Fedora Server Edition home server and/or homelab spin-off

📝The motive behind the project

• The 2024/2025 Fedora Server User Survey showed that the majority of attendees use Fedora Server in a domestic environment, either exclusively or in addition to a professional usage. We should take this into account and honor this with a special spin-off for this purpose.

• The objective is not to release a YABD (Yet Another Boring Device), but something dedicated and special.

  • Target specificall aarch64 SBCs due to
    • low power consumption / environment friendlyness
    • affordability

• Low end x86, e.g. Celeron and entry level PCs such as MicroPCs and Chromebooks

• Intended to be a replacement for widely used commercial NAS devices with their heavyweight and inflexible web interfaces

  • To be proven: Fedora tools (i.e. especially Cockpit and Ansible) offer a similarly easy-to-use administration, but they are lightweight, perform better and can be perfectly customized.

• Provide a ready to use installation with a typical set of software pre-installed and pre-configured

• All software included should be based on Fedora maintained packages (containerized or not), built as reproducible as possible.

• Establishing a (sub) community based on participatory software development models (see e.g. Storey et.al., Hecht/Maass) with the goal of

  • Opening up a (new) opportunity with low initial hurdles to contribute to Fedora by addressing an high level area that directly affects user's own interests and needs.

🚩 Basic ideas

• The home server spin-off to replace the widespread commercial NAS and offer a number of advantages
  • Better customizability and configurability
  • More performant administration through text-based Ansible and lightweight Cockpit Web UI (instead of heavyweight web configuration tool)
• Goal is creating a dedicated installation image
  • Special support for selected models ("recommended by Fedora Server Edition Working Group")
    • high rank on the criteria cataloge
    • on the affordable side or the price range
    • OSS friendly
  • Specifically supported models so far
    • aarch64
      • Pine64 Rock64Pro incl. eMMC module and case
      • LibreComputer incl. Mezzanine board and case (when available again)
      • Radxa Rock Pi 4 a (/b) incl. NVME extension board, case and SPI
      • Radxy Rock Pi 4 plus incl. NVME extensionmboard and case
      • Future candidates
        • Radxa Rock Pi 5 model B
    • x86_64
      • Intel n100 based Zotac
      • older model Intel core i3 Zotac ZBOX-RI531NANO (2 disk, raid capable)
      • older model Intel Celeron Zotac ZBOX-RI323NANO (2 disk, raid capable)

📝 Initial Software Portfolio

Typical Applications are pre-installed and pre-configured. A user can activate them either via Web interface (when development completed) or a Ansible based local config console.

We try to differentiate 2 typical use cases

• home server: used in an household to support domestic chores: local storage and federation of email, media server, ebook library, backup server for all familiy devices, storage for shared documents, storage for familiy archives.
• homelab: used to support individual software development tasks: central forge (forgejo)
• SUGGESTION: we combine both use cases, called Home Lab

Software portfolio home server

• Samba file sharing
• File synchronozation across several clients
• Mail storage
  • Syndication of several (external) Mail accounts
  • Backend to a public Fedora Mail hub front end
• Ansible controle hub
• DLNA streaming server
• Epub library
  • Calibre server or Calibre-Web
• Calendar and ToDo Server
  • Radicale, ...?
• Smart Home server
• ??? (please add ideas)

Software portfolio homelab

• Cockpit hub to serve multiple host securely w/o password access
• Forgejo forge