Taking my Raspberry Pi Supercomputer off-grid

Hosting my website on a cluster of Raspberry Pis completely disconnected from the power grid and wired Internet turned out to be a daunting task. But I got it working! This video explains how.

#RaspberryPi #TuringPi2 #Sponsored

Guides mentioned in the video:

And the entire project's automation and documentation is located here:

Products mentioned in the video (some links are affiliate links):

- EcoFlow

Finally, here are a few videos related to this video:

Contents:

00:00 - Server on a farm!
01:25 - Off-grid power
02:48 - Internet access
04:51 - Networking issues
07:33 - Kubernetes (K3s) and ZFS
09:35 - Physical protection
10:13 - Overcoming CG-NAT
13:35 - It works, but who cares?
15:36 - I learned a lot, but not farming

[JeffGeerling]

All good things must come to an end—the site was handling a spike in traffic from HN quite well, but then someone pointed a DDoS cannon at it, and it's been blasted by over 40 Mbps of continuous traffic (all POST requests so it bypasses cache) for over an hour now.

Now that I put Cloudflare in front, I am seeing over 6 million botnet POST requests per hour (in addition to some other traffic I haven't quite filtered). Ah well. At least it's back up and running!

Thanks again to Ecoflow and Haarmann Farms!

[victormorrow]

I salute your bravery. Someone has to ask "Why not?" and now we are all smarter as a result; thank you.

[andrewknowles]

I had to do something similar with my pi cluster!

I'm behind a carrier grade NAT, and my entire apartment building shares one public IP. I used a reverse SSH tunnel from a GCP instance with a public IP :)

[bdot]

I've often schemed how I would do this very thing. CGNAT was always the hurdle to overcome so I'm pleased that you also came to the conclusion of ssh port binding.

[JeffGeerling]

Thanks again to EcoFlow for sponsoring the video, and to Haarmann Farms for having me out there. Which cow's your favorite?

[jeremiefaucher-goulet]

I remember a few years ago, I was visiting Vodafone HQ and saw a bunch of big metallic suitcases, I was told these were portable base stations on standby, ready to be deployed anywhere in the world where there would be a disaster.
Designed to act as relay cellular base station to provide emergency communication, beamed from satellites in orbit acting as the backend infrastructure. I thought that was pretty cool.

[ganon]

I think it's my favourite video ever posted in your channel.
It gathers all the stuff you are doing (and that I like to see) hardware, kubernetes (k3s), ansible, zfs, network, explore the things ! :D
Thank you very much for sharing your content with so much passion and details.

[shariarrahman]

Your dedication to open source everything and to allow future coders to come in and see how you did things is beyond exemplary

[MarkHadley]

I would like to see more of these with dramatic disaster preparedness / harsh weather theme. And the sponsor Ecoflow is very apropos.

[charlieglennevansjr]

Your comments at the end of the video about communications resilience is exactly the sort of thing my startup is trying to tackle using IoT devices. I think it's awesome that folks are thinking about that and coming up with neat solutions!

[the_beefy]

@jeff you might consider using stunnel to do point-to-point TCP tunneling. SSH can be a bit finicky for long-running tunnels. I know that's why you're using autossh, but you might get a better experience using a purpose-built solution rather than a "band-aid" one. Another good option is an overlay network like ZeroTier, which can be configured for L2 bridging or L3 routing configurations :)

[MartinPHellwig]

It's about time that Green Shirt Jeff made an appearance! Looking forward for the next project, a Pi based cow position system with LoRa comms so the farmer always knows where the cows are and how much exercise they had :-)

[emirgoodman]

This is actually the first time I have ever seen a Delta Max power a server. Enjoyed the video.

[AdrianBoyko]

I’m really disappointed that the cluster wasn’t powered by methane sourced from the cows

[MattSnow]

This is by far one of your best videos. Thanks for doing this and creating inspiration to other like minded folks.

[barryman]

The farm ending part was pretty wholesome.

[johnrperry]

This is absolutely insane. So impressed

[TurboPotato]

I really liked the outdoor shots of you just talking about your setup. Do more of those! You explain things so cleanly. Edit: man I would love to see your take on disaster communications using LoRa and non line-of-sight communications.

Try doing all of this in the mountains and almost all of the regular methods break down. No cell service, no towers, no power.

[MegaManNeo]

This is the stuff I love to see.
Crazy experiments and scenarios I would have never think off.

[NormanBaatz]

I never would’ve thought I would ever be watching a video with this title 😊 Good stuff, Jeff!