The point of failure for all of these machines has been the SD card. They seem to last 4 years almost to the day. I suppose if I set up a RAMdisk they might last longer, but honestly, for the price of an SD card it’s not really worth my time.
There are "Industrial" SD cards which should last considerably longer, you can look up a few people have done their own testing. They can be slower but that shouldn't be a blocker for an email server on a pi.
OTOH, I corrupted a card by turning off the Pi in middle of writing.
Today, you can run mailcow/mailu with all the options on a relatively modest vps. I'm on a cable provider that locks down residential customers and charges over 2x as much for business, so it's cheaper to use VPSes.
On RPi, I've mostly opted to use SSD + USB Adapters as they've been significantly more reliable that SD. There's lots of cases that make this configuration a breeze. That said, I've mostly been running Mini PCs since COVID when the RPi got to be more expensive all-in and slower.
I’m scared of self hosting a mailbox.
I don't send a lot of emails from it, but the ones I do are delivered.
So while the content is in RAM on the Pi, a lot of the heavier lifting (TLS termination) is done elsewhere, which saves a ton of CPU load on the Pi.
On the one hand I get it, TLS is pretty heavy, and it makes sense to take advantage of a VPS or Cloudflare or however you want to do it.
But once you are spinning up a VPS, the question is ... why the Pi? The VPS in the article has less RAM, but more storage. If you're already doing TLS termination on the VPS (the most RAM intensive part), you might as well just do the whole shebang there.
I know this is all for fun, I'm just wondering -- is the Pi Zero really too slow to handle TLS, especially with an optimized TLS library? In this setup, the Pi is already being directly exposed to the Internet anyway, there's no VPN being used. That ARM11 isn't "fast", but surely a 1 GHz ARM11 can handle an optimized TLS library serving some subset of TLS1.2.
Also, all web pages are served from RAM. It's automatic that modern OSes will cache this stuff on first access.
Kind of irrelevant since operating systems and web pages in the 90's were significantly smaller in footprints, as the web was mostly plain text back then. Windows XP with its GUI would run Max Payne on 128MB of RAM. You could do a lot more back then that You can't do modern stuff like that today with 128MB of RAM.
Yesterday I one-shotted several interactive pages, that Qwen built out of straight HTML and Javascript. I handed it my API (source code, not even a swagger, via an MCP that Qwen wrote for me), asked for a frontend, and it delivered. One page at a time to keep context down, and mightve gotten lucky on the first draw but after the first one I told it to make the next ones like the first.
Can't say I've had that experience with backend languages & frameworks, incl writing that same API, but perhaps I'm off the beaten path with those, or perhaps there's greater breadth of things to do vs a narrower set of acceptance criteria? IDK.
Here I was sweating that I'd have to research and learn a current-day frontend framework. It felt like a magic wand using consumer-grade AI. HTML and plain old Javascript was plenty.
Tangent but apropos of other contemporary threads on HN, it puts a spin on supply chain threats. There's no NPM or anything, except perhaps whatever mysteries are baked into the model.
HTML code, CSS, Javascript, Images.
In this case, they are static elements, which can even be cached locally to share more easily.
If someone wants a massive build system to render a static HTML page, that's on them, and their personal interpretation. Increasingly, and maybe more often than not, there is more than one way to get the same outcome.
The fact that there's hundreds of downloads for a single web page is up to the constructor of that page. Still, these things can be reasonably cached. For example, host it on the Pi, then put a cloudflare in front of it or something.
The Pi Zero might not be for you, or easy to try to undermine. Which criticisms would go away if it was on a regular pi?
I retired my 486 in ‘95 or thereabouts…
While I may make the argument that most are probably hosting and doing php on the same server, it's not the typical approach for any custom software at this point.
I found a fun bug with it a couple years ago: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
It is still able to build software faster than it is released. It takes roughly a month to recompile the entire system :D
For the radio stuff I can just take the Pi, frontend, and a battery pack outside to test.
When I finally move to a place with proper fiber internet I'm going to be hosting several side projects on a handful of Pis.
- R-Pi Zero W
- Sixfab UPS hat
- Sixfab Cellular IoT App Shield
- R-Pi model 1B
With all this I should be able to make a multiply redundant always-on bastion host. It's awesome that alpine supports the armhf stuff, many OSes have dropped 32bit support entirely.
I've since got a lot more interested in the microcontroller community - so many Pi projects should really be microcontroller projects - the esp32 especially scratches the itch for cheap things to hack on, and you can get them for like 6-7 bucks each with wifi.
- Victron Monocrystalline Panel 90W 12V
- Victron Gel Battery 12V 60Ah
- Victron MPPT Charge Controller 75V 15A
- Raspberry Pi Zero W
- Witty Pi 5
- Sixfab 4G/LTE Base HAT
- Quectel EC25 Mini PCle 4G/LTE Module
Almost 100% uptime except for a few days after a bad winter storm, pretty neat!
A Raspberry Pi Zero can just run apache.
For whatever reason, the speed seems far faster than Python for me.
I don't mean to shit on this, exploration is nice and putting perfectly fitting hardware to use instead of throwing abundant unnecessary hardware on every simple problem — just to bring it to crawl with loads of shitty bloates software — is good, but it's not particularly impressive.