pi-rat Posted June 16, 2019 Share Posted June 16, 2019 Hello! I am new to Armbian, so I need a little help and advice here. Until now, I've been using a Banana Pi M1 with Bananian on it, and running NextCloud as my personal cloud server. Unfortunately, Bananian is dead, so there won't be any updated PHP version ( < 5.6), which are needed for recent NextCloud Version: NC 14 requires PHP 7, but Bananian (Debian 8.11) is stuck at PHP 5.6. Soo sad... That's why I need to switch to Armbian, and as far as I know, this project has no sword named "EOL" hovering above its head — at least not yet. ;) My questions are these: - Which version of Armbian would you recommend running NextCloud: Bionic or Streched? - Which one will run more smoothly on the Banana M1? (I am using this model because I can connect an SSD to it, which really is quite a performance boost compared to USB drives!) - Can anyone kick me to some good migration instructions, please? My idea of how to proceed is this: I want to install Armbian onto a second BPM1 and when the system is running, I want to copy NextCloud's and MariaDB's data directories from the old system onto the new one, thus making a perfect copy of the old NextCloud server, a copy that is now running on Armbian. When this is done, I want to update NextCloud to the most recent version available. Would you recognize this procedure or is there a more convenient and/or secure way of migration? Many thanks in advance for any help and clues! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Igor Posted June 16, 2019 Share Posted June 16, 2019 6 hours ago, pi-rat said: Which version of Armbian would you recommend running NextCloud Armbian provides kernel to Debian or Ubuntu user land. You should ask NextCloud creators what do they recommend but IMO Stretch will be just fine. 6 hours ago, pi-rat said: Which one will run more smoothly on the Banana M1 Interface with kernel is identical so there will be no difference. 6 hours ago, pi-rat said: Can anyone kick me to some good migration instructions, please? Start with a clean image ... Armbian is identical to Debian or Ubuntu on this level. Proceed with NextCloud recommendations for transferring things from one server to another. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pi-rat Posted June 29, 2019 Author Share Posted June 29, 2019 Thanks for your reply to my questions. If Armbian Stretch and Armbian Bionic are identical, it is simply a question of support: which version will be supported longer? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werner Posted June 29, 2019 Share Posted June 29, 2019 Ubuntu and Debian are not identical... Well, they are kind of in the point of view of armbian as they share the same kernel, same built script, U-Boot and so on...Different distributions though. Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) is a so called long term support release which comes with fives years support. EOL is 2023. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases Debian Stretch will be supported until 2022. Check https://wiki.debian.org/de/LTS You may want to wait for Debian Buster being released in about a week. Ubuntu may have one additional year of support but in your choice you should consider a few things. Ubuntu featuring newer packages in comparison to Debian. Though their origin is Debians testing branch. Also just a fraction of all available packages in Ubuntu are maintained and updated by Ubuntu themselves. Universe and multiverse repositories may or may not receive (security) updates depending on their maintainer. tl;dr imho: Go for Debian. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pi-rat Posted June 29, 2019 Author Share Posted June 29, 2019 Sorry for the misunderstanding! When I asked about the expected length of support, I was referring to Armbian. As far as I understand it by now, Armbian comes in two different flavours, derived from two different distributions: Debian Stretch and Ubuntu Bionic. I wanted to know, which Armbian flavour will be the one that will be supported longer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werner Posted June 30, 2019 Share Posted June 30, 2019 My guess is that both Debian and Ubuntu will be supported the same until the board is marked EOS. Unless one distribution decides to introduce hugh changes that break everything and is beyond repair. Unlikely scenario though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pi-rat Posted July 2, 2019 Author Share Posted July 2, 2019 Thanks again. To be honest: I haven't made up my mind yet, if I will keep the Banana Pi or if I will replace it with a more "modern" SOC. When I started to setup my cloud server, I chose the BPM because of its SATA connector. The first version of my personal server was Raspberry based, but the performance was very poor, no matter if I used the sdcard only or an attached USB memory. Then the Banana came out and I was happy, because I could connect an SSD to it. I know that the Banana's SATA connector is not a real SATA connector, it's a kind of USB to SATA converter. But still, read/write access to the SSD was much faster than accessing the USB devices on the Raspberry. But now the Raspberry 4 is out, and it provides native USB3 ports, which are much faster than the Banana's SATA connector. And (no offence meant!) I believe that the Raspberry and Raspbian will have a longer lifetime than the Banana. And more and faster memory will also make its use much more fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Igor Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 2 minutes ago, pi-rat said: I know that the Banana's SATA connector is not a real SATA connector, it's a kind of USB to SATA converter. Negative. Its real SATA and back in the cheap NAS game after this: 3 minutes ago, pi-rat said: which are much faster than the Banana's SATA connector In both cases, network will be the bottleneck. 4 minutes ago, pi-rat said: I believe that the Raspberry and Raspbian will have a longer lifetime than the Banana. Banana, which you are mentioned here, is from the days of Raspberry Pi 1 and is still usable for many cases. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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