Key Lime Pi | Hacker News Reader

Key Lime Pi

keylimepi.net

54 pointsmarkmassie28 comments

I work developing for the Pi and assuming that any of the SD cards would survive in a Pi environment is just a terrible idea. They get corrupted extremely frequently, both in hardware and filesystem level. Hardware level is because most brands just don't use chips good enough to handle the IO of a "desktop" OS, even if it's slow like the Pi. Software level is because the Pi is highly unstable hardware and freezes frequently, plus the tiny micro USB port for powering gets unplugged surprisingly often. Random poweroffs and reboots just asks for corruption on Linux filesystems.

You say you develop for the RPi, can I ask you what kind of development do you do and if you have any numbers to back up your claims?

I have deployed 3 RPis as digital signage systems. They work flawlessly for over a year now. I use another one as a home server for DNSmasq/VPN/etc. No issue and has more than 30 days uptime.

I share your views on SDCards but I don't consider the RPi 'unstable' by any means, although the SD cards get easily corrupted.

I had a 'bifferboard' (extremely small board) and an eBox2230. I know what unstable looks like, and the RPi is the most stable mini-PC at that I've seen so far.

The workloads you describe don't involve very much disk writing. The workload of a BTC wallet involves a lot of disk writing.

I used a rPi for a project that involved a ton of writing and it died every few days.

> I have deployed 3 RPis as digital signage systems. They work flawlessly for over a year now.

I've got about 15 out for 8 months running OpenELEC. No problems so far.

I am now using the SD Card only for booting the system and run everything of a USB flash drive following this [1] HOWTO. Since I rarely reboot my Pi, the SD card barely gets used.

I never had the SD card corruption issues before, but I moved to this option just in case. I don't see the instability issues you talk about either but we're probably giving the Pi different uses...

[1]- http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=44177

Are there any standard RPi images which mount the majority/entirety of the system read-only? Overlay schemes are standard on many platforms like routers.

I'd be interested in this too.

Used to have a lot of trouble with my RPi getting corrupted (fixed with a new power supply). And rather than spend any time trying to make everything read-only in software I figured I'd just use the "lock" switch on the sd card. That was when I discovered that the lock didn't actually do anything.

I saw this a few days ago, I have not done it myself, but here's the link: http://www.zdnet.com/raspberry-pi-extending-the-life-of-the-...

I can't support your experience either. I have about 9 Pi in the field for 1-2 years, as well as some sheevaplugs. they rarely freeze and the sds hold their belongings together in general.

I will say that I've had similar experiences. I wouldn't have a pi that does a large amount of reading/writing for a mission critical task. I have one pi, that I'm not sure if it's a hardware issue or what, but I've got to the point of just restarting it every 6 hours, if I don't, it hard freezes.

I've also already ruined one (admittedly, cheaper no name brand) SD card on another raspberry pi. That one went after 2 weeks of hard usage. I now have an ever growing collection of SD cards (4 gig cards are too small for more than basic uses of the raspberry, even 8 gigs can be a bit limiting)

That said, the raspi's are fun, but I wouldn't trust the SD cards on them with something like this.

So, essentially this site is just reselling Raspberry Pi's with a few pieces of software source code pre-downloaded to the SD card? I'm really not seeing the value add here.

They're selling them for bitcoin?

Maybe they have created amazing docs?

I'm not sure why this got downvoted. They are charging 0.03BTC (which Google tells me is USD 17) for a 8GB SDHC card with software preinstalled. This seems pretty steep for something that anyone can setup in a couple of minutes easily. Heck, someone can even distribute the exact same thing in the form of an ISO image for free.

I think you are underestimating the value a person places on the time to put these pieces together. If you are a student, $20 is a big premium to pay to order a PI, an SD card and then downlaod some software to the SD card and install it.

I have a couple raspberry PIs I have used for various applications. I decided to put together an arcade emulator as a gift to my son. I know how to make this. But if someone sold a PI arcade emulator with the card installed I would pay $60-70. With a controller, a $100.

I had do look twice when I saw the prices: 16 BTC seems pretty steep. The small leading dot is easy to miss.

Maybe use a leading zero or millibit or bits or whatever is trending right now.

"Setting up the Key Lime Pi is a breeze! Just insert the provided SD card, hook up your keyboard and plug the device into your monitor. Then follow the detailed instructions that are included with your device. The instructions can also be found here!"

Hardly "a breeze" for anyone with a laptop.

Excellent. "Offline" equals "safer".

Have you considered a detailed writeup on the risk profile someone would have with and without Key Lime Pi, considering things like hardware failure, theft, loss, user error, general or specialized malware infecting that SD card stuxnet style, backdoors and weaknesses in the various hardware and software parts etc.?

My rough writeup:

Every single listed weakness also applies to a device that is online. An offline device has a lower attack surface.

Very cool.

From a pure website UX perspective, I'd recommend making it more obvious what the differences are between each price tier. Took me a moment to realize what the difference between Complete and Complete Plus were. This will be even more confusing if the end user doesn't know about Raspberry Pi's and Rev B vs Rev B+

These SDHC cards give me the creeps when I have to store sensitive data. I wouldn't sleep at night if my BTC wallet was sitting in one of those.

True, SD cards suck. However, they use Electrum as the wallet system, which makes you back up the wallet seed, which is a few words you can write down.

Oh that's cool, I missed that part.

Well, you could distribute your encrypted wallet as widely as you want, without worrying about theft or loss (if you have a good passphrase and spread the wallet to enough locations), before you start receiving bitcoins to it.

The point of using the Pi is that you can make sure the decrypted wallet data only ever exists for a short time in RAM on hardware that is very likely non-malicious and that never has and never will connect to the Internet. If I had a significant amount of bitcoins sitting in an address that was generated by my laptop that I've been using regularly for the last four years, then I wouldn't sleep at night.

Note that if you're generating wallets/private keys on the "Key Lime Pi" you also need to trust the random number generators aren't backdoored.

Yep, they should make it CLEAR that the SD card is one crappy and unreliable storage to use and backups must be made.

What's the part that makes it more secure? Where are those details.

So that name didn't go waste it seems!

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