposing old hardware and wanted to share my success story.  

Has anyone tried something similar? I used the Nolabnoparty blog as my initial point of reference when setting up the secure repo: 

https://nolabnoparty.com/en/veeam-v11-hardened-repository-immutability-pt-1/

Very cool, especially focusing on low energy!

 

For commercial/production data I’d strongly recommend using something with a battery backed write cache, as you’re aiming to do BCJs it’s a bit more fault tolerant in my experience due to working with static files but it’s a great safety net!

 

Keep us updated on the deployment!

Nice setup and great idea. :sunglasses:

Personally I would be more comfortable with a internal hard drive, but I don’t know if it is possible with your machine. And it is a individual preference...

Very nice setup. I too would prefer internal drive but to each his own. That article by Jorge is great for reference.

Very cool, especially focusing on low energy!

 

For commercial/production data I’d strongly recommend using something with a battery backed write cache, as you’re aiming to do BCJs it’s a bit more fault tolerant in my experience due to working with static files but it’s a great safety net!

 

Keep us updated on the deployment!

 

** Sorry I posted this under my personal veeam account and the original was work. The site switched me over without me realizing.

 

 

You are not wrong but I didn’t think so much about write caching with the single drive solution. This would also be on a UPS and a copy of a copy.  But now you have me thinking about SFF server class hardware, although, it starts losing some of its appeal with running some repurposed hardware for home use. 

While I was running my desktop backup overnight I did run into an issue. Getting disk IO errors on ubuntu. This is a new drive so may be DOA or I hit some kind of issue on the USB interface on my repo host. It pulled over a Hyper V server with two win server installs and a debian unifi server in just a few minutes where the bottleneck was the source for sure. Then it got about 400 Gig into the Desktop agent job and froze. This was coming off an NVME disk volume so it should have made the bottleneck the destination. These are just backup jobs and not copies. I’ve pulled the drive and am running the WD diagnostics on it now. Should know something in abut six hours, lol.

Nice setup and great idea. :sunglasses:

Personally I would be more comfortable with a internal hard drive, but I don’t know if it is possible with your machine. And it is a individual preference...

** Sorry I posted this under my personal veeam account and the original was work. The site switched me over without me realizing.


What I am testing out on has a small internal SSD. I just looked up some info on it and it does seem to have a 2.5” internal bay. The SSD may be in it or it may be a msata. This thing was originally used for digital signage and if you can still find one they are like 30 bucks. It’s a J1800 celeron.

No problem 😎

As I said, it is a personal preference.

Sounds like a good idea, maybe you want to have more power savings.

I am powering off my repo server every night after the backup window and waking it up before the next. that way all those spindles (6 for me) do not have to move during the day. But my repo server consumes ~100W, so you don’t want to have that on the full day your small Celeron will take way less.

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