Nethserver on Raspberry Pi

,

@arm_team would you like to spend some time with that?

yes, i’m following it but from what i know, actually only very nice and very expensive enterprise-class ARMv8 board are fully supported.
ordroid-c2 and pine64 are community supported at the moment, but i have only a rpi3 maybe it’s time tu buy an ordroid…

more info:
https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch/AArch64

and for rpi3:

no upgrade path at the moment… while @mark_nl is busy, i’m testing ns7 final on rpi…

if someone what to help me, are really welcome :slight_smile:
is only a test, probably not so stable so, be careful

create the sd with centos 7-1611 as per wiki
http://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=ns_raspi2

then set your keyboard, ie:
localectl set-keymap de

and expand root partition:
/usr/local/bin/rootfs-expand

update:
yum clean all
yum update -y

install ns7
yum localinstall http://mirror.framassa.org/nethserver7-arm/nethserver-release-7arm.rpm
nethserver-install

please report back, and please have patience, i really am short on time :frowning:
tested only on rpi2 (i’ve left in the repo the aarch64 files but i didn’t have hardware to test)
tnx

3 Likes

Yes this is just perfect, I’ll try it in the next few days on my RPi 3.
I tried OpenMediaVault with OwnCloud and a nextcloud ubuntu image from here but bot were lacking in speed an stability.
If this works well it could be the solution to my problem (many mobile users taking photos, needing backup)

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Thanks man for your time, hope that someone else will help you @arm_team @Tom @EddieA @islipfd19

I am also interested in using Nethserver with a Arm based SoC (a Banana / Lamobo BPi-R1) but do to other commitments, I am going have to put this project on the back burner for a while.

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Unfortunately I do not have any spare RPi’s available.

Sounds great let us know how your tests go

new wiki page, for Nethserver 7 on Raspberry/Arm
please report back, tnx

http://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=ns7_rasp

6 Likes

Yes, great work, thanks. Came in handy today :slight_smile:
Did a reinstall from scratch on my RPi3, flashed the image and resized the partitions on the SD with computer and copied my tweaked board settings config.txt (and remove swap partition and fstab entry while I was at it).
Boot up on the RPi, login and update … failed to get some firmware packages (userland’s fault?). Manually downloaded and localinstall-ed affected packages and update went through.
Installed nextcloud and webserver from the servermanager. I’ll have to connect some disks and shares and remount them in proper places, but thats for my next adventure :innocent:
Also the dashboard patch is great

3 Likes

Nice job, works quite well from what I’m seeing. This is going to be in a demo for some Electronic Fairs and other local events in which we will show RPis and other platforms (I have a Pine64 and also some Onion Omegas).

Unfortunately 1611 image for arm7l lacks firmware for the Broadcom Wireless interface (shame). I found someone that managed to find all the needed files and put together a script, so:

curl -sSL https://gist.githubusercontent.com/rhwood/9d4bd315bf6a183c057c156743646d48/raw/65e28a279d753b86e8e9e6ffaf4d8337eb16c3e3/rpi3-wireless-drivers.sh | bash

So this has to be done before the mini-wireless howto put up from @mark_nl and my additional information on auto-starting wpa_supplicant. Run the script, reboot, then go on with the mini-howto. Add my commands, then enjoy your wireless interface going up on boot :wink:

3 Likes

Hallo,

today I checked my raspi 3’s ram in Nethserver Dashboard:

there are only 924 MB of Ram shown. How can I assign more RAM of the 2GB for system under Nethserver?

[EDIT]
Okay I was a little bit confused, the RPI3 has only 1 GB of RAM. I confused the technical spec’s of RPI with my Jolla C …
[/EDIT]

Then I have the problem that the RAM will be full after 2 days and the pi hangs.

Has somebody else this problem too?

How can I solve that problem? By increasing the swap only or are there other possibilities?

with warm regards from Leipzig

Denis

@arm_team @syntaxerrormmm @indra @medworthy could you help Denis? I would appreciate it

Hallo,

I wrote a script for crontab to clear the memory cache:

!/bin/bash sync; sysctl vm.drop_caches=1

I run this script every 5 minutes and until now it seems to fix the problem. The raspi does not swaping so often anymore.

1 Like

I didn’t leave it up for so long, so I cannot say it is behaving the same.
I can see is that after 2 hours up the RAM is nearly filled (924 MB used, 11 free); it can be OK (unused RAM is wasted money), unless it really hangs.

Last week it was up and running for about 6-7 hours with no issues.

I will let you know; during the weekend it is going to be up for a lot more hours.

My understanding of the RPI3 is that it contains 1GB of RAM and that the memory can not be upgraded / added to (ref: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=114326 )

After analysing the partitions that CentOS creates during the installation process / writing the image to a SD card, I noticed that the CentOS image creates a swap partition that is only 512M in size.

I am now wondering if, increasing the size of the swap partition (using either SUSE Yast partitioning tools, Gparted or some other partition tool that supports both Linux based file system formats and that can resize these partitions) to 2.5 GB (ie. increasing the swap partition to be no larger then 1.5 times the size of the actual physical RAM) and then increasing the ‘swappiness’ be changing vm.swappiness variable within /etc/sysctl.conf could resolve the memory limitations of the RPI3.

Obviously, using the above method would slow down read/write access to the RAM (as the RPI3 is now using a SD medium to act as virtual memory, which is slower then actual physical RAM), but theoretically, this should give the RPI3 an increase the RAM of up to an extra 2.5GB (resulting in 3.5GB of accessible RAM).

On a side note, does anybody know if there is a ARM branch of CentOS’s EPEL repository (as far as I can deduce, EPEL is only available for x86 / x86-64 architectures)?

Quote from the Centos Wiki:

there is no official EPEL repository for armfhp. But because lot of users were asking for this, we decided to use the centos armhfp builders to (re)build Source packages from EPEL 7 (and try to track those automatically) when they’re idle. Please note that it’s just an automatic rebuild without any QA/test, and also resulting pkgs aren’t signed either.

2 Likes

yes @dnutan is right
you can find the epel repo here (not so-official not fully tested):
https://armv7.dev.centos.org/repodir/epel-pass-1/

at the moment only the epel packages we need are in our ns7arm repo, instead of using directly the repo. This is how @mark_nl setup the repo and i have maintained this config. This give us a better control of what we have in repo (and for me to better understand what we really use/need). If you find some useful package let me know and i will add to the ns7arm repo

the situation is quite different for aarch64 where it seems to be an official repo:
https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/aarch64/

same tructure also for ns7arm on aarch64, please remember that while i’ve left in the repo the aarch64 files, probably thy aren’t updated as for armhfp.
sorry, i didn’t have hardware to test aarch64, i will order something compatible this week so i can test it

1 Like

i’ve my rpi3 working for weeks, but not heavily stressed, only simple bridged AP. Which service/module do you have installed? only wifi and proxy?