Raspberry Pi Education server

Development
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As some of you may know I’m homeschooling my eldest and as i have a tech background and have been a linux enthusiast for some time and thought it would be great to have a low cost or no cost educational infrastructure for home schooling, small community groups and schools with no funding especially in the case of remote learning.

Nethserver would be a great choice for the server base not because its the best server but because of this community and the efforts made to integrate software that would be useful not just because it fits a certain use case and is open to changing software for a better one or at-least being able to try to have both.

I then thought imagine if it can be run on a Raspberry Pi for a low cost, low power requirement setup.

I thought I’d make a topic to share some ideas, the first thing id like to share is i came across this.

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My thoughts on what would be needed would include but not limited to ( please add any that i may have missed.)

  • Web proxy/Filter

  • SSO

  • Savaprint

  • Active Directory

  • Moodle

  • Mobile Device Management

  • Nextcloud

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@Shane_Treweek

Hi

Take a peek at this case, includes SSD adapter, etc.
German site, specs are in english… :slight_smile:

Got one, quite pleased, will get a second…

My 2 cents
Andy

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i like that the main thing about the one i shared above was the ups addon

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I agree–I’m not sure I’d use that for a Neth server, but it might make a nice upgrade for my mini CA. Looks like a well thought-out system, and the RTC would be a nice addition as well. Looks like I need to get a laser cutter…

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this is one interesting topic, and i would be happy to bring onboard my experience working with education systems and platform for that matter,

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I think we’re getting a pretty good solution worked out for that, and it sounds like it should run on the Pi.

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Ok I’ve ordered my first raspberry pi it’s a standard v 4 model b 8g I went with this case to start https://core-electronics.com.au/argon-one-m-2-case.html for ease and capacity of ssd

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@Shane_Treweek

I’m sure you’ve seen this:

Next Weekend’s project for me… :slight_smile:

My 2 cents
Andy

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BTW nextcloud is available for arm, not in the software-center (jet:) still looking for a co-maintainer as i’m not a nextcloud user)
yum install nethserver-nextcloud should do the trick.

I’m curios how far you can push the RPI4, you are suggesting quite a workload… :thinking:

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I am … but i am going to try and see what the rpi4 can do and stress test it, keeping in mind that if need be (or even as an eventual feature) the infrastructure could be run over more than 1 unit but would still be very cost effective.

Think of the power savings in terms of both actual running costs and cooling i see many areas it could be useful

Example lets say you have a school where they limit the amount of students to 10 per class and due to lockdowns with covid they need remote learning infrastructure for 2 classes but as many commercial solutions have a 500 user minimum per month or even having a backup that can be implemented quickly for a school who has the infrastructure but a fire destroys the server rooms.

Another reason i thought it would be good is being low powered it could be run of battery and solar i maybey expecting to much but dont know unless you try

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@Shane_Treweek

A lot of people run solar / battery powered Raspberries… I know - for example - of a Bee-Keeper, who has one on each colony, reporting basics via LoRa (Longrange Radio for IoT), powered by sun / batteries. He has 4 colonies in the woods. At home he has the LoRa “Gateway” (Connector between LoRa / TCP/IP / Internet.

See here (Power) for some idea what the market provides:
(From normal power, solar cells, battery regulators & batteries)…

My 2 cents
Andy

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Ive just received my rpi4 im impressed so far i got a case i thought was bigger (at least what i pictures in my head)

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ok im trying to get lemon ldap working obviously getting lasso is the problem ive managed to cobble together most of the dependencies to build from source but im struggling with the followng errors which i cant find dependancies

configure: error: Package requirements (glib-2.0 >= 2.17.0 gobject-2.0 >= 2.17.0 libxml-2.0 xmlsec1 >= 1.2.6 xmlsec1-openssl >= 1.2.6 openssl) were not met:

No package 'xmlsec1-openssl' found
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Hi @Shane_Treweek for lasso: this is my development repo > BE WARNED, not all packages are tested!!

https://vps01.havak.nl/nethserver/7/devel/

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/Mark_Devel.repo << EOF
#
# Mark's devel YUM repositories configuration
#

[mark_devel]
name=Mark's Development Repository
baseurl=https://vps01.havak.nl/nethserver/7/devel/armhfp/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=0
EOF

then yum --enablerepo=mark_devel install ..... should do the trick

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thanks

Ive gotten to the stage of the server showing

lem
lem894×164 16.2 KB

how would i go about installing the nethserver-lemonldap-ng pakage for configuration

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You should be able to install it from my repo just like you do on x64. It’s a .noarch RPM.

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yum install https://repo.familybrown.org/nethserver/7/noarch/nethserver-danb35-1.1.0-1.ns7.noarch.rpm
Loaded plugins: changelog, fastestmirror, nethserver_events
nethserver-danb35-1.1.0-1.ns7.noarch.rpm | 55 kB 00:00
Examining /var/tmp/yum-root-lMkBGK/nethserver-danb35-1.1.0-1.ns7.noarch.rpm: nethserver-danb35-1.1.0-1.ns7.noarch
/var/tmp/yum-root-lMkBGK/nethserver-danb35-1.1.0-1.ns7.noarch.rpm: does not update installed package.
Error: Nothing to do

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yum install nethserver-lemonldap-ng --enablerepo=lemonldap-ng,lemonldap-ng-extras

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i just realized what i did i installed lemon lemonldap-ng first il have to go over what i installed as its still giving me the error installing the repo but yum install nethserver-lemonldap-ng --enablerepo=lemonldap-ng,lemonldap-ng-extras reports No package nethserver-lemonldap-ng available