371–380 of 1001 posts
We have over 2000 deployed over Europe in locksmiths, providing a form of key service to the public. Challenges include not DDoSIng our APIs, getting a correct configuration to not nuke SD cards, and ensure that a bad firmware push doesn't knock the network offline.
I'm using a Raspberry Pi (Gen 1, Model B I think) to run a smart mirror. It pulls up my daily commute, news headlines, weather, and calendar. I take no credit for the software ( https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror ) I also had one connected to my Motorola LapDock back in 2012 to run a portable raspbian laptop. It worked surprisingly well.
I chose this configuration rather than running plex in the cloud because a) don't want to pay monthly forever for something I use a few times a week; b) less wasting power and c) this at least theoretically can work during an internet outage (though plex authentication may make this difficult). I configured the HDD to spin down after 20 seconds of no r/w, so the whole thing draws very little power while idling (or so I assume).
The major limitation of this setup is that the pi cannot handle video transcoding. As long as I transcode to something the Roku supports natively this isn't an issue: transcode once (on my laptop), put it on the Pi, play whenever. I have yet to script this process but that's my next step in the project.
It will probably be a year before I realize any cost savings (a friend pays CAD20/mo for a hosted setup which also handles on-the-fly transcoding), but, well, it's a simple server and I just wanted to do it myself, gosh darn it!
I have it set up to run a project where a subreddit has control over the watering of a live plant in my apartment. The pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and can switch on a pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help inform the decision about watering. Despite many people's preconceptions about the goodness of the internet, I must admit that they do a wonderful jo…
Just a side note, the links under "Check out some of the tools I used to build this" don't seem to render, I think they're blocked by my Pi-Hole
my pihole also blackholes them
> The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) this week confirmed that its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been hacked. An audit document from the U.S. Office of the Inspector General was published by NASA this week. It reveals that an unauthorized Raspberry Pi computer connected to the JPL servers was targeted by hackers, who then moved laterally further into the NASA network.
I use syncthing to synchronize files. It's fast, stable, cost me nothing and the only limit I have is the size of my disks.
Syncthing is decentralized, that means that two machines have to be powered on at the same time to be able to perform sync. Raspberry Pi allows me to have that always-on machine at home which is small, quiet and unnoticeable in my electricity bill. Syncthing works across internet bypassing NAT thanks to the community-ran relays (I also run one of them). I could take my laptop everywhere and file changes will still reach my Raspberry Pi.
I hook up an external Seagate USB HDD and it runs just fine without an extra power source. Syncthing keeps up-to-date copy of all my files on that external HDD.
I use borg-backup to take hourly snapshots of my files. Those snapshots are encrypted and I upload them offsite without any worries that some cloud provider could possibly read them. I use rclone for that, it can interface with a number of cloud providers out there. It just take your files and one-way sync them into the cloud.
The setup of rclone and borg-backup is not particularly complicated but still requires some time. Directories, encryption keys, periodic jobs have to be configured. I abstracted all that into one script which is a bit opinionated but works for me. That script can be run on Linux on on MacOS. I used my Mac for that before Raspberry Pi. It uses system or launchd to run periodic jobs https://github.com/senotrusov/backup-script
I installed Ubuntu server on that Raspberry Pi to have familiar environment.
Sadly Raspberry Pi lacks secure boot and have no internal TPM functionality. My external HDD is encrypted but I can't trust Raspberry Pi to hold the encryption key. In rare event of reboot I have to ssh in and manually enter the LUKS key.
This setup is still prone to an evil maid attack as someone could replace or modify the SD card to log that key. That scenario is highly unlikely as I am no particular interest to anyone. What is slightly more realistic is that someone could brake into my house to steal stuff. For that my data is secure as the key is lost the moment you power off the Raspberry Pi.
Overall I'm pretty happy with that setup. My Raspberry Pi slowly blinks with it onboard red LED to indicate that all that services run well and alarms me with fast blinks if something is not right.
It also runs a Twitter bot I made that takes a picture of my backyard each morning (@walkburlington).
I was bullish when I got my first Pi to run Home Assistant (before hass.io), but got discouraged when the sd card failures were gas-lighting me by silently reverting my code changes. That and the lack of hardware clock hampering some of the diagnostic tools I usually use, kept me sticking with VMs on a NUC and a fanless Celeron for Kodi for my main compute uses. In time I have gotten more Pis, but mainly for hardware…
oh jeez the SD card story just gave me flashbacks. I changed networks (uni to home) and the RPi running pihole would constantly keep my uni DNS settings after a restart. Took me a good few hours to figure it out given that I thought the DNS settings were getting copied in from elsewhere on startup. I think i finally figured it out after i re-installed rapsbian from scratch and to my horror was booted in to the old sy…