Re: [gentoo-user] Rasp-Pi-4 Gentoo servers

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 4:25 PM james <garftd@×××××××.net> wrote:
>
> Yea, I was not clear. I'd run the mail-server, on a 'cluster' (4 or
> more), not an individual pi-board unless it was beef up, processor and
> ram wise. Gig E would also be on my list.
>

Unless you have some niche need I wouldn't generally run servers on
Pis.  The biggest issue with ARM is that all the cheap platforms are
starved for RAM, and RAM is one of the biggest issues when running
services.  And of course the Pi in particular has IO issues (as do
many other cheap SBCs but this is less of an ARM issue).  The RAM
issue isn't so many an ARM issue as a supply/demand thing - the only
people asking for 64GB ARM boards are big companies that are willing
to pay a lot for them.

I do actually run a few services on Pis - DNS, DHCP, and a VPN
gateway.  That's about it.  These are fairly non-demanding tasks that
the hardware doesn't struggle with, and the data is almost entirely
static so an occasional backup makes any kind of recovery trivial.
The only reason I run these services on Pis is that they are fairly
fundamental to having a working network.  Most of my services are
running in containers on a server, but I don't want to have to think
about taking a server down for maintenance and then literally every
IOT device in the house won't work.  These particular services are
also basically dependency-free which means I can just boot them up and
they just do their jobs, while they remain a dependency for just about
everything else on the network.  When you start running DHCP in a
container you have more complex dependency issues.

A fairly cheap amd64 system can run a ton of services in containers
though, and it is way simpler to maintain that way.  I still get quick
access to snapshots/etc, but now if I want to run a gentoo container
it is no big deal if 99% of the time it uses 25MB of RAM and 1% of one
core, but once a month it needs 4GB of RAM and 100% of 6 cores.  As
long as I'm not doing an emerge -u world on half a dozen containers at
once it is no big deal at all.

Now, if I needed some server in some niche application that needed to
be able to operate off of a car battery for a few days, then sure I'd
be looking at Pis and so on.

-- 
Rich