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Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

monterail.com

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Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#31

Post by pjc50 »

newshorts wrote: post #4

When I see companies build bespoke solutions like this I can’t help but wonder which client paid for that. Don’t get me wrong I would love to spend the time to build a system like that, as an engineer it sound fun! No doubt this project came at the cost of someone paying the company for value that was not transferred Sorry for being Daniel Downer here…

> The team had a long list of tasks they wanted to transfer over to the control of Raspberry Pi:

All those tasks are "home automation" for the office. You can buy solutions for this, e.g. meeting room free/busy, but inherently there's a large amount of customisation and the COTS ones tend to be surprisingly expensive.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#33

Post by yardie »

ahyattdev wrote: post #16
yardie wrote: post #10

This is a really cool project and as a hacker of the Raspberry Pi since v1b I love to see it. Clicking on the Monterail about page I really do appreciate when companies list their teams. It's that small bit of credit that I feel goes a long way. It appears more common in European companies. American companies will typically list the board and executives; ICs are treated as interchangeable cogs with no credit given ex…

I believe part of the reason for American companies to not list teams publicly is to guard against easily poaching talent using that data.

LOL. Like that information isn't readily available on LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, Github, etc. There are ways ($$$) to retain talent.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#34

Post by agumonkey »

404mm wrote: post #27
agumonkey wrote: post #3

What about powering the information system ?

I mean, let’s be real, what could it actually power? I can think of a few applications but it certainly won’t be much. - dhcp / dns / radius for the office - maybe internet router, if they don’t have a too fast connection (>500 mbps) - egress MTA - intranet wiki or ticketing - resource monitoring But yah, I agree with others, the title is a bit click-bait.

Yeah but that said my question is serious, I've seen offices relying on servers and desktops .. when in fact their entire operations could fit on an iphone (circa iphone 10).

I have the feeling that a lot of information systems are not exchanging much but require huge payloads to coat things enough to keep cute in the html5/es6 era

Quite often what would have been done with a bunch of bytes on a dumb terminal now requires full blown windows + browser, network shares of useless files, mail servers holding massively redundant content

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#37

Post by rootusrootus »

Damogran6 wrote: post #20

My RPi's are like lottery tickets. I buy them with the thought of all they could be used for...then collect duct in the junk drawer. I also tell myself I'm supporting the manufacturer, though it would appear they don't need my help.

Same here. I buy them, set them up for some interesting thing, and then I decided to just convert the fleet into a single NUC with ESX. Faster, easier to manage.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#38

Post by kd913 »

aweiland wrote: post #30
kd913 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I heavily recommend the use of them as a pihole + Wireguard VPN + DNSCryptProxy Server. Pihole -> Great use for a network wide adblocker/DHCP server. Wireguard VPN -> In combination with a DDNS setup and some port forwarding enables the use of a global private VPN. I think it's a prerequisite for a decent home-automation setup. DNSCryptProxy -> Great for ensuring all DNS requests on the network via DNS over HTTPS…

Any good tutorials on setting up Wireguard? This (and Pihole) have been on my todo list for a while.

I should probably write a blog on how to do this. I have a setup guide for myself, but unfortunately it contains a lot of obviously private details that I can't post (ie access to my cloudflare/VPN stuff).

A lot of my stuff is ad-hoc from my personal exploration and experience on Linux.

In regards to the wireguard specific stuff, this isn't a bad guide.

https://mikkel.hoegh.org/2019/11/01/home-vpn-server-wireguar...

The harder part with the VPN stuff is the following.

1) Setting up a clear route of forwarding traffic to the pihole. To do so, you would need to setup netplan/systemd-networkd so your pi gets a static private IP. (Not that easy if you are doing a full ipv6 route too.)

2) Setup a DDNS mechanism (as you most likely are getting a dynamic IP). My suggestion for this was to get a domain name (8 quid a year) and use cloudflare as a DDNS host. You also need to punch a UDP port through your router to forward to your pi.

3) Then setup the rest of the wireguard stuff.

4) Setup the pihole and ensure all interfaces are covered so your VPN has a DNS server.

Part 2 is the hardest bit as I kind of needed some custom scripting to ensure cloudflare had working routes to my networks. e.g. https://gist.github.com/Kedstar99/2d8ab0e9bec3a5629562b4ab01...

The above script obviously running as a systemd service that restarts automatically.

Obviously you can use something else like noip or some other DDNS solution.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#39

Post by gen220 »

aweiland wrote: post #30
kd913 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I heavily recommend the use of them as a pihole + Wireguard VPN + DNSCryptProxy Server. Pihole -> Great use for a network wide adblocker/DHCP server. Wireguard VPN -> In combination with a DDNS setup and some port forwarding enables the use of a global private VPN. I think it's a prerequisite for a decent home-automation setup. DNSCryptProxy -> Great for ensuring all DNS requests on the network via DNS over HTTPS…

Any good tutorials on setting up Wireguard? This (and Pihole) have been on my todo list for a while.

I did this a few months ago. I’d previously tried a few years ago, and found no good online resources. Now they’re a dime a dozen.

The community around WG has gotten much easier for noobs to get into, and the porcelain around the tool itself has made it quite easy to use, IMO.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#40

Post by foxfluff »

albertzeyer wrote: post #9

We use a small drink kiosk touch pad powered by Rasperry Pi, using this simple software project: https://github.com/rwth-i6/drink-kiosk Works great. Except the SD card seems to be dying now after 3 years of constant usage (well, less usage during the enforced home-office times).

Fwiw Alpine Linux is very easy to set up in diskless mode. That's what I used for my first Pi 4 install. It does boot up and load packages from the sd card, but after that everything runs from RAM.
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