So, check this little idea that I have - I want to browse the internet without all sorts of unscrupulous actors collecting every little bit of metadata on me and my family they can possibly get their hands on.
Raspberry Pies (is that how you pluralize it?), and especially their SD cards are not the most reliable pieces of hardware. I’ve already had a few die on me.
As for how annoying outages are, I guess that depends on how many people and services you have on your network relying on a functioning DNS. I am running two pihole instances on separate hardware in a keepalived virtual IP setup, with a replicated configuration. Sounds complicated, but it’s really easy.
It’s just nice to be able to reboot or perform maintenance on my pihole knowing it won’t impact DNS, and not having to worry about interrupting my girlfriend streaming her Netflix series or whatever. For example, just a couple of weeks ago I converted my bare-metal pihole installation to a dockerized one, which was a couple of hours of work, without any DNS downtime at all.
Raspberry Pies (is that how you pluralize it?), and especially their SD cards are not the most reliable pieces of hardware. I’ve already had a few die on me.
I grabbed a le potato with an emmc module a little while back and recently got a rock 3c with an emmc slot. I doubt think I can ever go back to microSD based SBCs. I have a good handful of pis from the first one to the 4. Each one of those has chewed up at least one card until I made a point to buy high quality microsds. They do work quite well if you don’t have them reading and writing from the card much, so if it’s just running as an appliance it should be able to last a while.
But yeah, I regularly dd my sd cards so I have a backup of a clean setup and a more recent one that I can revert to if I lose a card. Which reminds me, I should probably do that with my pihole, since it’s somehow become that one brick keeping my entire network functioning.
Raspberry Pies (is that how you pluralize it?), and especially their SD cards are not the most reliable pieces of hardware. I’ve already had a few die on me.
As for how annoying outages are, I guess that depends on how many people and services you have on your network relying on a functioning DNS. I am running two pihole instances on separate hardware in a keepalived virtual IP setup, with a replicated configuration. Sounds complicated, but it’s really easy.
It’s just nice to be able to reboot or perform maintenance on my pihole knowing it won’t impact DNS, and not having to worry about interrupting my girlfriend streaming her Netflix series or whatever. For example, just a couple of weeks ago I converted my bare-metal pihole installation to a dockerized one, which was a couple of hours of work, without any DNS downtime at all.
I grabbed a le potato with an emmc module a little while back and recently got a rock 3c with an emmc slot. I doubt think I can ever go back to microSD based SBCs. I have a good handful of pis from the first one to the 4. Each one of those has chewed up at least one card until I made a point to buy high quality microsds. They do work quite well if you don’t have them reading and writing from the card much, so if it’s just running as an appliance it should be able to last a while.
But yeah, I regularly dd my sd cards so I have a backup of a clean setup and a more recent one that I can revert to if I lose a card. Which reminds me, I should probably do that with my pihole, since it’s somehow become that one brick keeping my entire network functioning.