Re:Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?
by heelix on Saturday January 19, 2019 @11:22AM
(#18947718)
I'm a pilot - the bug masher kind flying general aviation. I use a pi with a couple USB digital radios and wifi to read adsb weather and other aircraft locations when flying, adding it to the moving maps on a tablet. The stratux project (http://stratux.me) started off as a bit of interesting hacking on reddit, and really took off into a mature bit of software/hardware. This does almost everything the $800+ stratus does for pennies on the dollar.
Re:Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?
by brutus1213 on Saturday January 19, 2019 @08:10AM
(#18946862)
Did you use some opensource IDS software or just your own scripts? Stuff like nmap, snort? I've been wanting to do this for a while .. just tracking comms statistics from various devices so I can see what phones home.
Re:Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?
by jamieweb on Saturday January 19, 2019 @08:44AM
(#18946995)
No it's a bit more primitive than that. :)
For basic IDS, it's a Python program I wrote a few years ago which does a recursive wget over my entire website, then generates SHA256 hashes of each page. Then it compares the hashes against the previous scan, and emails me if there are any changes. For very dynamic websites this doesn't work very well - luckily my site is almost 100% static so I can just whitelist the few allowed changes to prevent false-positive alerts.
I also monitor my DNS and WHOIS for changes, so that if my domain or DNS is hijacked, then I hopefully will know about it more quickly.
Re:Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?
by pvas on Saturday January 19, 2019 @07:02AM
(#18946577)
Pi 2B user here, have been utilizing it to download stuff periodically and push it to my telegram chennels.
I also use it as a pi-hole so as to block ads at the router level.
Also as a ftp server which hosts my files that I share within my home.
I believe there are even better ways to utilize this mini powerhouse, as the tasks I use it for are pretty light.
Re:Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?
by ioddly on Saturday January 19, 2019 @02:03PM
(#18948572)
I'm currently building a small reminder and timer device with time tracking functionality. Touchscreen, maybe battery powered for a bit if possible (it'll probably be plugged in most of the time but it would be nice to move it around the house).
I'm sure there are phone apps that do this, but I hate my phone and I want to integrate it with one of my web applications to some extent.
It's been fun playing with and hits the sweet spot between convenience and price. A nice break from web development.
Re:Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?
by timonoko on Saturday January 19, 2019 @06:30AM
(#18946481)
When first Raspberry Pi came out 2012, I had a cheapo phone with no USB host capability. Found out however that Raspberry makes phone USB tethering connection automatically. And then if you enable FTPD and in TELNETD in Raspberry you can access it from the phone quite transparently. As an example I could now move videos and photos from the phone to USB hard disk while in the wilderness. Or use TV-dongle in Raspberry and stream it to the phone.
Re:Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?
by stevefan1999 on Saturday January 19, 2019 @08:07AM
(#18946849)
Used to run it with Pi-Hole, but ultimately failed and I have to resolute to use my homelab. I was facing egregious segfaults and kernel panics due to the SD card controller, in high mysterious, cannot respond to IO requests. This also happened to my Rock64.
Re:Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far?
by timonoko on Saturday January 19, 2019 @08:43AM
(#18946991)
SD-card is not suitable for hard disk replacement. They always fail after month or two. In newer rasberries you can boot from directly from the USB-disk.
In older Rasberries you need to boot from SD, because USB is not recognized as boot device but soon thereafter you chroot to USB-disk.
When the Pi Zero came out I bought 4 of them and put them together into a 5-node grid computer, which to this day I use to run Einstein@Home.
You can see live statistics here: https://www.jamieweb.net/projects/computing-stats/
And a video of it here: https://twitter.com/jamieweb/status/1062048785352871936
For basic IDS, it's a Python program I wrote a few years ago which does a recursive wget over my entire website, then generates SHA256 hashes of each page. Then it compares the hashes against the previous scan, and emails me if there are any changes. For very dynamic websites this doesn't work very well - luckily my site is almost 100% static so I can just whitelist the few allowed changes to prevent false-positive alerts.
I also monitor my DNS and WHOIS for changes, so that if my domain or DNS is hijacked, then I hopefully will know about it more quickly.
I believe there are even better ways to utilize this mini powerhouse, as the tasks I use it for are pretty light.
I'm sure there are phone apps that do this, but I hate my phone and I want to integrate it with one of my web applications to some extent.
It's been fun playing with and hits the sweet spot between convenience and price. A nice break from web development.
I can sync files, contacts, todos and calendars across all my devices.
[1] https://nextcloud.com
In older Rasberries you need to boot from SD, because USB is not recognized as boot device but soon thereafter you chroot to USB-disk.
Or it has to do with the experience of the user?
Did you've Powerbackup? How did it corrupt your card?
btw: is there a alternative that “just works”?