New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
@ElliotJ Yep, I'm not sure whether it has a power button though, or just turns on as soon as USB is connected
This.
Just load the SD card with a chain loader and recovery and you got a IPMI system.
If I had the money, and a car, I would create a Raspberri Pi web host, only offering Raspberri Pi servers. That would be awesome. Please, someone steal my idea!
-snip-
How much ram will these things use after the OS is loaded?
It's possible, but only really economically viable in a large scale deployment. Which would be hard to get to, since, quite honestly, RPis aren't exactly powerhouses.
We had a thread a week or so back about it, the main issues are to do with storage.
You'd either have to replace the SD cards on a daily basis, run an awkward iSCSI setup, or invest in USB external drives.
None of these are ideal, but, not impossible.
The chain load HD idea is ideal, its fairly easy and allows for recovery so remote reinstallation.
http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/2403/raspberry-pi-dedicated-server/p1 is the thread, if anyone else is interested.
Got a lot of feedback from people saying they would be interested, but in the end, turned out to be too much of a logistical nightmare for me to want to deal with at the moment.
Back on topic for @netomx, I'm sure @bitcable mentioned they were going to rack a few up. You might want to ask them if you could 'help out' with the 'testing'
I think the costs outweigh the benefits. I can't see a realistic scenario in which the RPi would have any commercial value.
A homebrew-looking device would surely raise eyebrows in a datacenter or even in company server room. At very minimum, this could be a problem with the insurance because your cardboard case is most certainly not approved by fire regulations. A metal casing also reduces instability due to electromagnetic interference and static discharge shielding. For a proof of concept installation, the board could be powered by a USB cable connected to a IPMI equipped server. Power cycling the server will power cycle the Pi's. Pi boards can be installed/concealed into the server itself, in the expansion card area. A more refined "production" approach could use a 5V PoE splitter and empty 1U fiber optic drawer. Flash cards are used extensively in embedded systems and don't wear out so easily. The only missing part is a flash card image with some failsafe/recovery environement to facilitate the remote reinstall of the main operating system. The Debian flash disk image on the Rasperry Pi site does not have this capability. Raspberry Pi is certainly a poor server device, but it could have many meaningful purposes. The general IO pins could be connected to external alarm contacts, and the CPU has enough power to run datalogger and monitoring applications togheter with a web server and smtp server. Commercially available devices cost more than 20x the Pi price and are far less flexible.
One Raspberry Pi have 17 GPIO. You can connect 17 relays (about 2$ each) so you can control 17 raspberry pi from one.
It would be cool if they were stick shaped and were POE, the just plug into the switch like a Optiview tracker plug.
I know that, I was joking. :P
This is what I was thinking. Getting a handful of them, put them in friend's and family's houses with different ISPs and have them monitor remotely and report to a central server.
Taking stalking to a new level! /kidding :P
I meant monitoring my equipment, not my friends and family. LoL.
That would be overkill :-) . I'm thinking a simple 8-bit microcontroller, with USART for RS-232 control, with multiple GPIO just toggling power MOSFETs (transistors) as relays. I know that there are "integrated power switches" available which, in chip form, contain 4+ FETs. Don't know about COTS (off the shelf) solutions though...
500 mA is the minimal maximum rated current. 100 mA is the maximum the standard says a port should provide until a device negotiates for higher current, upto the max limit. Needless to say, most ports are perfectly happy to provide 500mA even to a dumb charger. Some recent desktop motherboards at least have also raised the max to 1A....
1 Pic (or RPi)with some shift registers, voila, unlimited "on/off" switches
Not gonna do 500 mA...
why not? http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/74HC_HCT595.pdf
20mA for clamp
Clamping current is the maximum current the "safety" diodes will sustain WHEN the other end of your input/output is above/below Vcc/GND. e.g. Say I connect a 10V input to a chip powered by 5V, the chip won't be damaged so long as the current conducted is below 20 mA.
The only specs that matter on that datasheet are max output current per pin of 35 mA, and total max supply current (Icc) of 70 mA.
Well, you can use an external transformer to run a RPi with several shift registers and relays, problem solved
Where does the shift register come in? If you have enough GPIO on say (a pic), you can just connect them to FETs; relays use way more space/power because of the physical electromagnet inside. If you want to to do this with few GPIO, you need a demultiplexer, e.g. you input 100, output pin 5 of 8 total goes on, etc.
Well, to control the power of the RPis, if you got like 30+ on one place, and need to reboot/shutdown 1 of them
Got it. That works, but the task is handled more properly by a demux (because with a shift register you have to input the entire state of all connected rPis, changing just the one you want to switch, and then latch it to ensure that the others aren't affected).
I havent used a demux yet
Fun little things.
http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/74HC_HCT157.pdf
We are also plannig some colo at our facility in Romania, but we don't have any ETA yet. I guess we will start as soon as the Raspberry PI is public available, and not only those 10k from the preorders.
My RPi came, I found some instructions for getting it to boot into the USB drive.
Using a USB Drive for Storage
Although the boot files must be on the SD card, the Linux filesystem may be on an external drive. To use such an external drive:
Obtain a USB disk drive and attach it to your Raspberry Pi.
Create a partition at least as large as the second partition on the SD card using the fdisk command. In this example, it's assumed that this partition is the first one on the USB disk (/dev/sda1).
Copy the contents of the second SD card partition to the disk drive: dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p2 of=/dev/sda1
Since the copy was made of the SD card while it was in use, the filesystem copy on the hard disk will be marked as "dirty". Use the filesystem check command to check and clean it: fsck -y -f /dev/sda1
Edit /boot/cmdline.txt to change the root device: root=/dev/sda1
You should now be able to boot to your USB disk drive.
Since it requires SD card just to boot, you can remove the SD card after.
Thanks @Daniel
This would probably help providers who are thinking of coloing.
The boot files could just be left on a really crappy small sd card because they are only used at boot.
Couldn't providers get round the OS reinstall issue by preloading the hard drive with every operating system in its own partition and then just telling the client to change the boot location?