Aftermarket add-on for the PEB-TIPI

[Omega-TI]

It's a good thing most people will never need to remove the SD card from their PEB-TIPI unit, because doing so is kind of a pain in the neck.  First you have to pull out that huge P-Box, open the lid, remove the card, get some tweezers or needle nose pliers and remove the card, then reverse the whole procedure to put it all back together again.  

 

After I got my portable TIPI unit, I figured it would simpler to swap the same card back and forth so I did not have to maintain two separate configurations... as long as it could be removed as easily as on the portable unit.  Well, I've been using the SD card extender for a while now and it does a great job.  Another benefit is that I did not have to map two more TIPI locations to my network as the mapping is to the individual RPi, not the SD card, so a quick swap is all it takes.

 

Oh yeah... this lets you use any full size SD cards you may have lying around as well, so you can use your newer, smaller and faster ones on other equipment.

[wierd_w]

I would still be more apt to leave the card internal, and just have the TIPI mount my NAS as an NFS volume, at an appropriate mountpoint.

 

I could then use my network to manage whatever data is there, wirelessly.

 

Say, something like this in /etc/fstab

 

Server:/path/to/export /local_mountpoint nfs <options> 0 0

 

Or, fully populated in my case:

 

192.168.0.4:/nfs/tipishared /home/tipi/tipi nfs rw,defaults,noatime 0 0

 

which would need to have all the data normally in that location copied to the NAS first, and to have that folder be empty on the SDCard.  After the mounting op being done automatically by the fstab entry, the configuration data and everything would be physically stored on the NAS, and could even be shared between physical tipi instances.

 

 

Edited August 20, 2020 by wierd_w

[Omega-TI]

That sounds kinda cool, but alas I have no dedicated NAS on my network.  If I'm using my portable TIPI there is a good chance I'm not even home, so a NAS would not be optimal for that need.  About once a month I highlight all the files on my networked P-Box TIPI and drag them to a backup folder on my PC for safe keeping in case anything goes wrong.  Simple and effective... for me at least.  At this point in time I cannot justify a fancy expensive Synology type RAID box, although a poor mans unit running a Rpi with a single drive might be in my future, who knows.  All told I don't have more than 6TB of data, but at least it's backed up.  

 

I know many of you guys here have more money, greater computer skills, and are even IT gurus and programmers.  For me the equipment I use is mainly to support my video and photography needs with a little gaming here and there.  The idea of spending that much money mainly to support a 40 year old TI-99/4A with a miniscule amount of software and data is not in the cards for me.  If I had a lot of money to burn/blow, I'd rather get a Canon EF 400 f/4 DO IS II USM lens or the more respectably priced Sigma 150-600 5-6.3 OG OS HSM lens for my camera body.

[+OLD CS1]

Anyone still using the WiFi SD cards?

[InfiniteTape]

I like this idea. I really didn't want to crack open my PEB, so I upgraded my TIPI to 2.x the hard way (in-place distro upgrade, then manually update the TIPI software). If the card were mounted externally, I would have just re-imaged it.

[+jedimatt42]

2 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Anyone still using the WiFi SD cards?

They all require FAT family partitions, which wouldn't help this once in several years problem.

[wierd_w]

*shrug*

 

Some of the "consumer appliance" sized NAS boxes are rather inexpensive. I have a mycloud EX2 Ultra, which I got for a song off ebay some years back. (I think I paid 80$.)

 

It only does raid 1, (volume mirror)-- but still.  It does the job, and when plugged into a wireless AC router, I get close to gigabit speeds wirelessly with it. It does both SMB and NFS shares, and can even make iSCSI LUNs. (though with only one gigabit interface, iSCSI is more of a joke than anything... but I digress.)

 

For the purposes of holding onto (and remotely managing in real time) the TI's software library in a more modern manner, it suffices just fine.  The only downside is that you need to have some kind of sanity check in case the network is down when you start up the TI. (The really robust solution would add a script in /etc/init.d that executes after fstab gets processed, to make sure that the NAS mounted, and if it did not, to mount some other folder as a backup at that mountpoint [probably using the -o bind option], that way it would still run as expected)

 

I used to work for NetApp, once long ago-- providing support for their FAS series high availability commercial storage products, so playing with network toys is kinda second nature to me.  What I have at home is a toy. What I gave support for was not.   However, many of the same tools apply.

 

 

One of the perks of using a NAS like that, is that you can have a virtual TI (say, classic 99) running TIFiles mode ON THE VERY SAME VOLUME that your physical TI is having presented by the TIPI. As long as you arent writing all over files behind each device's back while they still have them open, you can even have both running at the same time. (Useful if you are abusing classic99 as a compiler, and then immediately testing the generated code on the real iron using the tipi)

 

 

I mostly just use my NAS to store all the various digital detritus I have collected over the years though.