Nethserver on Raspberry Pi (3b+ OR 4b)

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Hello Community,

I have a question regarding the Raspberry Pi and Nethserver.

I am considering which Raspberry Pi to buy to run the following software with Nethserver:

-PiHole
-Squid Proxy
-Webserver (PHP website on local network)
-MySQL database

  • Lets encrypt

Can these requirements also be met with a Raspberry Pi 3b+ (1GB RAM)?

Who can give me information on this?

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@wmcig

Hello

And welcome to the NethServer Community!

A Raspberry PI 3B+ will run the software list you have above.
Or better said: it may not run, but crawl. I’d get a RPi 4B, either with 4 or 8 GB RAM…

The ARM Architecture is not (yet?) officially supported, nevertheless, it works. And our @arm_team will provide help!

My 2 cents
Andy

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Hi @wmcig, i don’t know your car knowledge and experience.
But…

image
image940Ă—627 221 KB

Did you ever considered to load this lovely BMW Isetta with 2 90kgs dudes, luggages, 2 beer kegs and a Class A amplifier?
If this happens, maybe the tiny 250cc engine won’t tell you “i’m fine, thanks”.

As stated by @Andy_Wismer 1GB of ram could be enough for piHole and squid, but when it comes to manage webservers and db servers, this lead to gamechange. Moreover: storage of Rasperry is usually made by SDCards.
Which improved a lot during these years, but it’s still “slower” and erratic as behaviour when you stack enough disk access with ram consumption and… swap.

Pi boards are really wonderful, but if you are going to build “services” above those, IMVHO load calculation should be done a little better.

You would like to have one device? Consider an x64, capable to 16gb of ram and using mSATA or even NVMe flash drives, faster and more networking interface (this come handy during backups). It has not to be the latest one on the market, according to CPU computational power available you can still look for 5 years or older device.
You want to use Pi? IMVHO the load split should among two boards, both Pi4 at least for not having the USB bus costrain on ethernet connection, if i recall correctly (WiFi is on a separate bus, but don’t use WiFi for providing services). 2GB Ram board should run piHole and Squid just fine, 4gb or more board could run nicely enough a site with MySQL instance.

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@pike

As per this, our user fausp actually installed an ARM based Proxmox on a 8 GB RPI, and installed Nethserver (Arm) and an OPNsense (ARM) on it!

Quite cool. But as said, the performance could be better, but still VERY interesting.
Using a USB connected SSD gives a lot better performance!

I might test this out the next weekend, I have an 8 GB RPI & a 120 GB mSATA SSD (inkl. Adapter) not yet used lying around…

My 2 cents
Andy

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Have not much to add to the excellent pointers @pike and @Andy_Wismer ,

Here links to get you going with NS on a RPI:

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thanks my issue has been fixed.

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thanks for the awesome information.

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i’ve also got among others all the software running except for pihole (i’ve had it running natively on a seperate rpi4 i use for development but i know it would run fine on a rpi4b 2g model but obviously would run fine using docker on the same machine) running on a rpi4b 8g it works flawlessly

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as for performance my case is an argon40 m.2 which has a builtin caddy for a m.2 sata ssd it also has UASP support so theres no throttling in hdd speed