Comment by MitPitt
21 hours ago
A raspberry zero is more powerful than an enterprise server from the 1990s. A minimalist static website is not impressive. You can fit way more in there.
21 hours ago
A raspberry zero is more powerful than an enterprise server from the 1990s. A minimalist static website is not impressive. You can fit way more in there.
I hosted my personal email domain on a Zero for almost 10 years. It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still idles under 1W and when it fails I can replace the entire machine for next to nothing.
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.
I remember in the mid-late 90's how poorly the Exchange server ran that there was a nix server for inbound email just to throttle the ingress. When it was upgraded to a 4-socket server, there was concern when the *nix guys just let everything that was being held during the upgrade through, and it just chugged along. But the moment of panic was palpable. The Unix guys really didn't like that business internals and apps were running from Windows services, so thought it would be funny to try to knock over the new mail server.
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.
They make high endurance microSD cards that can handle a lot more writes before failing.
OTOH, I corrupted a card by turning off the Pi in middle of writing.
Interesting, what tools did you use for email hosting?
I’m scared of self hosting a mailbox.
Have been using Mail-in-a-box [1] for about 5 years [1]. I haven't done any maintenance for at least 3 years, besides occasionally clicking restart in the admin webpanel every time it does serious security updates.
I don't send a lot of emails from it, but the ones I do are delivered.
[1] https://mailinabox.email/
I just use Postfix. I originally ran on NetBSD. I have an alternative approach for spam, so I have no anti-spam tools.
https://www.xmox.nl/ is pretty good single binary mail solution for personal email hosting, it not too many features of modern webmails are needed.
Self hosting a mailbox is easy - getting email back out is the hard part.
It's a relatively steep learning curve if you're not getting paid to do it. However, in my case, I have been running my personal mail server on a trusted VPS host for well over a decade now. After the initial setup, there is really nothing to do except for regular Linux updates/upgrades. I run postfix, dovecot, roundcube, and rspamd. All of the configuration is in Ansible, so if the host goes tango uniform, or if I want to move it elsewhere, downtime should be minimal.
There are a few open-source one-command mail server deployment solutions that do all of the heavy lifting for you. Some of them might even be pretty good. The problem with those is that if you don't understand how your mail server is put together, you're completely stuck if it breaks.
>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.
You can also boot (full size, not-zero) pis off USB disks. Or just netboot.
Hey, it loads! Unlike ~10% of pages on first page of HN, hugged to death.
Also I love the dithered B&W images. The entire aesthetic of the site is great.
The website running on the vape was far more interesting than this. I do wonder if anyone has tried to use the microphone in these devices to listen to audio. Backdoored vape
One could record from the microphone and then transmit via RF side channel.
I am serving a small web interface to control my shutters on an esp32. I even did the experiment to not parse the request and just always respond with the same response, so a webserver for a single page can be trivial (you would have embed images and all other resources into the html then). But of course I am parsing the request, because I need separate routes for the page and for the actions. Since this is on my home lan it doesn't even need ssl. I guess as long as the traffic is low, an esp32 might be able to do ssl. For me that isn't relevant because it isn't on the internet and when I want to connect to it from outside my home lan, I just use wireguard.
Indeed, you can even permanently run one using a balcony solar panel:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
My thoughts exactly. People regularly run Pi-Hole on these things, which not only is "serving a website" (the dashboard) but is also being a DNS server.