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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's fully remote managed and monitored by me

This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It reminds me of Ubiquity's cloud key. I wish some government grant contractors would try it.

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This has been a usual business model for larger vendors (and servers): selling appliances. Google also did it (I think it was for intranet search), it was also one of the story threads in the Silicon Valley sitcom (see "the box").

When I launched my first startup, I also did something similar. Though we were selling a service: we'd deliver it as a 'box' (my co-founder actually called it 'the box' - before SV was aired :) ). It was in 2011, and we didn't have the RasPi back then so we used something called the SheevaPlug [1] . It didn't have a display port, which we'd needed later on, but it was great for plug'n'play'n'forget installation. (Actually one of these is still running at one of our first customers, even though the backing service has been shut down ~5 years ago. Probably nobody knows any more what it's doing and they just think 'better not touch'.)

It's the easiest and most logical way to deliver some of the software/services. It mostly depends on whether it's something you want to interact with on your own machine (and a single machine) or whether you want to have it always running and/or multiple people to access it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

And having a physical object adds some scarcity into the mix, which you need:

https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...

In our case it wasn't the point. It was more about the plug and play (literally, since it was a background music service) vs "install and then keep it running all the time". We had a local competitor and funny enough they pitched themselves with saying "you don't need any special hardware". I.e. they didn't get that it was indeed a feature.

But it was an interesting read.

Yup. That raspberry pi with stuff on it is a clever way of addressing a wider market. :-)

If you’re clever or worried about business continuity you can learn from the practices of some enterprise it providers and add built in self checks, call home, and even charge for preventative maintenance. For example, “We noticed your dongle is overheating / having flash issues / whatever and not running optimally. Here’s a replacement.” Or - “we noticed that your dongle hasn’t been used in a while. Is it ok?”

That would be cool indeed.

Besides, depending on the reliability of the available internet connection, it might be also useful (and easy) to add an embedded mobile connection as a fail over.

I know a guy who had some issues for that reason. The quality of the customer's LAN was extremely poor, but the customer (out of ignorance, bad faith or both, it wasn't clear) always blamed his software.

I'd be a bit wary of something as important as invoices on the Rpi storage though. Hopefully there's some automatic backup.

Every single time the RPi comes up in an HN thread, someone mentions the reliability of SD cards. The truth is:

1) Regular SD cards were never designed to be OS volumes, of course they're going to fail when used for that. Buy better SD cards, like ones with high write endurance.

2) RPi 4 does not need to boot off SD card. It can boot from any USB drive of your choosing, or over Ethernet.

As this point, it's practically a meme.

I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these devices in over 5 years. Not one - and they boot from SD cards!

The stuff running on the RPis isn't very write heavy, and the cases are only lightly ruggedised (I forget the brand, but they are consumer gear, nothing fancy), and I forget what brand the SD cards are - but this is why I roll my eyes every time this is mentioned on HN (which is every time RPi is mentioned on HN). I really wonder what fraction of people repeating this reliability claim even have an RPi.

While I am not one of those commenting on such issues except for your prompt–my experience with RPi 1 & 2 has been that they tended to eat sd cards for breakfast. Either needed reimaging or broke the sd cards for good. Had this at happen in at least eight instances. Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss. Which tends to happen in both experimental and production environments, unless you take great care.

Younger generations have not had these issues for me. While I assigned that to my experience, usually reducing logging to sd card, booting off of USB and fewer unexpected power losses, it may simply not be an issue any more.

> Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss

Though in my experience as a technician installing 2.5" consumer grade / entry level Kingston/ADATA SSD to several clients, this is what generally will kill NAND flash devices, it's not an exclusive phenomenon to uSD cards.

I have a few running RPi's on premises for years. Ranging from v1 to now v4, certainly the only uSD 3 failures I have had has been with the early models and reliability went up with...... just a No-break power source. Just that.

It seems a lot of people think a sudden power loss it's what's only dangerous for electronics and NAND flash devices but for devices that are highly sensitive to browning down power rails (specially those first v1 raspis) any unstable power source is a rave party from which is hard to get out unscathed.

One of the first things I bought for my Raspberry was a battery hat, it’s great. When the power goes out, it keeps on trucking. I would love to add a solar panel or wind turbine as an extra power source.

Yeah! That has been my idea for a long time! When thought about it, I began looking into devices that can output DC and charge a backup battery but with a variety of input power sources, Solar as main source and line AC as backup. Didn't get that many practical search results.

But it seems what I was looking for are boat chargers. They're meant to provide energy through solar/battery and charge at the same time while parked on a deck. Didn't followed it up though.

Not sure how good wear leveling is across brands of SD cards, but given the much larger SD cards available today, it may be a factor.

Yeah i have the same experience with about 100 pi’s. But I still added a mitigation making the log directory a overlayfs with tempfs underneath.

I think that reduced the number of writes to the sd card allot.

Could you expand more on the "mobile land rigs"?

I've always wondered if any organizations have tried to make something like a Sandcrawler.

Many have tried but sadly there is a limited supply of skilled Jawa Programmers.

I tried to hire some to start such a project but I must have been looking in Alderaan places ...

Heh, it's nothing so fancy. There are a bunch of different types of land rig: some small ones come apart and get stuffed in the back of vans/lorries, others sit on a trailer, and some are self-propelled[0] [1].

Of course, it's not just 1 piece of equipment that moves around it's people, tech etc - some land rigs are almost semi-nomadic, with the whole camp moving around.

[0] https://www.nov.com/products/mobile-rigs

[1] https://www.nov.com/-/media/nov/files/products/rig/rig-equip...

It's much easier to buy industrial [1] and high endurance [2] microSD cards now. SanDisk/WD started selling them to the public due to the popularity of dashcams that record continuously. No more buying cards on digikey from a manufacturer you'd never heard of for 10x the price.

I haven't seen reports of these particular cards being counterfeited yet, but still... you probably shouldn't buy them from Amazon...

[1] https://www.westerndigital.com/products/commercial-removable...

[2] https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/memory-cards/sandis...

WD Purple does seem to have proper wear-leveling as well[1], which are easy to find in retailers anywhere for a reasonable price.

I believe over-provisioning space to delay wear if you write much can also help (in conjunction with wear leveling).

[1] See this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ex7dvo/quick_...

I definitely had this issue with the first generation Raspberry Pi. It wasn't just a corrupted filesystem. The SD card was completely ruined. When I started over, I followed instructions to make the file system readonly, turn off the tmpfs, turn off atime, etc. And never had another issue. Eventually I replaced the Pi with a newer one and haven't had any problems even though the file system is read/write. I think this issue may have affected the earlier models more, or maybe SD cards are better now.

I brought it up because it was being sold as an appliance type device with invoice data on it, to be sold to probably non-technical customers. Not just as a random gripe. I did reply, after finding that specific product page, with an update that she is shipping it with a real drive.

Can a RPi4 bought before the USB boot was added have it enabled?

You can boot the RPI off of an SSD nowadays, or boot off an SD card with the root file system on an SSD.

I also used to be concerned about persisting data on a RPIs because of the SD card problem.

But this setup is quite comparable to a standard Linux box with no replication. From there you can setup ZFS if you care to, or be satisfied with daily backups to the cloud.

I poked around and found her product page for the Rpi device, and she does couple it with a 120GB SSD and two USB sticks for backup. https://www.open3a.de/page-open3ABox

Also as this is managed solution, I would offer encrypted offsite "cloud" storage.

Any part of the box fails? Send over a new one the next day which will automatically pull all saved data once the login/password is typed on the setup page.

I'd probably lean the other way. I'd build that so that you could say

"Any part of the box fails? Send over a new one then next day then plug one of the USB sticks in and it'll automatically pull the encrypted saved data from itonce the login/password is entered."

If people are choosing a local box instead of her hosted offering, cloud backup might be a deterrent rather than a feature. For the ultra paranoid you could even sell them a spare which they can keep on-hand to swap in and get back invoicing immediately.

Oh, nice! I've never thought about using flash for backups, that's a very nice trade-off of for form factor and cost efficiency.

Or buy two or more put them on the same subnet and let them replicate. More money!

I thin I'd prefer a cold spare to a hot spare. There's probably more change of failure happening at around the same time if a pair have been running as replicas or one as a hot spare. A 15 min invoicing downtime while you unbox and boot the cold spare and restore from the usb stick from the failed one - is probably not as big a deal as the risk of one of your replication pair going bad and possibly corrupting the other, or having the similar runtime secondary fail around the same time as the primary.

I wonder if you still need to go through expensive UL and other testing before being able to market such product? The RPi has an integrator programme, but still there are potentially large fees to pay which makes whole thing not so attractive unless you are going to wing it and hope nobody will check.

What’s the point of having a server that is “non cloud” but remotely managed? Sounds like it is a cloud server, hosted in a substandard colo

Very true, on the flip side at least someone else is footing the power bill.

It's not so much the power cost but the reliability. If the power goes out, they only have themselves to blame.

Agreed. Would love to hear more technical details. Particularly about the remote managed part, and how the user accesses it.

I've written about the technical details somewhere here in the comments. Just search for "websocket", it should be in here…

The user accesses it with a small desktop application which finds the box in the same network by itself and opens open3A.

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