What's Your Pi Plan??

My Pi Plan is to get two!

I currently live in Asia, but my family lives in the UK. The first Pi will run Fedora Remix as a headless server, with a 1Tb USB drive and a seperate card reader attached to a USB hub - then I want to create a OpenVPN server which also runs as a internal SAMBA server on my UK domestic network, with an external facing SFTP site so that I can reach all my notes & files from where ever I need to. It will also run a VNC server, to give me a remote desktop (predominantly for Firefox) & an SSH server (to properly play with the config, as a command line is so much easier than any form of GUI).

The second Pi is so that I can teach myself Linux again (I've forgotten it over the last decade) & organise/deveop/upgrade/test my config for England on a local Pi in Asia, where if/when I destroy my config I can just reboot it, or restore it, or start over and try again until I get it right. That's why I need a second card reader on the first! I can then SFTP over a known working SD card image, dump it onto a card in the second reader & get someone to turn it off, swap the cards over, then power it up again with a brand new, but pre-tested, config.

Of course, having a Pi here in Asia where I can really get stuck into the OS & tweak it to my heart's content will be amazing fun. Each time I destroy it, I can just reimage an SD card before making completely different mistakes & repeating the process again almost indefinitely. The only way to properly learn what makes a computer tick is to repeatedly mess it up - then repeatedly have to dig yourself out of the hole that you just dug yourself into. After 6 months of that you really know your stuff, and after a year you're absolute dynamite. I can't wait for my first Pi to arrive & I really can't wait until production ramps up and I can get my second in place (on the other side of the world)...

My Pi Plan is to get two!

I currently live in Asia, but my family lives in the UK. The first Pi will run Fedora Remix as a headless server, with a 1Tb USB drive and a seperate card reader attached to a USB hub - then I want to create a OpenVPN server which also runs as a internal SAMBA server on my UK domestic network, with an external facing SFTP site so that I can reach all my notes & files from where ever I need to. It will also run a VNC server, to give me a remote desktop (predominantly for Firefox) & an SSH server (to properly play with the config, as a command line is so much easier than any form of GUI).

The second Pi is so that I can teach myself Linux again (I've forgotten it over the last decade) & organise/deveop/upgrade/test my config for England on a local Pi in Asia, where if/when I destroy my config I can just reboot it, or restore it, or start over and try again until I get it right. That's why I need a second card reader on the first! I can then SFTP over a known working SD card image, dump it onto a card in the second reader & get someone to turn it off, swap the cards over, then power it up again with a brand new, but pre-tested, config.

Of course, having a Pi here in Asia where I can really get stuck into the OS & tweak it to my heart's content will be amazing fun. Each time I destroy it, I can just reimage an SD card before making completely different mistakes & repeating the process again almost indefinitely. The only way to properly learn what makes a computer tick is to repeatedly mess it up - then repeatedly have to dig yourself out of the hole that you just dug yourself into. After 6 months of that you really know your stuff, and after a year you're absolute dynamite. I can't wait for my first Pi to arrive & I really can't wait until production ramps up and I can get my second in place (on the other side of the world)...