If you want to see the actual hardware used at the restaurant, check out the previous blog post: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at...
Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.
Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.
Funny how the world has changed.
I got my first taste of real computing from a guy in the next town who would buy dead PDP's from local McDonald's restaurants, fix them up, and sell them on.
He always said the hardest part wasn't replacing broken parts, it was that invariably the machines would always have soda spilled in them, no matter where they were stored. Cleaning the insides was his most time-consuming task.
One of the advantages of an Intel NUC is that it probably has a lot more horsepower than an old PDP/11. It's probably also a smaller target for wayward beverages.
It wasn't like having an account to crunch all the numbers on staff full time was cheap. Especially when you'd have to have 3-4 accountants just to have 24 hour service, regardless of the work load
Also is Highlander open source? I don't see a link to it in the article.
We use a VIP that the NUCs share... ie; one of the three will always have a VIP, and if it dies another NUC grabs it. This is a poor man’s load balancer in that sense, because we only have the NUC hardware onsite;
https://github.com/kubernetes/contrib/tree/master/keepalived...
We are also looking at metallb
[1] It's the same software that runs my home automation system, so an inevitable feature is my car and home units interacting, I wrote half of a piece of navigation software before I stopped, and the entire interface is intended for voice control so I need to throw that in there at some point too. I intend to work on a CAN interface to connect to the car, but I've had a few roadblocks to getting started on that project.
The code is here: https://github.com/ocdtrekkie/HAController but I don't know if I'd really recommend others use it. The main perk to me is that it's designed around what I want and use (I tried a lot of alternative options before rolling my own), so unless you also really like Visual Basic code and have a brain ordered bizarrely similarly to mine, you may want to start somewhere else.
I'd love to chat about what I've learned along the way or what ideas you have (because I might borrow them!), if you want to chat elsewhere hit me up at inbox (at) jacobweisz (dot) com
I once left the reading lights on; car was supposed to have turned it off when the doors locked, but somehow didn't. I found myself calling AAA in the morning to get a jumpstart.
There is an external battery solution for the NUC, and I bought it! http://www.mini-box.com/NUC-UPS But I haven't switched to it yet. The big upside is that it will gracefully shutdown my NUC after I power off the car. But if I use the cigarette lighter for power, it will lose the ability to turn itself on when power is present, because the batteries are always present. NUC UPS supports using a different power connector which can turn on the PC on ignition, but I haven't had it installed in my car as of yet as that's a little bit more work, and I'd need some help from someone who knows more about the car's electrical system.
As far as fast power-on, it's a pretty high end i5 NUC with an NVMe SSD. It boots pretty darn fast, and my software takes less than a second to load once the OS is up. The slowest part of boot is that I don't want my location history easily steal-able, so it's encrypted, and I have to key in the code to unlock the machine. (I'm looking at a security key or similar to replace this step in the future.)
As a note, I'm more or less specced out what's involved in a solar power setup on the roof of my car to independently power my computer all/most of the time when the car is off and otherwise charge a secondary battery off the car's inverter, but there's no reasonable or sane reason to do it. ...But I thought about it.
Probably the only real concern I'm afraid of is condensation when heating up the car on a cold day, but it hasn't been an issue so far, perhaps because the computer is not near a window.
The NUC-like hardware that goes into tanks have chassis consisting of a mesh cage to allow maximum airflow since the cabin temperature alone can exceed 100F.
I've been planning to make some custom-cut USB cables and a 3D printed part just to make the setup of my display a lot cleaner... and I haven't done either of those and it's been a year or so since I planned to.
They do actually make a dual NIC NUC, but it's a little overkill for most uses: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Machine-NUC8i7HVK-Radeon-Graphi...
On the other hand, my NUC has plenty of USB 3 ports, and an Ethernet dongle will run you about $7.
Part of the problem is that even if you only write 1GB per day the card is highly likely to reuse the same sectors over and over.
One would have expected this to be an area of focus for RasPi developers? Surely some driver could be updated to avoid this?
This talk about SD cards is really great and explains some of this:
And even then I'd be surprised if you could game physical sector offsets by playing with the virtual offsets you have access to.
I did a bunch of research on this a while back and the conclusion I found was: yes, but buy name-brand better rated cards to avoid cheapo cards that do not do wear leveling or do it very badly.
It's nowhere near as good as SSD drives, but it's better than just a naked flash chip... unless I'm wrong.
Even the brand name cards aren't worth shit; you need to buy "industrial" cards.
Source: tried to get a root filesystem to work on name brand SD cards for a high availability product.
How much abuse was your high availability product delivering to these cards in terms of writes? Was it something like a video recorder, database, cryptocurrency, or some other application that did large amounts of write I/O?
I ask because we're about to ship something that uses SD cards, but the I/O is very low. It's a network appliance and doesn't do anything locally that is high write throughput.
We even saw SD cards screwing up in RO mode in fact, from major brands. Trust me, you want to swap out for an industrial card in your BoM.
It's definitely getting better though
As an end user, I run a personal authoritative DNS server that has small RAM requirements. The RPi (or other SBC) boots to a mfs mounted root, then mounts all directories as tmpfs. Then I remove the SD card.1 As such, the logs for this server, which are automatically rotated and do not exceed 5M in total, are written to RAM.
1 I only use the SD card to boot. The only files on the card are a bootloader, a bootloader config and two kernels, each with an embedded filesystem. If updates are necessary, I make them to one of the kernels at a time. The other is the backup. The bootloader and bootloader config lets me specify which kernel to boot.