Pi File – The RPI as a NAS

[Ed P]

As far as I can tell the process I posted previously works on all makes of Pi and is fairly robust in that the SD card is only used at boot. It also seems to work on every drive I’ve used. i.e. it is fairly safe bet, but perhaps not the best if you have a Pi 3B.

Swappiness is a different issue – I do not know if anyone has access to the old MM files but there was a thread on that in which iirc Bruce showed a very substantial usb R/W performance improvement by reducing the swappiness to 5. (Caused I think by a unfriendly embrace between the needs of file access and page file swaps taking place on the same, not very efficient, drive). In server use swappiness is set to 60-100 (default 60). I’m not sure what I would use for a NAS. Backup is essentially a swappiness 5 operation, while simultaneously playing media files is possibly a 10. As swappiness is a reflection of reusing page files I think you probably only really need to increase it for the case of concurrent users. Wiki type info here

[keith with the teef]

Jolly good call Dave.

Not for me though a bit messy, Well maybe one day. ?

[D-Dan]

I went a step further. After my failures with the BT SmartHub as a NAS server, I plugged the drive into one of my Pis, set up NFS, formatted ext4 and copied everything back. Re-set my NFS mounts on other devices and it’s good.

Then I imaged rootfs from my other Pi (with retropie installed), reconfigured /boot/cmdline.txt on the retropie, did some witchcraft with /etc/exports on the NFS server pi, and now I have retro booting from the drive plugged into the NAS. The only thing that the sdcard is used for is to boot the kernel, and then it hands off to the NAS.

I’ve had to do some other witchcraft re disk mounting on the retro, which is exhibiting some permissions issue without intervention until I figure out the underlying problem, but a quick bash script called from rc.local has it fixing everything up automagically 🙂

I can even pull the sdcard after booting.

The advantage, of course, is that I no longer have to worry about re-write life on the sdcard.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Ed P]

Sounds really good Dan.

Just for the record I have been setting up a Pi3B+ with a touchscreen to demo possibilities to a school. As I probably will not be able to get myself set-up for broadband at the school I decided to use the 128GB Integral SSD as a storage plus boot device (featured as cheap buy on forum). I’ll use it to store a bunch of Pi demo builds and various Minecraft Python scripts and SonicPi noises etc

Other than the minor pain of having to use a PC to first set up Raspbian Stretch on an SSD the SSD was ready to boot the Pi. Works perfectly – very robust and other than cost much more suitable to kiddies crashing the setup.

The only minor irritation I had was that the ‘official’ touch screen uses the spi bus which prevents me using the very cheap and superior DAC sound route.

[D-Dan]

There are many touch screens that can be made to work, and for basically peanuts.

My own next step is to set up the server to also boot rootfs from the ssd, though this will be directly rather than over NFS (that had it’s own nightmares – I expect direct to be easier).

I’ve been toying with adding a screen to the server, but they seem so small. How are you finding it?

I should add, audio is no issue. I have both PIs connected via pulseaudio to the pulse server on my main rig, with 5:1 surround 🙂

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Ed P]

Sound is just a personal preference – for my purposes just cheap & good.  Where I can I use a cheap 12bit DAC and a £6  3 inch speaker for project work. That is probably the lowest of the low as it is possible to get very high quality DAC boards that will happily drive expensive HiFi rigs. The analog route gives very limited sound quality as it shares its bus with Ethernet (not sure if that is still true with 3b+). The use of the dsp port screws this up as it grabs the spi ports and interferes with the i2c route. (a black screen results).

With respect to usability – yes 7 inch touch screens are usable but the framebuffer needs to be tweaked to give a minimum of 614 vertical resolution. Below this many dialogs become impossible to use on a touch screen. 5inch 1024×800 are great for TV/Films but not really usable imo for text.  <5 inch are really just info displays (e.g. what radio channel, or music is playing) though you can get ones with full hdmi resolution which I guess could be used as video/security monitors etc.

I like 10 inch screens but cannot really justify their use in my projects.

[Author]

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