Raspberry Pi status update

[rvagg]

Just an informative post, but good news I think.

I spent the last few days doing a minor revamp of the Pi infrastructure:

1. After success with reprovisioning one of the Pi 3's with the latest RaspiOS (still based on Buster so it should be the same as what the others have, except the others have been progressively upgraded through their original version of Raspbian Buster prior to the rebrand to RaspiOS), I went ahead and just did the other 10. See Pi3 troubles #2365 for discussion on the problems keeping them alive and the success with the single Pi. So far, so good, no offlines in the couple of days they've been active, which is better than before.
2. I've completely disconnected the Pi 1 B+'s, they're no longer used in CI, we don't release or test armv6 officially (we do in unofficial-builds, but it's not tested) so the've been sitting idle for a few months. In the process of updating the 3's, I scrapped 7 of their SD cards because they looked dodgy on the particular reader I was using (I might need to test with another reader, because that's a surprising number of dodgy SD cards!) and I scavenged replacement from the disconnected 1's. I have another 6 or 7 SD cards I could potentially reuse as the existing ones fail, so that's good news since I think we've finally run out of budget from the original donations that have funded all of this.
3. I consolidated their networking and physical placement—including 3D printing little mini racks for them, which is really nice and more manageable than the cases they were in.

While I've done an update on the 2's, I haven't done a reprovision so they're still running the same Raspbian base that the 3's were, we just don't have any trouble with them staying alive. I might get around to that some time but it doesn't seem urgent.

Also TODO at some point is introducing newer containers on each of them to test, we're currently still running jessie and stretch and don't even have a buster container to test on, so we're quite outdated and need to get more recent OS in the mix to test on.

Some photos! (I haven't shared any pictures of their placement since I moved house a few years ago and they've been in my rather unaesthetic basement). 2's on the left and 3's on the right:

Unused cases, 1's and Odroid's that we haven't used in a couple of years:

[rvagg]

An update - I haven't touched any of this since my post, I've barely thought about it (except that the pile in the last photo is sitting beside me in my office and is kind of in the way...). All but 2 Pi3's and 2 Pi2's are still online and operating: https://ci.nodejs.org/label/pi3-docker/ & https://ci.nodejs.org/label/pi2-docker/, and the shared disk they are operating from is still at 58%. I did put a weekly cron job that does git gc on each of the */home/iojs/build/workspace/node-test-binary-arm/ directories on there, which I'm a little worried about because it's quite costly and is likely to produce test timeouts while it's running. But I haven't seen any complaints yet so 🤞 that doing it regularly means it's not too costly.

Pretty happy overall.