Matt Pinner <[email protected]> writes: > tldr: can i run a BBB for three years? > Sure!
> I'm about to fly a BBB (w the latest debian) high into the rafters at a > space in Denver. > Awesome! > It will control 1440 leds over SPI from pixel data sent over UDP via OPC. > What is OPC? Presumably this isn't OLE for Process Control? > This is all very exciting for me and things have been running fairly > smoothly and the community support and blogs have been enormously helpful. > > Now i'm kind of freaking out bc this thing should ideally run as stably as > any light fixture and i'm not sure a good way to really test that kind of > thing. > Indeed it's not easy to test for stability. I've found the BBB hardware to be rock solid but YMMV. The obvious place to start would be just to let the board sit running your code for as long as you can. > the sub one-minute boot up time seems acceptible enough, so the client can > always reboot it, but then what does that do the filesystem? > > i've started looking into logrotate to keep the disk cleared, but there is > still the question how many read/write cycles will the eMMC accept before > drama happens? > If at all possible I would try to keep the root file system mounted as read-only. It can be difficult to predict the rate of disk writes (e.g. logging rate) on a running system and I wouldn't want to risk it just for log files. This is especially true if you may have flaky power (SD cards have been known to die when power is removed at the wrong point in a write operation). My first instinct would be to play it safe and put /var on a tmpfs. > I plan to have a private network running so i should be able to login to > the BBB for some kind of maintenance and troubleshooting. do i run a long > (100ft) serial cable? and usb cable as well? > It certainly wouldn't hurt to have something like this in place, especially at first. > im tempted to put it online so i can check from afar, but i feel that > invites all kinds of new room for disaster and abuse. > If you firewall all but port 22 and configure sshd securely (either a particularly strong password or exclusively key-based authentication) I'd say the risk is pretty low. Let us know how it goes and don't hesitate to ask more questions! Cheers, - Ben
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