I’ve been traveling a bit recently, visiting friends and family. Before my initial departure I had about a bazzillion and 1 thing to do. I’m currently waiting at the airport for my next flight. I’m considering changing this blog into a webpage devoted to my bazzillion and 1 excuses for not attending to one of my alleged life’s passions, software development.
It’s been fun walking around downtown Seattle. From people’s conversations (I don’t like eavesdropping but Americans speak in very loud voices) it seems that every second person works in software development.
I didn’t manage to set up a reverse proxy before I left, so I ripped the ssd out of the kitchen server and grabbed an old raspberry pi. I’ve decided that setting up random software packages onto the base kernel is bad form. I’ll be setting up a server and focusing more on VM’s and containerized solutions before setting up proxies, tunnels and web pages. My next server will be a Pi. It fulfills my highest priority requirements:
- portable
- dedicated physical hardware that I can touch
- relatively cheap
There are a few things that give me pause about using a pi, aside from the obvious CPU and memory restrictions. The onboard SD card is used as native storage for the OS root directory and subsequently all read/write intensive applications. SD cards can be very unstable for that kind of thing, depending on what you’re doing. I’m going to explore the possibility of using an external solid state drive with the rpi. That may be unrealistic. We’ll see. If it turns out badly, maybe a higher end micro-computer is the way to go.
“regardless of how good the error correction is on your little piece of flash memory, sooner or later it will corrupt”
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/connect-hdd-raspberry-pi/
I found a tutorial on how to boot pi3’s from USB. It may be worth trying out once I’ve landed. It looks like doing the same on a RPI4B is going to be a bit more challenging, according to this reddit post. I haven’t had the time to acquire one of them. Eventually, though. Whellpp, time to board. Ciao!
keep documenting 