5 ms·

Very true for a given value of true 8) You need to evaluate all the components. The RPi itself is a decent piece of kit, well tested and safe to use. Get a d

Very true for a given value of true 8) You need to evaluate all the components. The RPi itself is a decent piece of kit, well tested and safe to use. Get a decent power supply to it - either a RPi branded one or at least a decent mobile charger from a brand that you trust. I generally use a decent USB stick nowadays. RPi 4 from about a month or so ago onwards will do this out of the box. You can also put a second USB stick in and clone the thing every now and then. You can PXE boot them as well (citation needed) and that brings nfs and iSCSI to bear. That's my long term plan for fleets of them. For the semi casual user, I recommend the dual USB stick combo. Quite easy to set up and you can always whip out the backup and test it on another device.

mikenew 6y ago
> RPi 4 from about a month or so ago onwards will do this out of the box Are you saying you don't need an SD card at all and it will just boot off USB?
- m_t 6y ago
  Yes, it can do that now.
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    I buy quite a few of them as a tinkerer and recent (~two months) ones don't need firmware/BIOS fiddling to boot off USB. Make sure you get reasonably recent stock.
  - sjy 6y ago
    Is the documentation outdated? https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/bootflow_2711.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... says “USB booting is still under development“ and https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/README.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... says “The Pi 4B bootloader currently only supports booting from an SD card.”
    - gerdesj 6y ago
      Two minutes ago I plugged in a RPi 4 with no SD Card in it. It does have a USB stick plugged in.
Hnrobert42 6y ago
I am curious why you would use a fleet of them instead of a larger server.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  They only consume a few watts, have a footprint of a few square inches, and cost a few twenties of dollars. It's a sweet spot for doing lots of things. There are a few ways they aren't ideal, but still a great compromise.
  - Hnrobert42 6y ago
    But if you are running a fleet of them, wouldn’t a server be more efficient?
- gerdesj 6y ago
  I am an IT consultant and own the business. Home and work blur somewhat! I have a Dell tower (ESXi), a pfSense appliance, a micro mainboard based box, two ESP32s and a 24 port PoE+ switch in my attic. With a UPS and smoke detector. There's rather more stuff hidden away in cupboards and under the stairs. There's a 50m run of ethernet and SWA 240V (all ducted and marked etc) down to our summer house in the garden, which sports an eight port PoE+ switch, 2.4 and 5GHz wifi, and four double IP66 power outlets. "Fleet" is a bit of an excessive term but I have four RPis at home, mainly for TV frontends for MythTV. There are rather more in the office. The above is just a sample and not the whole story 8)
- curryst 6y ago
  They're great for tinkering with distributed systems. I.e. if you want to play with Kubernetes, you can build a master and 2 workers out of RPis for like $90. They won't have enough power to run anything substantial, but it's enough to play around with upgrading the control plane or mess with the network plane. Same thing if you want to play with failure scenarios on distributed databases, or whatever. It's doable with VMs, but every time I try to do anything fancy with VM or container networking, I end up spending hours reading documentation because my VMs refuse to communicate at all. I also like it because they force me to use Ansible and actually make my installs repeatable. On my actual server, practically everything is some snowflake crap I did at 3am that I couldn't repeat if I had to.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
I really think PI I doesn't make sence for this usecase, I strongly reccomend getting any random Intel-atom based mini pc off ebay, they cost similar, have proper storage and a heatsink. I have never come across one where ubuntu doesnt work. Pi really shines when you are interacting with hardware sensors, or need ARM.

mikenew 6y ago

> RPi 4 from about a month or so ago onwards will do this out of the box Are you saying you don't need an SD card at all and it will just boot off USB?

m_t 6y ago
Yes, it can do that now.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  I buy quite a few of them as a tinkerer and recent (~two months) ones don't need firmware/BIOS fiddling to boot off USB. Make sure you get reasonably recent stock.
- sjy 6y ago
  Is the documentation outdated? https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/bootflow_2711.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... says “USB booting is still under development“ and https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/README.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... says “The Pi 4B bootloader currently only supports booting from an SD card.”
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    Two minutes ago I plugged in a RPi 4 with no SD Card in it. It does have a USB stick plugged in.

Hnrobert42 6y ago

I am curious why you would use a fleet of them instead of a larger server.

colechristensen 6y ago
They only consume a few watts, have a footprint of a few square inches, and cost a few twenties of dollars. It's a sweet spot for doing lots of things. There are a few ways they aren't ideal, but still a great compromise.
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  But if you are running a fleet of them, wouldn’t a server be more efficient?
gerdesj 6y ago
I am an IT consultant and own the business. Home and work blur somewhat! I have a Dell tower (ESXi), a pfSense appliance, a micro mainboard based box, two ESP32s and a 24 port PoE+ switch in my attic. With a UPS and smoke detector. There's rather more stuff hidden away in cupboards and under the stairs. There's a 50m run of ethernet and SWA 240V (all ducted and marked etc) down to our summer house in the garden, which sports an eight port PoE+ switch, 2.4 and 5GHz wifi, and four double IP66 power outlets. "Fleet" is a bit of an excessive term but I have four RPis at home, mainly for TV frontends for MythTV. There are rather more in the office. The above is just a sample and not the whole story 8)
curryst 6y ago
They're great for tinkering with distributed systems. I.e. if you want to play with Kubernetes, you can build a master and 2 workers out of RPis for like $90. They won't have enough power to run anything substantial, but it's enough to play around with upgrading the control plane or mess with the network plane. Same thing if you want to play with failure scenarios on distributed databases, or whatever. It's doable with VMs, but every time I try to do anything fancy with VM or container networking, I end up spending hours reading documentation because my VMs refuse to communicate at all. I also like it because they force me to use Ansible and actually make my installs repeatable. On my actual server, practically everything is some snowflake crap I did at 3am that I couldn't repeat if I had to.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

I really think PI I doesn't make sence for this usecase, I strongly reccomend getting any random Intel-atom based mini pc off ebay, they cost similar, have proper storage and a heatsink. I have never come across one where ubuntu doesnt work. Pi really shines when you are interacting with hardware sensors, or need ARM.