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Raspberry Pi - Self hosting

Topics about the Beta trials up to Build 3043, the last build by Cumulus's founder Steve Loft. It was by this time way out of Beta but Steve wanted to keep it that way until he made a decision on his and Cumulus's future.

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Raspberry Pi - Self hosting

Post by mcrossley »

How viable is a Raspberry Pi as a self hosting system?

I have mine up as a test at the moment, it is running:

CumulusMX - copy data to my 'real' web server.
nginx (web server)
PHP5
MySql

I have ported over my Windows server based web site (dang case sensitivity on Linux!)

I have put it on the web here with static data

It's a little slow for my liking, but it does seem to run all these processes OK.

So do I switch to a RPi just to run CumulusMX (two copies) and switch to a hosted web server, or find something a bit beefier than the Pi?
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Re: Raspberry Pi - Self hosting

Post by tumutbound »

The main thing I'd be concerned about would be the constant reading/writing to the SDcard, I've had a few die on me. I've added an USB thumb drive to my Cumulus RPi setup and everything Cumulus related, resides on that drive. It made it very easy to move between different RPi (Model B and B+)
The other option is to add a USB hard disk. I've done this in my Rpi weather camera and it's working qute well. Drive is an ATA interface drive from an old IBM laptop fitted with a PATA to USB adaptor (about $4 from memory). Speed is about the same as for a USB thumb drive.
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Re: Raspberry Pi - Self hosting

Post by mcrossley »

Yep, the Pi I am running at the moment is HDD based. I regularly got SD card corruption on power fails etc. since moving to HDD I haven't had a problem.
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Re: Raspberry Pi - Self hosting

Post by steve »

I would imagine that anyone who is going to run Cumulus MX on a Pi won't be using an SD card long term. Even USB thumb drives have limited lifetimes, depending on the type of flash memory they contain.
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Re: Raspberry Pi - Self hosting

Post by mcrossley »

I've disabled the link again, the PHP service kept hanging up for some reason. I think just running MX on the Pi and going back to a hosting service is the way to go.
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Re: Raspberry Pi - Self hosting

Post by Adrian Hudson »

mcrossley wrote:I've disabled the link again, the PHP service kept hanging up for some reason. I think just running MX on the Pi and going back to a hosting service is the way to go.
I think you are probably right - any more than a few requests to your web site and the Pi would probably get much too slow and people would click away.
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Re: Raspberry Pi - Self hosting

Post by mcrossley »

The nginx and PHP seemed to be reasonably quick, as expected MySQL was too slow when doing full table scans. I really don't want to invest the effort to port to say SQLite just to test it. So search for a hoster I think, and port both my sites to that. The current host I use for my astro site kicked my weather site off for too much FTP activity.
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