The Recon-Gemini

2021-02-04

Photo of the Recon-Gemini

My gemini server is kind of a representation of a number of things I find interesting and fun to play with all wrapped into one. The capsule and gemlog you are reading right now is being hosted on this little failed network security snake oil device called a Recon Sentinel. It was supposed to be something you plugged in on your network and would uhhh...do stuff to keep your network secure? Unsurprisingly it did not achieve much success and a large number of the devices were getting liquidated rather cheaply. I've seen some people report picking it up as cheap as $8 USD but I spent $18 on this one (and $16 on 2 additional ones). So what makes this interesting and easily worth the price is the PINE64 Rock64 SBC that is hiding inside. It is a quad core SBC with 1GB RAM a Gigabit ethernet port, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a USB 3.0 port, hdmi, the typical gpio pins and an emmc socket and micro sd card slot. It also includes an 8GB sandisk microSD card, a power supply, a 16x2 lcd display and the enclosure. SBCs, electronics, selfhosting and doing more with less in the computing power and money sense. All things that get me going.

After some trial and error the Recon-Gemini is running armbian for the OS, gmnisrv for the gemini serving software and I'm writing my posts by hand so far. My plans for this gemini capsule in the near future are to get some sort of gemini specific static site generator to help keep things organized and get visitor stats or something displaying on the 16x2 lcd.

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