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Raspberry Pi colocation - Page 2
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Raspberry Pi colocation

24

Comments

  • @willie said:

    Learntolive said: Aliexpress and did order rpi 3 b + ones

    That's the pi 3. You do know the pi 4 was just released, I hope:

    https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

    There's another thread about it that I opened a couple days ago.

    I know that rpi 4 got released, dont need so good specs for my project 😎

  • @cociu any offer?

  • cociucociu Member

    Learntolive said: @cociu any offer?

    we can do something in your budget.

  • @cociu said:

    Learntolive said: @cociu any offer?

    we can do something in your budget.

    Give me deal, I ship you pre configured raspberry pi

  • rcxbrcxb Member
    edited June 2019

    @willie said:
    I could give them the pi box with the laptop drive on top with a rubber band holding them together :).

    Don't do it! Rubber bands don't last long.

    Thanked by 2willie Janevski
  • @rcxb said:

    @willie said:
    I could give them the pi box with the laptop drive on top with a rubber band holding them together :).

    Don't do it! Rubber bands don't last long.

    Well you can tape them together

  • williewillie Member

    I'll talk with Freerangecloud about possibly colo'ing something a little bit bigger than a pi, like an HC2 or a NUC. I can actually live without ipv4 if that helps (i.e. v6-only is fine, can always proxy a VPS if I need v4 for something). This is cool.

  • @rcxb said:

    @willie said:
    I could give them the pi box with the laptop drive on top with a rubber band holding them together :).

    Don't do it! Rubber bands don't last long.

    Get some velcro.

  • williewillie Member

    Yeah I thought of those velcro straps but I'm also looking at some enclosures on ameridroid.com.

  • level6level6 Member

    Plastic tie

  • For storage, Instead of tape and stuff something like this looks really nice and clean:

    Best thing - with minimal board it all (including psu) fits within the same $35 which rpi costs.
    Main disadvantage - it is still USB2-SATA.

    Thanked by 2uptime poisson
  • uptimeuptime Member

    here's one I've been eyeing for a while but have not yet tried out:

    https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc2

    The HC2 is built with a high performance SATA port and a Gigabit Ethernet port, to build a faster network storage device. It's engineered metal frame body is designed to store a 2.5 inch HDD/SSD or 3.5inch HDD

    CPU is same as ODROID-XU4 (big/little architecture: Samsung Exynos5422 Cortex-A15 2Ghz and Cortex-A7 Octa core CPUs) w/ 2 GB ram, USB-2, SATA-3

    about $55 (plus shipping and maybe tax)

    I suppose if arranging for colo would also want to have an enclosure (in addition to the metal frame/heatsink) - but without enclosure the frame is designed to be stackable

    Thanked by 2Gamma17 Janevski
  • PureVoltagePureVoltage Member, Patron Provider

    We have been playing around with some more options for Pi and mini systems for our colocation. The only downsides of doing those systems is the cheap price/low profits and often the lack of any remote fixes such as IPMI so they require manual reboots if they go down.

  • terrahostterrahost Member, Patron Provider

    We will be doing Raspberry Pi Colocation and Hosted "servers" later this year in Norway. 70 Pi's per 3U on our custom PCB with:

    • Direct Console access to each Pi (via TTL-USB serial chips onboard the PCB)
    • Remote reboot
    • Automated reinstalls
    • Network based storage
    • Pi4 1-4GB

    Pricing currently not set.

    :)

    Thanked by 1Aluminat
  • williewillie Member

    Concept of a pi as a compute server is not that interesting. It gets more interesting as an HDD storage server.

    That Nanopi NAS box is nice! There is also the Odroid HC1/HC2 that got a relatively unfavorable comment from someone who had tried it, here on LET when I asked about it a few months ago (I forget who posted the comment though). Plus there is something for the more expensive and power hungry H1.

    Thanked by 2uptime poisson
  • @PureVoltage said:
    We have been playing around with some more options for Pi and mini systems for our colocation. The only downsides of doing those systems is the cheap price/low profits and often the lack of any remote fixes such as IPMI so they require manual reboots if they go down.

    Any offer? 🤔

  • Odroid hc2 is nice too, there are few potential issues however.

    One i am always worried about when looking at all this ARM boards is software compatibility. Being stuck with specific kernel version with a bunch of (bug-ridden) proprietary blobs for drivers sucks. Allwinner chips have very nice community, almost as good as rpi. Sure without manufacturer support not everything goes smooth, like video decoding/gpu support is still problematic, but at least looking at H3/H5 devices i am sure that i will be able to run latest mainline kernel, may be with some limitations. Also H5 is 64bit, and looking at how aarch64 is now considered one of "Main architectures" for centos 8 it seems like a big "+".

    I do not know how well samsung SOC-s are supported, and quick search did not provide any useful info apart from the fact that samsung requires signing NDA just to be able to get datasheet, so i probably would not buy such devices without talking to someone who already owns one first.

    Thanked by 2uptime TheLinuxBug
  • williewillie Member

    I know the Odroid XU4 has been well received. I should find the old thread discussions the HC1, but I think the complaints were about the hardware and packaging, rather than the software. Anyway, it's a headless server, so video drivers shouldn't come into the picture.

  • kozikozi Member

    @willie said:
    colo'ing something a little bit bigger than a pi, like an HC2 or a NUC.

    I'd be interested in something like this too... I'd love to colo one of my NUC's.

  • PureVoltagePureVoltage Member, Patron Provider

    @kozi said:

    @willie said:
    colo'ing something a little bit bigger than a pi, like an HC2 or a NUC.

    I'd be interested in something like this too... I'd love to colo one of my NUC's.

    This is what we see more often even clients with full racks put in little nucs etc for remote windows boxes sometimes.

  • grnzgrnz Member

    I'm glad we forgot about the ... "Camera"

  • williewillie Member
    edited July 2019

    Ok, I found @texteditor 's January 2018 post about issues with the Odroid HC1:

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2612413/#Comment_2612413

    It doesn't sound so good for use in a data center after all. Oh well. Unless I hear otherwise I'll presume the HC2 is the same way.

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • @willie said:
    Ok, I found @texteditor 's January 2018 post about issues with the Odroid HC1:

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2612413/#Comment_2612413

    It doesn't sound so good for use in a data center after all. Oh well. Unless I hear otherwise I'll presume the HC2 is the same way.

    Guess this is the reason why collocating such devices is so unpopular. Most of ARM boards have issues like that, including rpi, probably because they were not designed for DC-s. For example it is hard to find anything worse than rpi1 sd card slot, even those microsd is probably better.

    SD card can be avoided on some devices, theoretically anything allwinner SOC based should be able to boot from usb storage, and since HDD is connected using USB-SATA - from hdd. It also makes adding "rescue microSD" possible, for cases when something breaks and reboot does not help.

  • @terrahost said:
    We will be doing Raspberry Pi Colocation and Hosted "servers" later this year in Norway. 70 Pi's per 3U on our custom PCB with:

    • Direct Console access to each Pi (via TTL-USB serial chips onboard the PCB)
    • Remote reboot
    • Automated reinstalls
    • Network based storage
    • Pi4 1-4GB

    Pricing currently not set.

    :)

    Could I get on testing group and ship mine there?

  • @willie said:
    It doesn't sound so good for use in a data center after all. Oh well. Unless I hear otherwise I'll presume the HC2 is the same way.

    It is. it also has only 1 screw for the 3.5in drive. it is the same board in the same position on a longer, wider HDD bed

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • @Gamma17 said:

    @willie said:
    Ok, I found @texteditor 's January 2018 post about issues with the Odroid HC1:

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2612413/#Comment_2612413

    It doesn't sound so good for use in a data center after all. Oh well. Unless I hear otherwise I'll presume the HC2 is the same way.

    Guess this is the reason why collocating such devices is so unpopular. Most of ARM boards have issues like that, including rpi, probably because they were not designed for DC-s. For example it is hard to find anything worse than rpi1 sd card slot, even those microsd is probably better.

    SD card can be avoided on some devices, theoretically anything allwinner SOC based should be able to boot from usb storage, and since HDD is connected using USB-SATA - from hdd. It also makes adding "rescue microSD" possible, for cases when something breaks and reboot does not help.

    The Pi boards, at least since the Pi 3, support both USB and PXE booting instead of SD cards

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • @texteditor said:

    The Pi boards, at least since the Pi 3, support both USB and PXE booting instead of SD cards

    Good to know. I did not personally use rpi after first terrible experience with rpi1, short time after it was released a lot of chinese boards appeared, which were much, much better.
    rpi4 finally looks interesting with gigabit lan and all that, i may actually buy it out of curiosity...

  • terrahostterrahost Member, Patron Provider

    @Learntolive said:

    @terrahost said:
    We will be doing Raspberry Pi Colocation and Hosted "servers" later this year in Norway. 70 Pi's per 3U on our custom PCB with:

    • Direct Console access to each Pi (via TTL-USB serial chips onboard the PCB)
    • Remote reboot
    • Automated reinstalls
    • Network based storage
    • Pi4 1-4GB

    Pricing currently not set.

    :)

    Could I get on testing group and ship mine there?

    Sure, contact us via our website and we'll get in touch when we're ready to beta test :)

  • williewillie Member
    edited July 2019

    @freerangecloud I can't speak for others but I find myself more interested in colo'ing a hard drive than a dinky ARM server. Any chance of offering something like Delimiter (who?)'s old slot hosting product? Basically they set up some older 12 core Xeon servers (2x X56xx iirc, no hyperthreading) in 12 bay storage chassis, so for $10/m you got a KVM with a dedicated core and a hard drive slot where you could colocate your own disk. I wouldn't touch Delimiter (who?) with a 10 foot pole these days but the product was appealing.

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • freerangecloudfreerangecloud Member, Patron Provider

    Hmm, I could probably do something with USB-based storage, if you wanted to send a USB HDD I could attach it to a KVM instance. I don't have any chassis' with a large number of bays floating around unfortunately.

    @willie said:
    @freerangecloud I can't speak for others but I find myself more interested in colo'ing a hard drive than a dinky ARM server. Any chance of offering something like Delimiter (who?)'s old slot hosting product? Basically they set up some older 12 core Xeon servers (2x X56xx iirc, no hyperthreading) in 12 bay storage chassis, so for $10/m you got a KVM with a dedicated core and a hard drive slot where you could colocate your own disk. I wouldn't touch Delimiter (who?) with a 10 foot pole these days but the product was appealing.

    Thanked by 4uptime poisson willie Jun
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