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Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?

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Re: Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?

#4
When first Raspberry Pi came out 2012, I had a cheapo phone with no USB host capability. Found out however that Raspberry makes phone USB tethering connection automatically. And then if you enable FTPD and in TELNETD in Raspberry you can access it from the phone quite transparently. As an example I could now move videos and photos from the phone to USB hard disk while in the wilderness. Or use TV-dongle in Raspberry and stream it to the phone.

Re: Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?

#5
Pi 2B user here, have been utilizing it to download stuff periodically and push it to my telegram chennels. I also use it as a pi-hole so as to block ads at the router level. Also as a ftp server which hosts my files that I share within my home.

I believe there are even better ways to utilize this mini powerhouse, as the tasks I use it for are pretty light.

Re: Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?

#6
I've had a Pi running 24/7 for around 3 years - I use it to run network monitoring scripts, basic IDS for my website, uptime monitoring, etc.

When the Pi Zero came out I bought 4 of them and put them together into a 5-node grid computer, which to this day I use to run Einstein@Home.

You can see live statistics here: https://www.jamieweb.net/projects/computing-stats/

And a video of it here: https://twitter.com/jamieweb/status/1062048785352871936

Re: Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?

#7
Used to run it with Pi-Hole, but ultimately failed and I have to resolute to use my homelab. I was facing egregious segfaults and kernel panics due to the SD card controller, in high mysterious, cannot respond to IO requests. This also happened to my Rock64.

Re: Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?

#8
post #6

I've had a Pi running 24/7 for around 3 years - I use it to run network monitoring scripts, basic IDS for my website, uptime monitoring, etc. When the Pi Zero came out I bought 4 of them and put them together into a 5-node grid computer, which to this day I use to run Einstein@Home. You can see live statistics here: https://www.jamieweb.net/projects/computing-stats/ And a video of it here: https://twitter.com/jamiewe…

Did you use some opensource IDS software or just your own scripts? Stuff like nmap, snort? I've been wanting to do this for a while .. just tracking comms statistics from various devices so I can see what phones home.

Re: Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?

#9

Used to run it with Pi-Hole, but ultimately failed and I have to resolute to use my homelab. I was facing egregious segfaults and kernel panics due to the SD card controller, in high mysterious, cannot respond to IO requests. This also happened to my Rock64.

SD-card is not suitable for hard disk replacement. They always fail after month or two. In newer rasberries you can boot from directly from the USB-disk.

In older Rasberries you need to boot from SD, because USB is not recognized as boot device but soon thereafter you chroot to USB-disk.

Re: Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?

#10
post #6

I've had a Pi running 24/7 for around 3 years - I use it to run network monitoring scripts, basic IDS for my website, uptime monitoring, etc. When the Pi Zero came out I bought 4 of them and put them together into a 5-node grid computer, which to this day I use to run Einstein@Home. You can see live statistics here: https://www.jamieweb.net/projects/computing-stats/ And a video of it here: https://twitter.com/jamiewe…

Did you use some opensource IDS software or just your own scripts? Stuff like nmap, snort? I've been wanting to do this for a while .. just tracking comms statistics from various devices so I can see what phones home.

No it's a bit more primitive than that. :)

For basic IDS, it's a Python program I wrote a few years ago which does a recursive wget over my entire website, then generates SHA256 hashes of each page. Then it compares the hashes against the previous scan, and emails me if there are any changes. For very dynamic websites this doesn't work very well - luckily my site is almost 100% static so I can just whitelist the few allowed changes to prevent false-positive alerts.

I also monitor my DNS and WHOIS for changes, so that if my domain or DNS is hijacked, then I hopefully will know about it more quickly.

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