ODROID

Papa's Got a Brand New NAS: the Software

Kyle Rankin — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 12:00:00 +0000

Who needs a custom NAS OS or a web-based GUI when command-line NAS software is so easy to configure?

In a recent letter to the editor, I was contacted by a reader who enjoyed my "Papa's Got a Brand New NAS" article, but wished I had spent more time describing the software I used. When I wrote the article, I decided not to dive into the software too much, because it all was pretty standard for serving files under Linux. But on second thought, if you want to re-create what I made, I imagine it would be nice to know the software side as well, so this article describes the software I use in my home NAS.

The OS

My NAS uses the ODROID-XU4 as the main computing platform, and so far, I've found its octo-core ARM CPU and the rest of its resources to be adequate for a home NAS. When I first set it up, I visited the official wiki page for the computer, which provides a number of OS images, including Ubuntu and Android images that you can copy onto a microSD card. Those images are geared more toward desktop use, however, and I wanted a minimal server image. After some searching, I found a minimal image for what was the current Debian stable release at the time (Jessie).

Although this minimal image worked okay for me, I don't necessarily recommend just going with whatever OS some volunteer on a forum creates. Since I first set up the computer, the Armbian project has been released, and it supports a number of standardized OS images for quite a few ARM platforms including the ODROID-XU4. So if you want to follow in my footsteps, you may want to start with the minimal Armbian Debian image.

If you've ever used a Raspberry Pi before, the process of setting up an alternative ARM board shouldn't be too different. Use another computer to write an OS image to a microSD card, boot the ARM board, and at boot, the image will expand to fill the existing filesystem. Then reboot and connect to the network, so you can log in with the default credentials your particular image sets up. Like with Raspbian builds, the first step you should perform with Armbian or any other OS image is to change the default password to something else. Even better, you should consider setting up proper user accounts instead of relying on the default.

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Two Portable DIY Retro Gaming Consoles

Kyle Rankin — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 12:33:21 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

A look at Adafruit's PiGRRL Zero vs. Hardkernel's ODROID-GO.

If you enjoy retro gaming, there are so many options, it can be tough to know what to get. The choices range from officially sanctioned systems from Nintendo all the way to homemade RetroPie projects like I've covered in Linux Journal in the past. Of course, those systems are designed to be permanently attached to a TV.

But, what if you want to play retro games on the road? Although it's true that you could just connect a gamepad to a laptop and use an emulator, there's something to be said for a console that fits in your pocket like the original Nintendo Game Boy. In this article, I describe two different portable DIY retro gaming projects I've built and compare and contrast their features.

Adafruit PiGRRL Zero

The RetroPie project spawned an incredible number of DIY retro consoles due to how easy and cheap the project made it to build a console out of the widely available and popular Raspberry Pi. Although most of the projects were aimed at home consoles, Adafruit took things a step further and created the PiGRRL project series that combines Raspberry Pis with LCD screens, buttons, batteries and other electronics into a portable RetroPie system that has a similar form factor to the original Game Boy. You buy the kit, print the case and buttons yourself with a 3D printer, and after some soldering, you have a portable console.

The original PiGRRL was based off the Raspberry Pi and was similar in size and shape to the original Game Boy. In the original kit, you also took apart an SNES gamepad, cut the electronics and used it for gamepad electronics. Although you got the benefit of a real SNES gamepad's button feedback, due to that Game Boy form factor, there were no L and R shoulder buttons, and only A and B buttons on the front, so it was aimed at NES and Game Boy games.

The PiGRRL 2 took the original PiGRRL and offered a number of upgrades. First, it was based on the faster Raspberry Pi 2, which could emulate newer systems like the SNES. It also incorporated its own custom gamepad electronics, so you could get A, B, X and Y buttons in the front, plus L and R buttons in the back, while still maintaining the similar Game Boy form factor.

Figure 1. PiGRRL 2

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Papa's Got a Brand New NAS

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:21:40 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

It used to be that the true sign you were dealing with a Linux geek was the pile of computers lying around that person's house. How else could you experiment with networked servers without a mass of computers and networking equipment? If you work as a sysadmin for a large company, sometimes one of the job perks is that you get first dibs on decommissioned equipment. Through the years, I was able to amass quite a home network by combining some things I bought myself with some equipment that was too old for production. A major point of pride in my own home network was the 24U server cabinet in the garage. It had a gigabit top-of-rack managed switch, a 2U UPS at the bottom, and in the middle was a 1U HP DL-series server with a 1U eSATA disk array attached to it. Above that was a slide-out LCD and keyboard in case I ever needed to work on the server directly.

The 1U server acted as my primary server for just about everything. It was the gateway router, local mail relay and secondary MX for my personal domains, DNS server, DHCP server, and with the eSATA array, it became our home NAS (Network Attached Storage) array that we used for general file storage and backups. Everything generally worked well, and if you ignored the power bill and the space it took up, it was quite the impressive setup in its day.

The key phrase here is "in its day", because these days, a combination of virtualization and cloud computing means you are more likely to see a Linux geek with a laptop than a pile of servers. As computers have become faster, smaller and cheaper, my 1U server was starting to show its age. Given that all of my eggs were in this basket, I started wondering about what I'd do if one of the expensive components on the server failed. Although the server had been stable up to this point, I realized it wouldn't last forever, and if it did break, I could buy modern hardware for the cost of replacing, for instance, one of its fancy serial-attached SCSI drives. I ended up researching a lot of different options, and in this article, I describe how I ended up replacing that 24U cabinet and all the hardware in it with something that's smaller than a shoe box, much lower-powered and relatively cheap.

It's an ARM's World

At the beginning of my search, I started down a more traditional route with a cheap 1U server and a modern motherboard, but I quickly started narrowing down the motherboards to small, lower-power solutions given this machine was going to run all day. As I started considering some of the micro ATX solutions out there, it got me thinking: could I use a Raspberry Pi? After all, the latest iteration of the Raspberry Pi has a reasonably fast processor, a decent amount of RAM, and it's cheap, so even if one by itself wasn't enough to manage all my services, two or three might do the trick and not only be cheaper than a standard motherboard but lower power as well.

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