Raspberry Pi 4

[Dave Rice]

Looking good http://tinyurl.com/yyfmu4rm

USB C, 3 & 2, dual 4k HDMI, up to 4GB ram, Gigabit Ethernet, 1.5GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 (A v8)

2GB of ram model £44 at the PiHut official USB C power supply £8.  If you want to use USB C, PoE splitters are available but the ones I’ve seen are more expensive than the PoE Hat @ £18.

[Ed P]

You beat me to it!

[Ed P]

El Reg has a good review – it looks like the fan or air cooler may be a good thing to have.

[Dave Rice]

If was at IFSEC last week where Manything launched their network adaptor for IP cameras that can’t natively run their cloud storage app (currently still only Hikvision but others inc Onvif coming soon).

It’s based on a Pi 3B+ which was suddenly obvious when I was told. I suspect it’s giving the CPU a good workout as they said they’d been through quite a few case types in testing. It looks like they may sell the hardened Raspian and app for those with their own hardware.

Meanwhile my own use for a Pi is now mainly for remote access to clients LANs using an OpenVPN server. I use the inbuilt VNC viewer server and Zenmap Security Scanner. As it’s nearly always on a CCTV site there will be a PoE switch there so I power it over a PoE splitter. Saves a lot of site visits! Everything else I used them for is now hosted in a Digital Ocean Ubuntu cloud server or a Linux VM on my own lan.

However USB 3 may be a game changer. When I get the summer holidays out of the way I’ll be getting one. I’ve got an old 60GB SSD in a USB 3 caddy. I see you can get one for M2 drives now, that will cut the size down.

[Drezha]

Ordered myself the 2GB version. I use it as a remote desktop over VNC, so improved desktop performance would be good. The 4GB version was sold out by the time I decided.

I didn’t really need, but I’m coming to the end of a major project at work and thought I’ll have some time to myself next week.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Ed P]

I could not see a requirement for 4GB unless I start processing larger data sets so I settled on the 2GB job plus a fan module.

[Drezha]

I didn’t see a fan module, though did buy the heatsinks for it as well – is this the one you mean?

I’ll see how I get one – most of the time, it’s fairly idle as it runs Pi Hole, but then I get it converting Youtube video and that hits the CPU as you might expect.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Ed P]

Probably only of interest to Dave, but the Pi4 launch site is running on a cluster of Pi4s in a sort of distributed mode (Pis allocated to specific tasks). Ars link

[Dave Rice]

I’ve always been suspicious about the word “cluster”. In the Folding days I found a cluster wasn’t what people thought i.e. the same job being processed by X number of units, it was the orchestration of multiple jobs to multiple units. Not much different to just having X autonomous units apart from the Geek kudos and wasting a unit to orchestrate the others.

It was a “Folding Farm” if you wanted to put a label on it, but then people thought that also meant parallel processing was taking place. I’d try and explain that in terms of pigs and pigsty’s.  It’s not a giant pigsty made up of many bolted together to produce a single giant pig ? or pop out lots of smaller pigs in the same time ?

It’s actually lots of pigsty’s producing pigs in their own sweet time. The farmer can’t make them faster (or slower) and the guy from the Ministry decides which Sow is getting preggers from which Hog anyway.

No analogy works, but that was a favourite. But who cares as long as the same amount of bacon ends up in my sandwich?

This seems much the same with the heavy lifting not even involved. Very messy wiring and they’re not even using the GBIC on the Netgear switch! Port 48 is being used for the uplink so not even a stack of switches. Pah! ?

[D-Dan]

Found 4G back in stock yesterday. Ordered, and arrived today. Playing with stock raspbian tonight (‘cos, y’know, Friday beer). Tomorrow, it get’s light installed to set up as my various server stuff. The 3B it will replace gets Amibian installed to be a permanent Amiga 🙂

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.

[The Duke]

At sub 30 quid, it was a “no think” purchase, but art 54, I’ll pass untill I was a use for one.

I’ll admit, it’s a lot of kit for the cash, but still too much for a ‘why not’ purchase.

[D-Dan]

Not so much a “Why not”, as a “why stick with slower”. I’ve migrated my NFS to the 4, along with PiHole, and my Plex server. Plex is still rebuilding the index, but it’s clearly doing it a lot faster, and streaming what has indexed is much faster, as is NFS access generally.

One of the 3B+ machines will soon be redundant, and so will get reinstalled with Amibian for a dedicated Amiga machine 🙂

Oh – I’m repeating myself.

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.

[Dave Rice]

Having got Samba’s reverse engineered Active Directory working on a Synology Server I may look at doing the same with a Pi.

However just getting AD going from an admin point of view is a PITA and Synology have done all the heavy lifting by installing it and working out the dependencies. May be one for the dark winter nights.

[Ed P]

If you plan on fitting the fan shim then plan on having to do a bit of plastic nibbling on the fan unit as otherwise the shim and fan will not fit neatly together. (Not a great advert for the UK company that makes the kit, I expected better!)

[Drezha]

This was why I was running in to issues… The Pi 4 doesn’t support booting from USB! At least, not yet and requires some playing around and using the Pi as the bootloader.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Ed P]

It would seem that early adopters have inherited some moderately carp firmware and an outstanding ‘todo’ list e.g No USB Boot or Ethernet boot – imo an appalling regression. In addition to this it seems the USB3 sata connection is also very flakey, and some controllers such as the Sabrent are not supported. There is more info on this problem here.

I would have been a much happier customer if they had released it when complete and ready instead of trying to hit some artificial deadline.

 

[Dave Rice]

Typical of the whole IT sector I’m afraid. Early adopters = beta testers.

[Drezha]

Yeah, I’ve ended up going back to the Pi3+ for the time being as that works quite nicely for what I need to do for the time being.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[D-Dan]

My Fan Shim arrived today, and no plastic nibbling required. They do seem to have upped the game a little. It no longer comes with plastic screws, but has little metal ones, and worked out of the box.

The software seems flakey (fan will kick in when stress testing, but doesn’t turn off again), but honestly, it’s pretty much silent, so who the hell cares if it’s running permanently.

And it has bought me a 20C temp reduction, so I’m happy.

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]

At long last the Pi4 has added some of the missing elements of the boot code. It now supports network boot and power via the USB-C port. This link gives most of the necessary information, but I’m afraid it is still a useless  box gathering dust in my house without the Boot from USB change.

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