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How did end up running 9?

How I ended up running 9 Pis (but not any more)

This is now out of date!!

My first entry into Pis was after having to move out of my office in the spare room, as that was soon to be a nursery. How do I run the stuff that was on 2 desktop computers? They were Linux hosts running KVM, the services could be run on other hardware. But what do I use?

After looking about I found thr Pis, the size of a credit card and run off a phone brick. Just what I was looking for, but the first Pis had 1 issue for me. The speed of the old Pi 2 was something I didnt look into, should have done more research. Still, I started my move and found them to be very capable little things.

The first build was only 3 pis, starting point to get the stuff off the big hungry desktop servers.

Then I needed more power for nextcloud and so added a new pi to allow me to serate out all the bits of nextcloud on to different pis.

After that, as a new pi came out. I used that to update the current stuff.

Then I got hold of a pi zero w and a sound hat, that was going to replace my current subsonic pi. But I couldnt get the sound to work, it was choppy. Not what I was looking for. The pi zero w sat about for a long time, then I found a page about how you can setup snapcast to output directly to a sound device. That was what I needed and after some config, the pi zero was playing buttery smooth music.

Then I started to look into docker and needed a pi for that, so docker01 was borne. But as docker needed more resouses then the pi 2 had, an upgrade was needed. docker02 pi was now running.

While looing for a pi zero fix, our youview recorder box started to get very slow. to the point you couldnt pause live tv as it would take 10 seconds to register the buttion press. So I looked about for what I could do.

Options:

  1. live wuth the speed
  2. buy a new box and learn to live with it
  3. see if I could use a pi as a relacemnt

Option 3 turned out to work very well, as I used OSMC. This is an all in one PVR, allowing us to pause and record. But in order to have a pi to do it, I needed to up an upgrade of a pi. Queue a Pi 4B with 2 GB of memory to replace the Pi 3B+ that is file pi, the would free up a pi to use for OSMC.

So to date my pi farm has a head count of 9, plus an unused 2b.