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Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

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Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#71

Post by markoman »

peckrob wrote: post #44
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.

I use mine all the time for experiments. They're super useful for doing quick one-off experiments to see if something will work. Sometimes I'll keep using them, other times I'll switch to a different platform. Friday I was trying to figure out if I could remotely read realtime usage off my power meter. I've tried using a SDR for it but it uses some proprietary frequency hopping system that is difficult to understand…

This project will make a great blogpost once you complete it. I for one would be interested to hear more. My power meter was replaced a couple of years ago (to a more modern remote-read version) and I would definitely like to directly access usage information in real time.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#72

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

pengaru wrote: post #65
thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried using a Pi4 for a pihole and it kept crashing. Overheating I think. But, if I solve that, the SD card would kill it eventually.

I've had a bunch of Pi Zero W cameras in 24x7 use for years in a very harsh desert environment where ambient air temps regularly exceed 120F, and have never had a single crash of any of them, not even a failed SD card despite being written to daily for storing motion-activated images (the sunrise/sunset is always captured). I don't even have fans on these, and they're in the compact pi foundation red and white case f…

Again, I'm using the supply it shipped with. Not that having to use their supply because they screwed up the spec is an acceptable situation, mind you.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#73

Post by johnklos »

I had an office with close to a thousand ports spread over a dozen VLANs waiting on a Juniper "expert" to configure routing / NAT / firewalling. Between hardware that was delivered non-functional, other hardware which wasn't properly licensed, and the lack of experience of this "expert", nothing was working for the first several days.

In a fit of frustration, I asked for all VLANs to be sent to one port, then I set up a Raspberry Pi to do DNS and DHCP using a NetBSD host-based router to actually forward and do NAT. I told them it would stay that way until the Juniper gear was set up 100% and tested.

They're excellent little machines, inexpensive, and wonderful to keep around "in case of emergency". Learn how to root off of a USB drive or to limit writes to the SD card, and they're wonderfully reliable, too.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#74

Post by pridkett »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #55
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…

I tried using a Pi4 for a pihole and it kept crashing. Overheating I think. But, if I solve that, the SD card would kill it eventually.

Be careful with the gear you use on your Pis, just like any system. If you’re using a no-name USB-C power supply and dirt cheap generic SDHC cards, you will likely have problems. By default, the Pi4 doesn’t come with a power supply and while you might be tempted to power it from your PC, spend the money for the official power brick, or, even better, get the official Pi Power over Ethernet hats. For SD, buy from a reputable source and get a brand name (Samsung or Sandisk).

This is anecdata from my part, but I’ve got eight or 10 Pis running (Flightaware/ADSBexchange, PiHole/Influx/Grafana/Wireguard, a couple of Octoprint, Home Assistant - with a relay HAT for triggering dampers, Showmewebcam, and a handful of other things). Once I switched to good power supplies and good SDHC cards, my problems went away. My most heavily loaded machine is the PiHole machine which also has influx running and writing to the SDHC card - it’s probably a ticking time bomb, but it’ll celebrate it’s fourth birthday on the same card in two months.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#75

Post by II2II »

throw10920 wrote: post #52
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.

If you still haven't found a use for them: they make for good low-power, always-on, headless networked servers for processing-light tasks. Other commentators mentioned pihole/DNS, WireGuard, and music streaming, but you can also use them for a (slow) NFS server, persistent Syncthing node, Maestral host[1] (third-party Dropbox client written in Python (that can actually run on the Raspberry Pi, unlike the official Dro…

I do the same thing, with a different mix of services:

- The obligatory PiHole.

- An ssh server, which I use to access my internal network.

- A script that scrapes a website daily.

- A database to support a web development project.

- A web server to support a web development project.

- An NFS server, for data backups.

While it is probably underpowered to serve the needs of some people, it serves my needs. Since I don't fiddle around with it very much, it has proven to be very reliable.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#76

Post by dang »

treesknees wrote: post #13

The technical detail blog post has a bit more information. At first I was wondering why they decided to go with an RPi instead of a few enterprise servers, and it looks like they're utilizing the GPIO interfaces to interact with relays to power some of it. https://www.monterail.com/blog/2016/smart-office-raspberry-p...

Ok, we've changed to that from https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/nine-raspberry-pis-power-th... above. Thanks!

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#77

Post by petre »

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.

The easiest way on the Pi is to install the HomeAssistant plugin, but it's quite easy to set up on a Linux too. Generate two keys, copy paste them in a five line config, same thing on the client. On a phone install the app and scan a QR code that you rsync over to your PC. There's a tutorial on the Wg website.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#78

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

hateful wrote: post #41
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.

I use one for the clock in my bedroom. I use FullPageOS to load a web page that contains the time, date and weather (Open Weather gives you 60 checks per minute for free - way more than I need). The clock is on a full size monitor so the wife and I can see it without our glasses on. I basically deployed a nodejs app and configured FullPageOS to load that local page. The clock itself is just HTML and JavaScript (jQuer…

what do you use for the display?

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#79

Post by mbreese »

andrewzah wrote: post #21
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.

Indeed. One actually useful case I found was using an rpi with shairport-sync + owntone to allow airplay streaming. I got a quality DAC from hifiberry [0]. Another use was running HomeAssistant, but I migrated that to my real server. Another use is having an external InfluxDB + Grafana monitoring setup so I can view stats even if the server goes down. Lastly, you can take X amount of raspberry pis and run a kubernete…

I have a few Pis around the house, but likewise, the primary use-case that has stuck has been as an Airplay target (using shairport-sync). I'm not using a RPi specific DAC, but rather a cheap USB DAC. I have two of these around the house and haven't had to touch them for years.

The second use-case I have is as an Octopi server to run my 3D printer. I have found this interface to be significantly more user friendly than uploading new designs to an SD card.

Re: Nine Raspberry Pis powering an office (2016)

#80

Post by 542458 »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #70
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.

All the stuff I used to do on a large and clunky hot power hungry noisy Intel box is now comfortably running on a cluster of Raspberry Pi's tucked away in the basement ceiling where nobody can see them. I wish they were a little faster in some cases (particularly serving the Nextcloud UI) but overall I much prefer this setup, especially since I can add Raspberry Pi's to facilitate specific roles like I would in a pro…

> particularly serving the Nextcloud UI

Nextcloud is an absolute dog. Even on a server with loads of power and an SSD-based database over a local connection with all the caching options turned on… it’s still not snappy. I wish we had better FOSS options in this space.

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