MarkLuun

Dear Armbians I have a NanoPi Neo 3 board with 1GB of RAM running in a DC for quite a while now. Because of an SD card failure, I had to make a fresh setup with the actual Bookworm image. This image seems to be quite unstable. Device is going up and down all the time. I am unable to find the problem myself. Maybe someone can take a look and help me to fix my stability issue: Debug output: https://paste.armbian.com/sozozoyahi

I already started to donate to Armbian by Paypal subscription ;). This is a great project and should be treated this way :).

Hi Armbians :) Armbian's discontinued support of the NanoPi Neo3 board, hit me very hard. I have operated multiple of these SBCs with Armbian very stable, in different DCs for a long time. Because of the defunctional kernel under Armbian, I was forced to look around for alternatives and only came across Manjaro, DietPi and Friendlyarm published by FriendlyElec themself. Unfortunately I was not happy with Manjaro and Friendlyarm. Dietpi, on the other hand, seems to be doing quite well till now. And most importantly, it doesn't seem to have the kernel/ reboot problem that affected Armbian. But how can that be if it's based on Armbian? Can someone explain that to me?

Dear Armbians I have an Odroid C4 in use in a DC with 100 MBits synchronous network connection. As I use it as dedicated networking device, bound to the internet over ethernet connection, I would like to disable the drivers for Wifi, HDMI and Bluetooth permanently. They are not necessary in my case. What would be the safest way to do this?

Thats a good point. Tor requires 64bit for optimal encryption. So the Odroid X4U seems not that good for this. But what about the Odroid C4? I have never used a Amlogic S905X3 Quad-Core Cortex-A55 but the 2 GHz and 4GB RAM seem to make it a nice choise in my eyes…

The Odroid C4 looks like a nice choise too. Maybe it could also be worth a closer look.

I will update this old topic a little bit. The NanoPi Neo 3 still does it‘s job very well in the Datacenter. The original plastic case makes cooling a little bit difficult but the temp stays around 62-70*C. Very nice hardware for a Tor relay! So what about the Odroid X4U? Should be nice for this use case too, I think. Anything that speaks against it? Does anyone have experience in this regard?

I just wanted to add that, if someone is able to help me to fix this soon, I have the chance to test the maximum throughput this board can handle under a 1 Gigabit network connection, and so under real and counting test conditions! The connection speed is valid for the next 30 days till it falls back to 100 MBits standart. So we all would benefit from solving this issue soon

Hi Armbians I have a problem with one of my NanoPi Neo 3 boards and dropped RX packages on eth0. From multiple Neo 3`s I have running, this is the only one having this issue. But its also the only one with 1GB of RAM. All other boards have 2GB of RAM. But this should not matter I think. Output ifconfig: eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet XXXXXXXXXX netmask 255.XXXXXXX broadcast XXXXXXXXXX ether XXXXXXXXXXX txqueuelen 20000 (Ethernet) RX packets 140166777 bytes 110091299296 (102.5 GiB) RX errors 0 dropped 3686 overruns 0 frame 0 TX packets 127249076 bytes 110451144546 (102.8 GiB) TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0 device interrupt 39 lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 65536 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0 loop txqueuelen 20000 (Lokale Schleife) RX packets 96 bytes 7103 (6.9 KiB) RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0 TX packets 96 bytes 7103 (6.9 KiB) TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0 Output "ethtool -S eth0": Any secure way to fix this issue?

After having the NanoPi Neo 3 in use for some time, I can say the white case shipped by FriendlyElec is a little problematic seen from the site of cooling down the CPU. The colocation room has full AC with 15 *C room temp but under high load, the CPU temp goes up to 61-62 *C. I think something like this might be a better choise because the air flow is much higher: https://www.ebay.at/itm/333921941529 The producer of this case told me another case with the possibility to add a 40 cm fan gets addet soon. Might even be better!

The NanoPi R1 is running in the DC for 17 days now. But with one port connected (GBit WAN port) its getting ~26 MBits traffic in both directions done. A little bit disappointing as i had high hopes to see another beast like the Neo 3 in it. I will try to connect the second port and split incomming/outgoing traffic between WAN/LAN port. Maybe this gives some better results. If not, i see no reason for this one to have twice the price of the Neo 3. We will see...

Now, on day 10, after the node was started the Nanopi Neo3 reached a continous traffic of 80 Mbits. Its still doing fine and it is not overwhelmed at all! I think it could handle even more but i have some limits on the ISP site. Thanks a lot Werner for the tip. These devices are like made for this job . An update on, how the R1 will do, will follow.

Yes, it seems I will have to But this will take some time till I am ready.. What I can say for sure about the NanoPi Neo3 so far, is, that it does a good job in the datacenter. Ramping up the traffic may not be complete after 7 days, but at this point, it handles 50 MBits traffic in both directions easy. CPU temp. is with a small fan and some aluminium heatsinks+ full AC in the colo room at 42 *C. System load: 8%

I got my hands on a cheap and brand new NanoPi R1 with 1GB RAM now, that will arrive soon. Should be a good choise for handling high network throughput (50-100 MBits in both directions) as i found out. Any personal experiences on this board? Its hard to find direct user rewiews online for this one.

What about these here? - FriendlyELEC NanoPi A64 - 64bit A64 Quadcore 1GB Ram - Radxa D4_512MB_LANonly Rock Pi S 512 MB Ram They are a little low in RAM but could act as a nice middle- or guardnode. Or is there anything that speaks against high bandwith throughput with this boards? 40-50 MBits traffic passing would be a good value and cheaper HW will be hard to find.

Thanks for the warning but after running between 20 and 30 TOR nodes for about 4 years already, I have seen most problems comming up with this. But you are right in the point, not to run an exitnode from your own home network. In this case a middlenode is a good choise and make no problems at all. Exits are better placed in a DC. In Europe some good and cheap options are avaliable for this and own dedicated hardware via a SBC is a good way to go in safe environment. I found the NanoPi Neo3 to be a good choise for this use case. But it’s just ramping up the traffic now. Will take some days to have results that count.

Hi Armbians In the last years I had the pleasure to have more then 30 Cubietruck boards in my hands to work with. Condition of the boards ranged from "new and still sealed" to "working but has been running for some months 24/7 alraedy". In this time, I learned a lot about this hardware and I learned that none of them seems to be 100% like any other of them. While one board crushes immediately when the power input goes under 5V for some secounds, another board in the same condition, same CT version and production date seems not to care about this and keeps working. One of the most important points for stability is the network plug used. So what network plugs did you use with success? I am running 95% of my CT boards with this plugs. Both seem to do the job fine and do not care about being in use 24/7: https://www.amazon.de/HomeSpot-Raspberry-Ladegerät-Netzschalter-Kompatibel/dp/B078567K85/ref=sr_1_37?dchild=1&keywords=HomeSpot&qid=1612923046&sr=8-37 https://www.amazon.de/AmazonBasics-USB-Ladeadapter-Ampere-mit-Anschlüssen-Schwarz/dp/B0773J952F/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_de_DE=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&dchild=1&keywords=amazon%2Bbasics%2B5v%2B2%2C4%2Ba&qid=1612923159&sr=8-2&th=1

Nice tips, thanks a lot. But all these seem to be a bit to low in RAM for what i need them. Sad they do not have higher RAM versions then the 512 MB or 1 GB avaliable.

I have to say that, after I have done the setup, I am really impressed by the performance of this little beast . Exited to see how it will do its job in the datacenter.

Good to hear as I bought one already ;D. But this traffic should be easy to do with this board, right!?

But how do I enable the last resorts of the CT and tune the network throughput to the max.? Is there a way???

So the NanoPi R4S is nice but I am sure there are more options. Any other recommendet boards to run a TOR relay with +50 MBit/s on? The RAM requirement stays 1,5 GB minimum and one interface for ethernet is fine. What about this one: NanoPi Neo 3- 2 GB RAM https://www.antratek.de/nanopi-neo3-2gb Sould be a nice one too :). Or is there anything that speaks against it?

One interface is enough for my needs. But this board looks like a nice choise and the price is fine too! Should be given a chance ;).

After setting the parameter „vm.swappiness=0“ and deleting any not absolutely necessary UFW parameter (also the IPv6 ones) I set the network connection parameters again in „armbian-config“. Now the traffic, passing my relays, seems to go back to a normal value again. So I would say this problem is solved! Thanks a lot!