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Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

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Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#61

Post by SahAssar »

indigodaddy wrote: post #26
spijdar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've seen this in more than a few places. There was a blog "running on a Wii" that, IIRC, was doing the same thing. On the one hand I get it, TLS is pretty heavy, and it makes sense to take advantage of a VPS or Cloudflare or however you want to do it. But once you are spinning up a VPS, the question is ... why the Pi? The VPS in the article has less RAM, but more storage. If you're already doing TLS terminatio…

The TLS termination isn't actually on the VPS. The article details that Tierhive has an haproxy edge service (handling the TLS), that then has the vps as the backend, but that vps is just doing tcp proxying with socat to the ddns exposed home server fqdn. Feels like a lot of unnecessary loops. Kinda fun I guess but, just, why

Not disagreeing with you, but that makes it even worse.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#62

Post by bityard »

girishso wrote: post #41
raddan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hosted my personal email domain on a Zero for almost 10 years. It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still i…

Interesting, what tools did you use for email hosting? I’m scared of self hosting a mailbox.

It's a relatively steep learning curve if you're not getting paid to do it. However, in my case, I have been running my personal mail server on a trusted VPS host for well over a decade now. After the initial setup, there is really nothing to do except for regular Linux updates/upgrades. I run postfix, dovecot, roundcube, and rspamd. All of the configuration is in Ansible, so if the host goes tango uniform, or if I want to move it elsewhere, downtime should be minimal.

There are a few open-source one-command mail server deployment solutions that do all of the heavy lifting for you. Some of them might even be pretty good. The problem with those is that if you don't understand how your mail server is put together, you're completely stuck if it breaks.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#63

Post by SahAssar »

tracker1 wrote: post #30
Antirust3743 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is sending plaintext traffic over the open Internet "the way most people do TLS in 2026"? Am I missing something from the post?

Many (most?) are hosting web applications and/or content in separate applications and sometimes servers from where TLS (HTTPS) termination happens. HAProxy, Traefik, Caddy and Nginx as reverse proxy and TLS termination servers are pretty common, even more so if you're containerizing your applications themselves. It dramatically simplifies the application stack. While I may make the argument that most are probably hos…

It's vastly different to do TLS termination within your own network and to do it on a rando VPS and then send normal TCP over the internet. It's not an argument of it being on the same server.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#64

Post by [deleted] »

indigodaddy wrote: post #57
Antirust3743 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is, "we plan to use our external VPS for handling the TLS termination". Edit: Ah I see you are just pointing out termination is on haproxy service not VPS. Thought you were implying it was terminating on pi, my apologies.

The VPS is running socat only and just doing tcp forwarding. There is a shared haproxy also run by their same host, sitting in front of the VPS and is handling the TLS. I encourage you to read the article fully. They probably should have said "VPS provider" instead of VPS for the TLS bit.

[deleted]

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#66

Post by [deleted] »

tracker1 wrote: post #30
Antirust3743 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is sending plaintext traffic over the open Internet "the way most people do TLS in 2026"? Am I missing something from the post?

Many (most?) are hosting web applications and/or content in separate applications and sometimes servers from where TLS (HTTPS) termination happens. HAProxy, Traefik, Caddy and Nginx as reverse proxy and TLS termination servers are pretty common, even more so if you're containerizing your applications themselves. It dramatically simplifies the application stack. While I may make the argument that most are probably hos…

[deleted]

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#68

Post by ClikeX »

c0nsumer wrote: post #8

This feels a little weird because while they are running the website itself (HTTP) off the Pi, they are handing off all TLS to a cloud provider. So while the content is in RAM on the Pi, a lot of the heavier lifting (TLS termination) is done elsewhere, which saves a ton of CPU load on the Pi.

It reminds me of the footage of Doom running on a pregnancy test. And then it turned out it was another computer just displaying to the build in AMOLED display.

What was supposed to be a cool achievement is rendered pointless when one of the key elements is offloaded elsewhere.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#69

Post by cachius »

c0nsumer wrote: post #8

This feels a little weird because while they are running the website itself (HTTP) off the Pi, they are handing off all TLS to a cloud provider. So while the content is in RAM on the Pi, a lot of the heavier lifting (TLS termination) is done elsewhere, which saves a ton of CPU load on the Pi.

Why even serve TLS here?

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#70

Post by dijit »

cachius wrote: post #69
c0nsumer wrote: post #8

This feels a little weird because while they are running the website itself (HTTP) off the Pi, they are handing off all TLS to a cloud provider. So while the content is in RAM on the Pi, a lot of the heavier lifting (TLS termination) is done elsewhere, which saves a ton of CPU load on the Pi.

Why even serve TLS here?

because we collectively seem to have decided that plaintext http is worse than.. the computational cost to the planet.
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