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The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

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Re: The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

#11

Post by bigiain »

steve19 wrote: post #7
glenneroo wrote: post #4

I had one of these running with a 10 meter cable to the window so the receiver could get enough satellites. After 24/7 for about a year it just died and I haven't had time to figure out what's wrong. Lights blink but it's not reachable via ping, ssh or scp. HDMI output shows nothing. I had to move on to other projects, so I gave up and assumed I either got hacked or I hit the cheap-SD-card problem of corruption that…

I wonder how much the rpi foundation would need to sell a pi if it included 32gb of storage. I would gladly pay not to feel like I'm playing roulette with my microsd.

How much more are you prepred to pay?

This is a big jump up price-wise on the 'Pi, but it meets your "32gb of storage" requirement for $174:

https://shop.udoo.org/other/home/udoo-x86-advanced-plus.html

Re: The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

#13

Post by Fnoord »

glenneroo wrote: post #4

I had one of these running with a 10 meter cable to the window so the receiver could get enough satellites. After 24/7 for about a year it just died and I haven't had time to figure out what's wrong. Lights blink but it's not reachable via ping, ssh or scp. HDMI output shows nothing. I had to move on to other projects, so I gave up and assumed I either got hacked or I hit the cheap-SD-card problem of corruption that…

I have two Pi's on remote locations. One is abused with power cuts, the other one not. The one with the power cuts is still alive, the other one had a corrupted microSD card which I just could not repair, and the system would hang (if I reinstalled it was OK again). Both Pi's have /var/log and a bunch of other locations mounted with tmpfs (so, in memory instead of on microSD) with swap off.

After the advice from a fellow HN reader [1] I bought a bunch of aMLC microSD cards from DigiKey. No S&H costs and it literally arrived 1,5 days later (from Springfield to The Netherlands) though I had to pay import tax. Needless to say, they've been rock stable. I'm using one in a Pi and one in a Dafang camera [2]. I still gotta replace the microSD cards in the remote Pi's though but I'll do it once they break (again).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16777238

[2] https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks

Re: The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

#14

Post by gsich »

glenneroo wrote: post #4

I had one of these running with a 10 meter cable to the window so the receiver could get enough satellites. After 24/7 for about a year it just died and I haven't had time to figure out what's wrong. Lights blink but it's not reachable via ping, ssh or scp. HDMI output shows nothing. I had to move on to other projects, so I gave up and assumed I either got hacked or I hit the cheap-SD-card problem of corruption that…

Switch to network boot with NFS as storage. Much faster (compared to most "cheap" SD cards) and more reliable.

Re: The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

#15

Post by jon-wood »

steve19 wrote: post #7
glenneroo wrote: post #4

I had one of these running with a 10 meter cable to the window so the receiver could get enough satellites. After 24/7 for about a year it just died and I haven't had time to figure out what's wrong. Lights blink but it's not reachable via ping, ssh or scp. HDMI output shows nothing. I had to move on to other projects, so I gave up and assumed I either got hacked or I hit the cheap-SD-card problem of corruption that…

I wonder how much the rpi foundation would need to sell a pi if it included 32gb of storage. I would gladly pay not to feel like I'm playing roulette with my microsd.

Take a look at Resin’s Project Fin, which is designed for IoT deployments - it runs off a Pi Compute Module. https://resin.io/blog/introducing-project-fin-a-board-for-fl...

Re: The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

#17

Post by mlichvar »

gsich wrote: post #14
glenneroo wrote: post #4

I had one of these running with a 10 meter cable to the window so the receiver could get enough satellites. After 24/7 for about a year it just died and I haven't had time to figure out what's wrong. Lights blink but it's not reachable via ping, ssh or scp. HDMI output shows nothing. I had to move on to other projects, so I gave up and assumed I either got hacked or I hit the cheap-SD-card problem of corruption that…

Switch to network boot with NFS as storage. Much faster (compared to most "cheap" SD cards) and more reliable.

Another possibility to improve reliability with SD cards is to use a distro that is designed to not make any writes to the storage in normal operation. I have some NTP servers running on OpenWRT and they work great.

Re: The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

#18

Post by swebs »

steve19 wrote: post #7
glenneroo wrote: post #4

I had one of these running with a 10 meter cable to the window so the receiver could get enough satellites. After 24/7 for about a year it just died and I haven't had time to figure out what's wrong. Lights blink but it's not reachable via ping, ssh or scp. HDMI output shows nothing. I had to move on to other projects, so I gave up and assumed I either got hacked or I hit the cheap-SD-card problem of corruption that…

I wonder how much the rpi foundation would need to sell a pi if it included 32gb of storage. I would gladly pay not to feel like I'm playing roulette with my microsd.

Eh, then you might have the same problems with bargain bin soldered on flash memory. Just let us boot from USB and be done with it.

Re: The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

#19

Post by berbec »

makomk wrote: post #16
tramtrist wrote: post #9

They still haven't separated the USB/Ethernet Bus :/

This is also possible with the Orange Pi/NanoPi boards which have actual Ethernet that doesn't go over USB, though I don't think there's such a good writeup of how to do that.

This would be a perfect case for a NanoPi Neo. [1] It's designed to be ultra-tiny and run headless. It's also $13. I find FriendlyElec's board better designed and supported than Orange by a bit and miles above the Banana folks.

1: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

Re: The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

#20

Post by kingosticks »

copperx wrote: post #8
steve19 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much the rpi foundation would need to sell a pi if it included 32gb of storage. I would gladly pay not to feel like I'm playing roulette with my microsd.

They just need to make booting from a USB drive easy. Plug in a $20 SSD and stop worrying about reliability.

It's very easy on the 3B+, see https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
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