thoughts on raspberry pi

using a raspberry pi is something i have always wanted to do, but never invested in. raspberry pi's are cool, tiny computers with teensy consumption rates. the one i'm looking at has an arm processor at 1.5ghz and 4gb of ram.

at under 15 watts, those are some highty mighty specs! especially considering gemini and gopher are static, miniscule services to host.

of course, i'd want a site on the web as well, but i'd probably just use darkhttpd, or even just netcat. i like what tilde.pink does: just a little blurb that says "we're on gemini!"

it's a shot in the dark, but i like to think that one pi 4 could serve around... hmm maybe just under 50 users, if they're not always online running the 'yes' command, or something!

at $50 it might be a fun project.

i'd need a doamin name. those are like $15 a year. not bad. in total it would probably cost around $40 a year, assuming a decently average load on the pi. i can afford that. it's cheaper than, say, netflix, which *most* middle-class citizens tend to have!

wow yeah netflix is $10 a *month* for the *cheapest* plan! that's $120 a year! ouch. ouch ouch owie how do people afford that?

but anyway...

as for software, maybe just gmnisrv, if i'm honest. should i allow ssh access? or just have sftp? i want people to have access to rsync to reduce bandwidth, though... maybe also a gopher server, but i'd rather encourage more gemini content, so maybe not... but on the other hand, older, non-tls machines won't be able to browse that content... huh.

i'd need a static ip. those are expensive. i don't like that idea. that's not fun. i don't know how ip works. can telus just give me free ipv6 without the expensive ipv4? can i just use some cheap dynamic dns service? how reliable are they? ehhhh i wish i finished that networking course so i knew about all this stuff!

can i limit folder storage capacities in unix? i mean yeah, most likely, it's just not something i'm totally used to doing. if i had a 128gb usb-c hard drive, assuming 28gb is reserved for the os, disk caching, installed software, and whatnot, that leaves 100gb of free space to throw around.

i want every user to have 1gb of free space. that's more space than anyone needs for textual content. i just want to deter people from spamming archives and stuff into the server. it would also make enough room for 100 users. that's a lot of users, but again, i'd only want to serve about 50 before closing registrations.

can you buy an external nas drive? does an ssd handle load well? is gemini small enough that i can just get a consumer-grade disk and use that? what about a microsd card? at 150mb/s read times and 50mb/s write times, it might be able to handle a few users...

if i host a public server on a pi, i probably wouldn't even have my own account on it. i mean, i would, but it would just be some documentation and info about the server. i'm pretty comf here on tilde.pink! i don't feel the need to move, but if they ever shut down, i want to have a server to fallback on, and that server may as well be my own!

we'll see. it sounds fun, but like most things that sound fun to me, it will probably just sit around in my 'todo' list for the rest of my life!

march 2, 2021