forestj

Someone in IRC brought this up regarding self-hosting when I lamented that there aren't any user friendly projects to make self-hosting easier: https://syncloud.org/setup.html However it sounds like they still expect the user to configure port forwarding on the router as a pre-requisite, which is a big no-no in my opinion: https://github.com/syncloud/platform/wiki/Things-to-know-before-buying-a-device https://github.com/syncloud/platform/wiki/External-access

from https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers:

I have been self-hosting my blog (ghost), git server (gogs), and a few other small things for years: https://sequentialread.com/. I'm not using an SBC for it, rather a very old dell desktop, but I think the principle is the same. I use docker-compose to run the apps on my server. I worked as a DevOps engineer for a couple years so I am intimately familiar with docker and linux containers in general. So to me, setting up containers and what not (anything which is done inside the OS of the server) is the super duper easy part, its highly automatable, it can all be defined with code, like with ansible for example. I think there are 2 main pain points for self hosting, both of which don't really have any great solutions out there on the world wild web: Configuring your router is a pain in the butt, especially for non-technical people & may not be possible for many users. If you want to use your self-hosted services for something "mission critical" like email, you probably are going to want monitoring, observability, automated failover, etc. These things are really complex and hard to set up, there's no "ez mode" button or framework that one can use, especially not anything designed for self-hosting. I actually started a project to try to address those pain points, starting with #1. I wrote a bit about it years ago here: https://sequentialread.com/pragmatic-path-towards-non-technical-users-owning-their-own-data/ I also decided to try to coin a term to describe what I'm trying to create, a "personal datacenter", basically like a personal computer, but instead of having a screen, keyboard, and mouse, it's a web server or group of web servers that are accessible on the public internet, and one can easily run various "apps" on these servers to make a blog, email server, online store, git server, etc. I know there are already other projects out there like nextcloud, freedombox, yunohost, etc, but I don't think any of those projects really address the hard pain points of self hosting, the network routing setup & failover. I don't wanna go too much in depth with my project here, I'll probably make my own thread about it at some point. I don't quite have enough done to show it off properly yet

Hi, I was just in the armbian matrix channel asking about FLOSS SBCs, SBCs which can be booted / operated without blobs or with as few blobs as possible. I am not one of those purist Stallmanite zealots who refuse to touch anything which i deem imperfect in the freedom department. Instead I am just trying to be practical and figure out whats the best options for SBCs which respect users. SBCs whose security/integrity is verifiable and doesn't hinge on appeals to authority, like "just trust our secret sauce, it will be fine". I want to know about any projects from the past, things that are in progress, and hear experiences from folks who are interested in open source firmware, bootloaders, etc. I got the general idea from talking in the matrix channel that there are actually more FLOSS-friendly SBCs than a cursory google search might indicate, and I would like to discuss and put together a list. Goal would be that this can perhaps be published somewhere, I'm not sure where would be the appropriate place on the Armbian documentation or web site, but I can also publish it myself and try to keep it up to date as this is something I'm keenly interested in. So, without further adieu, I will start, these are the projects I know about which I'm interested in: Bootloader software projects: https://libreboot.org/ https://www.coreboot.org/ It's not an SBC, but there is this project to have an open source bootloader/firmware linux laptop based on this chrome book: Asus c201 with RK3288 https://github.com/SolidHal/PrawnOS This old open source hardware board I believe can be run with open source firmware but its quite slow and less than 1 GB RAM https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A10-OLinuXino-LIME Someone from matrix said that the ROC-RK3399-PC (http://en.t-firefly.com/product/rocrk3399pc) can be run without blobs: Please let me know about any other open source firmware/bootloader for SBC projects that you know about!!

This is a bunch of background info, scroll down to TL;DR for my question.... Hello, I am working on developing an application to make single board computers easier to use for non-technical users. You can think of it as something similar to yunohost or freedombox, but with more hand-holding involved around the hardware & network setup. I'm trying to enable people like my mother who've never seen or used a terminal/shell before to be able to set up and operate a server in their home. The general process looks something like this: user downloads my cross platform desktop application called "seedpacket" they run the app and go through a series of setup wizard screens one of the screens prompts them to insert an SD card, then the application will flash the SD card with a linux image for their SBC. seedpacket will then write additional files to the SD card, including things like the user's wifi credentials that they entered earlier on in the wizard. finally, the user will be prompted to insert the SD card into the SBC and turn it on. automated setup scripts will run on the SBC and send data to a cloud service, seedpacket will poll this cloud service and display progress information to the user. I want to support installing Armbian this way. So far I have steps 2 thru 5 working. I can flash the image to the SD card and write my custom config files to the SD card as well. I just tried testing it on my odroid XU4 and it boots, my custom sshd_config & authorized_keys files work, which is great! Next steps: I want to figure out where to put my script that communicates with the cloud service I want to automate the stuff that happens automatically on first login (/usr/lib/armbian/armbian-firstlogin) I want to automate the process of migrating the OS to a USB SATA device (/usr/sbin/nand-sata-install) I want the script that communicates with the cloud service to be able to post an update ASAP, preferably after the first boot and before it reboots to apply the partition re-sizing on the SD card. ------------------------ TL;DR --------------------------------- I just booted Armbian on my odroid XU4 and I can tell it rebooted once after the first boot, based on the /var/log/armbian-hardware-monitor.log having two boot cycles in it. However, I've been looking through https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/packages/bsp/common/usr/lib/armbian/armbian-resize-filesystem and I can't tell for the life of me where/what causes the system to reboot. Maybe I am just blind and missing something obvious? I want to understand this because I may want to ensure that some additional steps complete before it reboots. EDIT 2: Soooo it looks like I'm a fool, nothing caused it to restart, because it didn't restart... I must have rebooted it myself and forgotten about it, because I just re-flashed the SD card, did it again, and it only booted once. Lol. At any rate, I will still ask just in case: is there any situation where it will reboot after the first boot ?