On Tue, 12 Nov 2019 10:31:27 +0100
Edward Bartolo via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The Raspberry Pi is very frequency used with an SD Card which is
> highly intolerant of frequent writes as these are limited. My first SD
> Card became read only after about six weeks with Devuan running. Using
> Raspbian, this issue did not repeat itself.
>
> Needless to state, although it seems, it is actually needed for some
> people, the Raspberry Pi is not a full blown server, although it can
> be used by the hobbyist adolescent who wants to experiment and learn.
>
> The suggested defaults in this thread will make Devuan even more
> unuseable for the vast majority of use cases concerning the Raspberry
> Pi.
>
> For those who cannot affort brand new hardware, they can always opt to
> use second hand hardware. If one wants a cheap computer/server, there
> is absolutely no need to buy new or to buy the best of brands.
>
> In short, trying defaults which assume an infinite number of disk
> writes, is contrary to what a Raspberry Pi is.
>
> Please, promote defaults that respect what a Raspberry Pi is.
>
> Finally, Devuan's Image for Raspberry Pi did NOT DETECT my sound card
> by IQaudIO atlhough the kernel modules were included in the image.
> _______________________________________________
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> Dng@???
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I'm not constantly writing to the SD card so I really don't understand
how having the journal enabled is going to cause the thing to burn out
significantly sooner that with it off. I am not expecting to use the
thing like an FTP server, but I do expect to be able to boot off it and
store basic system stuff like a last-known-time since the thing lacks
an RTC and time can't be acquired until after network init.

I do not think it's appropriate to discount the Pis or any other SBC
and a toy for children. Sure it's used that way but so are pencils,
books, and anything else.

Some things just don't require a full blown server and are served just
fine by the pi. For example, I have an old venerable UPS and power
distribution unit I have taken apart, serviced, and modified over the
years. I can get data from it and control it via a custom driver shim
for Nut Daemon. Now I want all the servers, routers, and switches in
the rack to be aware of the UPS's state so that if the power is out
past a certain battery threshold, various devices will start to power
down so that only essentials are left. I also want to be able to
programaticly energize each inverter inside the thing as more or less
load is needed to help achieve maximum efficiency. No point in having
both inverters active when at less than 40% load. I also want to record
line conditions like input freq, voltage, etc for historical analysis
on the monitoring server.

The Pi is what I had laying around the seemed suitable for the task.
It's got GPIO pins and a network port. Sure there are other SBCs I
could have used but a lot of them are still going to have SD cards or
some kind of write-limited flash storage for their rom.

It's not as good as spending the time to actually write some firmware
based on OpenWRT but for 30 dollars it's well worth it's weight.

-- 
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