Since I don’t actually use the appliance (or any similar version of CentOS) on 
anything, I can’t say what hardware support the appliance would or would not 
have.  You might need to check this out yourself.  My gut feeling is that it 
would be fine once you figure out how to overwrite the “ChromeOS” that is 
currently(?) on it.  Watch out for any potential “secure boot” BIOS problems 
that could exist on this thing since it gets sold as a media player in mind.

Depending on what your usage requirements are, I would question long term 
reliability of such a thing.  Note that the Intel NUC has not proved to be a 
very long-lived device either and I generally trust ASUS products less!  If you 
don’t care that this thing could have a likelihood to failing in the next year 
or two of 24/7 usage, then go for it.

Note that in my case, I used a previously used PC to power our Rivendel at our 
radio station, which would normally be a very poor choice too!  However, this 
computer was taken from a pile of other identical units (think lots of spare 
parts), and contains a set of mirrored drives, redundant power supplies and a 
proven reliable Gigabyte motherboard, all in a filtered rack mount case with 
lots of [noisy] fans to keep things cool.  Furthermore I have another, 
partially current identical unit as a very “cold standby” could be made ready 
to replace a fully failed unit in a day or so, plus yet another computer (that 
wear other hats as well) that automatically gets daily rsyncs from the onair 
system, and can also “go on the air” in just a few minutes should the main fail 
(while allowing me to update the “cold standby” from it).  Not to mention, 
there is yet another set of redundant computers (from same batch) at the radio 
transmitter site that automatically take over with some simple “backup audio 
programming” if there is any loss of audio stream from the studio itself for 
any reason.  In short, I still sleep well at night even though I have a tired 
8-year old computer providing programming to this radio station!

PS: Actually, I’m a little surprised all this IS still running well at this 
point, which is why is shouted “STILL” in my previous post.  But oh well, the 
station owner has a “don’t fix it if it ain’t [yet] broke” attitude.

From: Seth Stevenson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2016 2:12 PM
To: Jim Stewart <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [RDD] good off the shelf computer for Rivendell

What about the Asus Chromebox-M004U? Any thoughts about running the Centos 
appliance on it?


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