Excellent idea!
My £60 ARM server
11–20 of 72 posts
Re: My £60 ARM server
#12Personally I wouldn't trust a microSD card for any production role beyond being a bootloader. You'll be paged one day only to find you had to make a time-consuming visit to your co-lo, and that all your data was irretrievably gone.
The solution to this is to have one "real" PC acting as a NAS and serving iSCSI. You would have to divide the extra cost of this PC across all the ARM servers you have.
Re: My £60 ARM server
#13Anyone else blocked by the stupid cloudflare scam about not having 3rd party cookies enabled meaning you have virus on your computer? And preventing them from reading the article?
I didn't know Cloudflare was that harsh, that's frustrating, sorry about that :(
I had to read your fine post from the google cache, missing on the pretty pictures:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hUwlhkh...
Re: My £60 ARM server
#14Anyone else blocked by the stupid cloudflare scam about not having 3rd party cookies enabled meaning you have virus on your computer? And preventing them from reading the article?
Huh? I browse constantly with third party cookies disabled in Safari and Chrome and never have a problem. I can see that site perfectly. And that's certainly not how CloudFlare decides that your machine is likely to be infected.
What are you seeing when you visit the site?
Re: My £60 ARM server
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't know Cloudflare was that harsh, that's frustrating, sorry about that :(
I had to read your fine post from the google cache, missing on the pretty pictures: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hUwlhkh...
Hmm, I might need to disable cloudflare then, frustrating really as it's a clever service.
Re: My £60 ARM server
#16"Micro-SD card performance is highly variable, and generally rubbish"
Agree with that. I use a pandaboard as a build server and I felt it is a lot efficient to use NFS than running off an SD card.
Ewan, have you tried USB HDD instead of SD card?
Re: My £60 ARM server
#17Interesting article but pls fix website for mobile readers http://twitpic.com/9o9q35
I would have commented on your blog but on Firefox the "about me" floats over the disqus column so I can't.
Re: My £60 ARM server
#18Personally I wouldn't trust a microSD card for any production role beyond being a bootloader. You'll be paged one day only to find you had to make a time-consuming visit to your co-lo, and that all your data was irretrievably gone. The solution to this is to have one "real" PC acting as a NAS and serving iSCSI. You would have to divide the extra cost of this PC across all the ARM servers you have.
I run a Dreamplug pretty much 24/7, as my "homebrew" backup and NAS solution; the SD is used to boot and then mount an external RAID enclosure connected via eSATA, which holds the real data. Works quite well, in a fraction of the space that a "real" pc (or even a MacMini) would need.
Re: My £60 ARM server
#19Personally I wouldn't trust a microSD card for any production role beyond being a bootloader. You'll be paged one day only to find you had to make a time-consuming visit to your co-lo, and that all your data was irretrievably gone. The solution to this is to have one "real" PC acting as a NAS and serving iSCSI. You would have to divide the extra cost of this PC across all the ARM servers you have.
Micro SD are notoriously bad for server usage, they are designed to store infrequently changed files for a while, like mp3 collection, cameraphone snapshots, apps etc... Going with a brand name might help.
In order to extend their lifespan, you might want to minimize the writes by disabling some logs and the "last access" updates on files (`noatime` for "no access times").
Some examples: http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-usi...
Re: My £60 ARM server
#20Personally I wouldn't trust a microSD card for any production role beyond being a bootloader. You'll be paged one day only to find you had to make a time-consuming visit to your co-lo, and that all your data was irretrievably gone. The solution to this is to have one "real" PC acting as a NAS and serving iSCSI. You would have to divide the extra cost of this PC across all the ARM servers you have.
You're probably right, it's certainly the component I'd be least surprised about if it failed.
I do nightly backups off the box, and if the machine does die, I'll post down a newly configured micro-SD card for insertion before doing much investigation.