> An RPI project to me is 20% surface level solution and 80% troubleshooting. Don't be afraid, I'll give you a few examples to cheer you up and motivate you...

> An RPI project to me is 20% surface level solution and 80% troubleshooting. Don't be afraid, I'll give you a few examples to cheer you up and motivate you... (just make sure to backup your working Pi setup: I just dd the entire microSD card once it's working). I've got one of my Pi who literally reached more than one year uptime. It's gently sitting, since years, in another country, constantly and relentlessly establishing reverse-SSH tunnels. Zero issue. I ran a RasPBX on a Raspberry Pi 1 (yup, 1, a decade ago or so) for years, hooked to a SIP trunk, to provide VoIP to four Cisco VoIP phones. Zero issue. Once it was setup, I did "dd" its microSD card and kept the backup safe and that was it. I never needed them. My wife's SME's employees used that daily, for years on. Zero problem. Regarding TFA: > Since I was not willing to spend more money on my setup, I used a Raspberry Pi 3 which was sitting unused in one of my drawers. That's the spirit! Recently I decided to use one of my idle Raspberry Pi 3 as a "firewall+router" between two private LANs. It's surprisingly capable at that even if it is definitely the bottleneck: I've got fiber to the home and the Pi 3 cannot do anywhere near Gigabit ethernet, especially seen that it's only got one ethernet port and I needed two, so I had to use a USB-to-ethernet adapter... But the Pi 3 only does USB 2.0. A few firewalling rules and it's happily firewalling and routing traffic. After reading a few comments here I also decided to configure another Raspberry Pi as a DNS, running unbound (while my main "workstation" runs dnsmasq as a cache, but the DNS is unbound on the Pi). Someone also mentioned using a Pi Zero to transform a non-networked printer into a networked one: I'm planning to do just that for my trusty B&W laser Brother printer (haven't done it yet). I've got a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter in my vintage arcade cab. Zero issue. (Once again: I've got a "dd" of the full microSD card should some issue show up). Every single time I turn it on, it just works. One of my Pi is my "airline / airgapped / booting and remounting the system read-only", with X all working in RAM. Sure, these Pis aren't advanced servers full of redundancy and ECC RAM but they cost next to nothing and they're trusty little beasts. And on that subject of these Pis not being that powerful: there's no way I'd use a Pi as my main desktop, I've got a beefy desktop and I wouldn't want to replace it with a Pi. P.S: I'll probably be only buying Beaglebones from now on because the Pis now seems to be unobtainium.