Currently, I am supporting about 160 Dell OptiPlex 3010 PCs running Squid for WCCP caching and another proprietary application to cache Windows updates and Windows applications used by our District Offices. They are running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The subscription is coming up and I am thinking about changing to CentOS because there is no price tag to get the update channels. These have been running just fine with no vendor support for over 10 years. Anyways, with the hardware coming of age too, about 5 years, I was thinking about swapping that out too. If I could get the Business Unit buy in to purchase. Today these Dell PCs have 8GB RAM, 1TB drive, etc probably more hardware than needed. I was thinking about testing out using Raspberry Pi 3 or Pine64, sure there are others I might be missing, to use for this case. They are low powered and easy to run. In the event one went bad I could cross ship a replacement cheaper than shipping a heavy PC. Few items I am uncertain of. Would any of these type of boards run Squid efficiently enough? 2GB of RAM. Are there any other boards that come with more RAM than that? Is it possible to order 160 boards and enclosures with MicroSD cards in bulk like this? I was going to get a 64 or 128 GB MicroSD card for them all for the storage. Today, space allocation varies from about 40 - 80 GB depending on Office. I haven't checked if CentOS has a ARM version but I do know openSUSE does have a 64-bit ARM version so I could use that. Just trying to think if I missed anything on why this wouldn't be a good cost-effective alternative to cache websites, WCCP traffic, and applications? Thoughts or any other information on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

I would caution against the Pine64, purely because there are 32bit/64bit issues with the boot up early on. That means it's not quite as straightforward as it seems, and your choices of OS are curtailed. At least investigate that area before plumping for one.

As for squid, surely that depends on what loading you are catering for.

One further issue I should have mentioned. Disk throughput.

With an ssd, you will get several hundred MB/S from an x86 motherboard/chipset, and cached reads/writes are even faster. The same cannot necessarily be said of usb disks, even usb-3.0.

You may be able to run a Pi3 or other of the many boards like that.

Personally I might be tempted to run a Liva X2.

I wasn't going to use any external disk. I was going to use the MicroSD card that housed the OS. I figured if I got a 64 or 128GB card that should be more than enough storage. I would need to reconfigure my squid.conf file so the cache store was smaller but then everything would be contained within the board.

LIVA's look interesting but they also come with a price tag higher than what I am looking at. Overall, I want to reduce the price footprint thus the Raspberry Pi thinking. I am hoping to find someplace to purchase about 150 - 160 with 128GB MicroSD cards and enclosed for around the price one of the LIVA's cost.

Do a speed test, I would suggest. It's rare enough to find a parallel interface of any width to an sd card, so you're stuck in serial, and then the sd card memory is a slower write cycle than volatile ram. It's ok if the site is low throughput, low traffic, low connections. I can foresee bottlenecks otherwise. I ran 'hdparm -tT' on my own sd card (Not MicroSD, the next size up) in an sd card reader and got reads of 17.03MB/S. I also tried a MicroSD in a USB-3.0 port and adapter thingy and got reads of 20.75MB/S. I would consider those speeds underwhelming for something live online, and of course writes would be slower.

What would one expect to pay for a complete Pi3 that has power supply, enclosure and SD card?

You can get the Pi, enclosure and power supply for about $67. That was what I saw at Newark last week.

Still would need a CF or other media for each machine?

Another user was posting about a different device the nanopc at similar price.


Wonder if one could get this up in linux? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-156-_-Product

First things first - is that "proprietary application" ported to ARM ?. If not, you are dead in the water.

I use a pi3 at home for router/firewall/squid - works fine for low traffic environment like my house. I too would be concerned about throughput loads - and sdcard reliability. I bought two 32 Gig class 10 to investgate the whole ARM thing - one was doa. Web forums suggest they are not as reliable as you might want in an office. Mine has been running fine 24/7 for about 8 months since I installed - just the one sdcard.

Thanks for the real world information.

If cost is driving you to consider the Pi or Pine 64, may I suggest you do what I did when maintaining Paint Mixing Machinery for some years in the 90s? I needed cheap pcs, specs weren't a huge issue. I would go in person to small computer shops and ask:

"Do you do upgrades?"
"Yes, yes," they would reply eagerly. I would cut in:
"Good, do you have any Downgrades?"

If they were slow off the mark, I would explain that this was their opportunity to get some beer money (in cash) for the working parts they had taken out of pcs they already upgraded and had under their workbench waiting for the next skip (to be dumped). I could usually get unspectacular working motherboards with some ram, video cards & hard disks for affordable & unspectacular prices. Power supplies were rarer. I would have cash, and see the hardware boot up. It was a buyer's market; plenty of small pc shops, few people needing downgrades.

Not sure how far along you are with this, but these might help.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ThePiHut-Ra...rb_top?ie=UTF8

(I've been wondering how powerful these units are compared to a normal PC, with only 1GB shared memory, they may not be very good with online browsing, which is my main usage these days.)