FilePro on Raspberry PI?

[Bill Campbell]

See below.

On Sun, Jun 13, 2021, Bill Campbell via Filepro-list wrote:
>On Sun, Jun 13, 2021, Brian K. White via Filepro-list wrote:
>>On 6/13/21 4:57 PM, Bill Campbell via Filepro-list wrote:
>>> Is FilePro available for the Raspberry PI?
>>> 
>>> Considering that I can put together a system with an 8gb
>>> Raspberry PI 4B, Argon One M.2, 1TB internal SATA SSD, and PoE
>>> splitter for less than $300.00, this looks like a viable
>>> replacement for an existing Linux box.  The Argon case doesn't
>>> need any internal fan, so no moving parts.
>>> 
>>> This box would handle e-mail, OpenVPN, and pretty much everthing
>>> their current Linux system does.
>>> 
>>> Bill
>>
>>CPU & ram isn't the problem, the storage is. SD cards are not reliable enough
>>even if you were ok with the speed.
>>There are a few enclosures and adapter boards that provide a real pcie slot,
>>which you can attach a real ssd to, and I think now finally they have
>>firmware updates that allow you to boot from that ssd.
>
>I have an internal 1TB SATA drive in the Argon One M.2 case, and
>am trying to figure out how to get it to boot from that without
>the microSD card installed.

I have been working on this system for a while now, and have it
booting off the internal SSD drive with no microSD card
installed.  It seems that the recent versions of the Raspberry Pi
tool to create bootable uSDs now has an option to boot from the
first available device so that will be a bit easier than when I
got this done.

I have built most of the software we use on all of our systems
here and at our client sites.  There were a few "interesting"
issues with backwards compatibility issues, most notably that
openssh, postfix, and several other packages now want
openssl-1.1.?, and I haven't been willing to update on working
systems that depend on openssl-1.0?.  I really wish that the open
source folks paid more attention to backwards compatibility.

Things got much more critical on Friday the 13 when I was in
Maryland for my sister's 55th Anniversary.  We had a power
failure here in Washington, and my new 16KW generator didn't work
properly resulting in a long enough outage to bring everything
down.  When I got back home on Monday, I found that my primary
server wouldn't reboot.  I have a full backup on my Synology NAS
so that makes recovery possible, but tedious.

I've been in the process of building a replacement server on the
8GB Raspberry Pi 4 with 1TB internal SSD, and have most things
working now including our master djbdns DNS server, postgresql,
postfix email, web services, and a few hundred miscellanious
utilities that I've written over the last 35 years or so.

When I get to a stopping point, I plan to build a basic system on
a similar RPi in the Argon case, internal SSD, etc., and the
essential software for Internet connection, all my security
stuff including firewalling and intrusion detection, email,
local DNS with DHCPd, postgresql, samba for Windows file sharing,
OpenVPN, and pretty much everything except FilePro.  Once that's
done, I should be able to clone systems.

I have one client running FilePro that's getting pretty long in
the tooth.  I would like to build a new Intel based system for
the FilePro application, possibly running VMware or other VM
software so the FilePro part could be run in a VM basically
independent of the underlying OS.  This hardware was first
installed in November 2007, and is running CentOS 5 with FilePro
5.0something.  The FilePro application was most recently modified
by K. Rodgers Hemer, the last in a series of developers.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www2.celestial.com/ 6641 E. Mercer Way
Mobile:         (206) 947-5591  PO Box 820
                                Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820

The problem with socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of
other peoples' money. -- Margaret Thatcher