Rasberry PI

[mad_jock]

Well my bombed up Linux contractors 386 laptop went to the wind after saving the day many a time. I think the record was 2000 users hanging off it for email along with 200 print Q's.

Boss getting charged a ridiculous amount for email.

Was thinking a couple of PI's and couple of usb drives should be good enough to hang 100 folk off including a web interface.

Job done for 150 quid and an internet connection.

[Keef]

I gave my PI away - never got round to doing anything with it.

I have 100-odd ecclesiastical users on a purchased service from an excellent outfit run by a pilot friend. Very simple to drive, minimal hardware ;)

[mad_jock]

Aye its simple enough when you know how.

Which is what annoys with some of the prices that are charged.

[mixture]

Was thinking a couple of PI's and couple of usb drives should be good enough to hang 100 folk off including a web interface.

Job done for 150 quid and an internet connection.

Are you serious ? :ugh:

Have you not figured out in the world of IT that trying to do things on the cheap is only going to come back and bite you in the backside !

I honestly don't know where to start with your hair brained idea there are so many things bad with it.

If you are going to do it in-house, then do it properly. Otherwise outsource it somewhere where you get SLAs and someone else takes care of keeping the thing running for you.

[mad_jock]

Its just a couple of Linux servers. Same as I used to set up for big networks using 10's of thousands worth of Solaris boxes.

And if you mean properly get an exchange server in :mad: right off.

sendmail and an imap demon will do nicely thanks.

[mixture]

nd if you mean properly get an exchange server in right off.

No its not, and I'm sure you know that's not what I meant.

I meant using Raspberry Pi with USB sticks is an absolute joke.

[mad_jock]

Its no different to using a couple of spark5's load sharing.

It may seem like a joke but really you could have a hundred of them with battery packs for the price of one normal server and UPS. Distribute them across subnets. You don't have to have USB sticks there are top boards now with proper HD and timing chips. Its the lack of timing chip which would actually cause most problems with the raw unit.

[mixture]

Yes mad_jock, I am aware of that style of cheap component architecture, the sort Google use in certain areas of their operations.

Trouble is, I doubt you have the resources or operational experience that Google have. I can tell you for a start that Google most certainly do not use USB sticks, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Which is why I have been humbly suggesting that you will be fighting a loosing battle with your plans, and that a more traditional setup would serve you much better (I don't care if you run a Windows or Linux based system on it).

I'm telling you. You need to realistically consider the full lifecycle cost. What may appear to be an "expensive" third party managed service may not necessarily be as expensive as you think.... and I've doubts about your definition of expensive too.... getting hosted email can be done relatively cheaply yet robustly these days. Your solution may appear cheaper than anything out there... but that's only because you're seriously devaluing other lifecycle elements.

[mad_jock]

I don't have googles combined skill set obviously.

But I have done about 10 setups for corporations from fresh and 5 micro****e exchange rip outs.

Also worked 2 years for a blue chip on contract.

It payed for me to become a pilot.

[Unusual Attitude]

Well if all else fails you can always install RASPBMC onto your Pi and it makes an awesome cheap home media centre!

Even my wife was impressed and she normally just rolls here eyes at anything geeky.....

[mixture]

But I have done about 10 setups for corporations from fresh and 5 micro****e exchange rip outs.

Also worked 2 years for a blue chip on contract.

It payed for me to become a pilot.

Yeah fine but .... none of it was on Raspberry Pi. And with the sort of background you purport to have, I'm even more surprised you consider it a remotely viable solution to providing email for 100 users.

Anyway... each to their own, but don't come back here crying looking for tea & sympathy (or just technical advice) when it all blows up in your face. If you're a full time ATPL then you've got even less time to waste babysitting some cheapo solution.

Good luck.... you'll need it.

[le Pingouin]

C'mon mixture, it all comes down to hardware reliability - the software is the same. Maybe mad_jock's client is happy to forgo that extra decimal point of availability to save 90% of the cost. Horses for courses.

[mixture]

C'mon mixture, it all comes down to hardware reliability - the software is the same.

(a) Hardware reliability is 2/3 of the problem
(b) The software is not quite the same, its not like you can run any nix/nux of your choosing... you have to run very specific operating systems that have been heavily cut-down to fit the limitations of the product.

I'm sorry. I've seen too many penny pinching clients in my time. Most get denied their request, but for special customers I've occasionally complied with their request because I know I've had solid T&Cs in place and the solution wasn't for production use. The penny pinching always ends up blowing up in their face once the full lifecycle kicks in.

Using the Raspberry Pi in this scenario doesn't even comply with the old "pick two" motto .... its more like "pick one".... the one being price at the expense of quality and reliability (or whatever other two factors you wish to name).

Extra decimal point ? More like dropping from somewhere in the late 90s to somewhere in the early 80s !

[mad_jock]

100 is relatively small.

Last email I set up was for 3000 with a couple of spark5's with a couple of NIC's each # linked to a solaris file server with samba running the file system to link to PC's on the back of NIS+

Worked a treat and the load factors never got above 0.6 Only down time was planned.

There was mucho moaning from across the atlantic about joining the exchange enterprise but that would have cost an absolute fortune in hardware and licenses and 3 admins. Job done for 2 recycled work stations and about 5 hours a month admin patching after setting up all the cron jobs.

Was still running 7 years ago and had been up for 5 years. How much for 3 exchange servers for 3000 users and licenses for 5 years?

Even though I am an ATPL I still have a black belt in vi and still have all my old scripts.

Will let you know how its goes I may through throw caution to the wind and get 5 raspberry's and 5 rechargeable battery packs which will bring the hardware price up to 250 euros.

[le Pingouin]

But what is cut down? If you're running a mail server and printer queue all you need are the relevant parts. Quality? It's using the same mail server and print queue software as any other equivalent Linux installation. Sure, it won't be an enterprise equivalent but that isn't required.

[mixture]

Afraid I'm done with this topic of discussion le Pingouin. See ya on another thread.

[mad_jock]

He is doubting the hardware of the raspberry PI. Which you can over come by sheer numbers. For the same price as one "server" PSU you can buy 4 Rasberrys.

A full installation of Fedora has been ported onto it as a standard build.

Not that you would need that for a mail server.

Half a G of ram is more than enough.

They are mass produced and aren't soak tested before dispatch which server hardware would be. But for 35 quid and producing 30 000 of them a month what do you expect.

And for all the server hardware gets tested you still get the occasional wonky one.

[Milo Minderbinder]

Jock

so just how are you going to set them up, what software for instance, and what are you going to use as storage? I can't see pen drives being reliable enough

[cattletruck]

Can Rasberry Pi do the following?

Recently I set up a full webmail solution under guidance from someone who has done a dozen of them before, and it was pretty full on in terms of configuring all the moving parts.

On the backend I used:
- SAN for the mailstore.
- Dovecot for IMAP access (SSL & POP)
- Postfix as the MTA
- SpamAssassin, Amavis, ClamAV for virus checking.
- postgrey for blocking spammers.
- A bunch of SQL databases.

On the frontend I used:
- Roundcubemail for webmail client.
- Maia webinterface for managing quarantined messages with viruses
- Postfixadmin for managing e-mail domains and e-mail addresses.
- SendmailAnalyzer for sysadmin reports.

Both the frontend and backend servers where running Linux High Availability.

All servers had management:
- SNMP (Nagios)
- logrotate/rsyslog
- puppet
- ntp
- package management

As I said, lots of "moving" software parts but it worked extremely well once I got everything setup perfectly.

Best thing is all the software is free :ok:.

Now I've also used MS-Exchange and was once a fan of it but not now for lots of reasons.

If you can do the above with Rasberry Pi I would be very impressed.

[mixture]

If you can do the above with Rasberry Pi I would be very impressed.

You can't.

You're dead at point one. SAN storage.

And no, trying to fudge it over the NIC won't cut it.

[mad_jock]

Why on earth would you need a SAN for 100 users?

IMAP is easy and so is pop
Sendmail I am happy with.
Loads of choices for antivirus and the like infact that's what one of the PI's can do on its tod.

H'mm didn't think about a sqlserver setup that could do for document control.

Websever on one of them for outside access although.

Its was only a though I have 5 of the things on order and one of the FO's fancies turning one of them into a document control database for the pilot stuff with electronic signing etc.

I think the disk handling will become the issue as I to don't think a USB stick will cut the mustard or even a external USB disk.

There are add ons getting made all the time. GIRT boards can control you house easy enough with the relays. And I am sure someone will give better conductivity to them.

If not there are already other blocks coming out with better interfaces

Cubieboard: Raspberry Pi competitor with SATA port - LinuxBSDos.com (http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/09/11/cubieboard-raspberry-pi-competitor-with-sata-port/)

A PI will do to get things moving and worked out.

[mixture]

Why on earth would you need a SAN for 100 users?

Maybe he's using his proper infrastructure for more than just email. Maybe you don't realise how much less you can spec a basic SAN for these days. Maybe he used the word SAN when he meant something else.:ugh:

Cubieboard: Raspberry Pi competitor with SATA port - LinuxBSDos.com

Throughput will still be butt ugly on that chipset though. :yuk:

Plus no battery backed cache, no RAID.

These things are consumer toys, not servers, no matter how you try to paint it. They were designed as "a tiny and cheap computer for kids" (Pi's own words on their About Us).

[Saab Dastard]

With real, proper servers (used) going for silly money these days, why bu99er about with Rpi?

HP DL380 G5 rackmount server for £100 on ebay (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-PROLIANT-DL380-G5-470064-616-1x-QUAD-CORE-2-83GHZ-E5440-16GB-RAM-P400-Server-/140964284118?pt=UK_Computing_Servers&hash=item20d22046d6)

SD

[cattletruck]

I did mean SAN, e-mail was just one type of service used on the SAN, SANs are now cheap and getting cheaper, my one supported NAS IP interfaces too. It's the way to go if you're serious.

The e-mail service is commercial, the e-mail users number in the hundreds and some of their domains have been hosted for about a decade, According to sendmailAnalyzer 45% of mail traffic is spam/virus/spoofing/malformed protocols/relaying attempts/vectored exploits, at least 99.9% of it is caught and not seen by the user. The hosts are all virtual (vmware) who's images live on the SAN but are not highly spec'd at all as the mailer/virus/spam/greylist software are extremely efficient and good at what they do.

Whether you like to admit it or not, e-mail is sometimes used to relay extremely critical information (from the customers POV), you can't half-arse about with this stuff anymore, it just has to be robust and reliable.

And a nice thing about using a SAN like this is you can use its NAS interface to keep a warm duplicate at another site just in case a plane crashes into yours.

2c.

[mad_jock]

Its a project which can fail or can work.

I will try it out on the pilots first which have the full range of thick old boy to 3 sysadmins and one DB guru.

If it works I will take it to an old place of employment and take to the test plant and stick a proper load generator on it and hammer it until it falls on its backside.

It will be a bit of fun which I can do in hotels down route by just plugging the thing into the telly. Which I can't do with a rackable server.

And if you don't try these things there is no innovation. Who is to say there isn't a market for a 500user unit email system which is plug and play in a small business office.

[cattletruck]

... the full range of thick old boy to ...

My bet is the thick old boy will succeed with his innovation.

I also built a similar system to the one I described above for Qantas and found the flight crew were very forgiving, flexible and adaptable to issues that arose, not that they wanted to be put in that situation.

I can't imagine the look on their faces if we told their suits we built it all out of Rpi's though :}.

[mixture]

It will be a bit of fun which I can do in hotels down route by just plugging the thing into the telly. Which I can't do with a rackable server.

You can access a rackable server just fine from hotel rooms, BIOS and all. :E

And if you don't try these things there is no innovation. Who is to say there isn't a market for a 500user unit email system which is plug and play in a small business office.

(a) There is innovation and there is "innovation". I happen to have sat as one of the judges on the panel of an innovation award thingy on a couple of occasions. Yes, all the submissions were "novel and unique" ....however all the judges agreed very few of them had any viable use in the real world, and it was never very hard for us to agree on an eventual shortlist of finalists. Yours is not a real world solution, its a proof of concept lab setup at best.

(b) With the cloud etc., small businesses on a tight budget will be going in that direction, they already are, wake up and smell the coffee. Other businesses that can afford it, can and should do it properly and not mess around with a stupid harebrained idea of using a hardware platform that was never, ever conceived to be a server to fulfill that task.

I will wish you all the best in your pet project mad_jock, but for gods sake don't go trying to impose it on others as a good idea, because its not.

[green granite]

Mixture, may I remind you of:

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

"There will never be a bigger plane built." -- A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people.

[mad_jock]

I won't impose it on anyone don't worry

And I know you can access however many servers as you like while dual tasking on pprune.

And that's half the problem with these awards they are generally judged by people that are set in there ways.

One place I worked as a mech eng one of the young YTS lads had umpteen hundreds of gallons of solution to mix up. He was meant to stand with a augar for hours. He didn't like this idea and got a hose and stuck a nozzle on the end of it. Charge hand didn't like it, Workshop manager didn't like. I over heard and thought why not try it on a 50 gallon batch.

High pressure nozzle submerged mixes it at treat and after 5 mins the batch was tested and passed by QA. Charge hand threw the nozzle out two days later which I recovered from the skip and then with my own fair hand machined another one mainly to prove to myself I could still use a lathe and survive.

The arguments I have had with the woolie jumper, sandle wearing VAX boys. Apparently these new fangled PC's were the work of the devil and would never catch on.

[A A Gruntpuddock]

Also -

"Lasers are a laboratory toy with no practical application"

"640K is enough memory for any computer"

“We don’t need Jews like Albert Einstein.”

“Flight by heavier-than-air machines will never be possible”

[mad_jock]

I can't imagine the look on their faces if we told their suits

I am one of the suits :D and its not the pilot suits that care as long as it works. The negatives only come from the external service providers who are usually Microsoft only qualified. Oh and the accountants and HR usually spouting some bollocks about security. And you don't half get some twitching when you tell them what there actual current state of security is with multiple people with admin access having access to the hardware.

And with all things aviation the cash gets pointed towards the aircraft and fuel. Getting 300 euros and producing something running will prove the concept when they have a $18,000 bill on the table for a new windscreen that de laminated. Then when its proved to work then you can go for the Gucci gear.

I will of course stay completely away from the admin staff and only play with the Engineers and Pilots. With any luck we can get a working email system, document control and maybe a database for engine health monitoring running off a smart phone app. At which point we can relegate the PI's to media servers in the pilots accommodation and get some rackables in.

Anyway its the DB guru that I reckon will struggle, not much has change over the years they are still chimps.

[Milo Minderbinder]

One area where I reckon the Pi will come into its own is in public display screens. At present these generally have a dedicated PC driving the screen, usually running windows and acting as a single-role application server. Sometimes you'll find a little VIA microPC attached to the back of the screen, but usually its a full sized tower with a long VGA feed. With the correct software it would be a real saving.
Thats the problem - at present most run Windows (usually Xp). One wonders if the impending demise in Xp will see a rash of development to a cheaper model

[mad_jock]

There are loads on things which you could use it for but all it takes is a bit of Linux gumption and your away.

That relay girt board would make it possible to control you heating off and on. So the place is warm when you get back or for that matter not heated when you get stuck overnight somewhere.

[mixture]

green granite,

throw quotes at me all you like, the fact remains that there is a limit to how much penny pinching you can do in IT before it comes back to bite you in the backside... not only has mad_jock crossed that level, but he has crossed it by a substantial amount. It might not happen immediately, it might not happen tomorrow.... but one day, it will come to bite him at the most inconvenient moment, probably when he's busy exercising the rights afforded to him by an ATPL and won't be infront of a computer for another few hours.... result will be 100 severely p*ssed off users.

Providing email services to 100 users on something that amounts to no more than a cheap toy is laughable. Its a joke, and unfortunately its May 1st and note April 1st !

I think this thread has reached the end of its life, its starting to go round in circles and I've no interest in perpetuating that.

[mad_jock]

See your dismissing it already as a toy.

That's the same thing what happened when lego brought out its controller for robotic tech lego.

Soon they were sold out thinking where the hell are these going.

Very quickly industry realised that the controller was just as good as the 2k ones which they had previously been buying.

A national instuments A/D data acquisition card costs in the region of a couple of grand.

Manchester Uni has already brought out a 16 channel sampler add on for the Pi. Linked to another one with a servo relay controller on it and you have quite a tasty industrial control unit for 100 quid.

The software side of things I can deal with as I did in the past with cron jobs and scripts. If two spark5's can run for years only being taken down for patching I can't see why I should have a crisis in the air. The hardware can be dealt with by pairing. And the girl on the front desk can run a sudo script for account creation/deletion.

[cattletruck]

Will your Rpi mail server have it's own public DNS MX record or will it just be all internal corporate stuff? Also you mentioned a pair of sparc5s, which were very well built and quite reliable back in the day, and which also implies that you will be using the old and unreliable "mbox" mailbox format for each user account in the mailstore rather than something more reliable and feature rich like "Maildir".

I'm with you all the way on not using an MS-Exchange solution in this instance, but you have given yourself quite a challenge on doing it all on the Rpi. Good luck, and let us know how goes it.

[mixture]

Very quickly industry realised that the controller was just as good as the 2k ones which they had previously been buying.

Very much doubt "industry" would use a lego toy in an environment that may lead to an insurance claim.

The 2k ones are not just 2k because someone picked that number out of the hat. I betcha the whole design process, PCB upwards was completely different.

The hardware can be dealt with by pairing.

If only it were that simple. The hardware is not even appropriate to do that.

Manchester Uni has already brought out a 16 channel sampler add on for the Pi.

The answer is in the word "Manchester Uni" .... one big lab environment .... students can play with whatever they want.... the cooler it looks on their thesis the better.

Also I don't buy your comparison of the Pi to the hardware produced by Sun Microsystems. Chalk and cheese, completely different design.

As I said. Good luck, just don't kid yourself that what you're doing is more than what it is, and certainly don't plan your retirement on flogging it to the masses.

I'm genuinely done with this thread now. Bye.

[Saab Dastard]

Afraid I'm done with this topic of discussion le Pingouin. See ya on another thread.

I think this thread has reached the end of its life, its starting to go round in circles and I've no interest in perpetuating that.

I'm genuinely done with this thread now. Bye.

Third time lucky, eh Mixture? ;)

SD

[mad_jock]

Very much doubt "industry" would use a lego toy in an environment that may lead to an insurance claim

Nope it was the same base controller and was subject to different duty tax to boot as a toy than an industrial controller. And obviously the industrial ones the dimple effect on the outside was slightly wasted.

And why would insurance come into it. There are ones fitted to offshore production platforms and signed off by Lloyd's. If the design is signed off by the CEng and it gets LLoyds or DNV certified that's it insured. If the unit needs G and vibration tested it will be done if its a lego product or industrial.

And the Manchester Unit has been brought out by a spin off commercial unit. Same as the one that designs Satellites.

Will have a look at all the different formats when I get round to it I had presumed things had moved on. I would more than likely keep it internal to begin with. The getting the DNS MX entry would have to been done on the sly or by completely changing the service provision.

Spark5's were solid brained a rat once with one of the keyboards those laser mice were ****e though.