6-in-1: Build a 6-node Ceph cluster on this Mini ITX Motherboard

[@JeffGeerling]

Building a Ceph cluster on a bunch of Raspberry Pis was a fun project, and I think perfect for this board! If you're looking for some Pis, they pop up from time to time on rpilocator.com (no affiliation, I just use that site to check up on Pi stock around the world). Thanks especially to KIOXIA for sending the NVMe SSDs to fill in the rest of this board - check out their XG6 and their new XG8 if you need a great, reliable NVMe drive for your computer. I'd been working on this video since a few weeks ago (before the hospitalization), so I was able to get it out for this normal weekly release. I'll probably be taking a break and won't be posting a video next Wednesday-just check back the week after, and in the mean time, go check out Geerling Engineering, my 2nd channel! kzbin.info

[@andreas7944]

I really like your videos because you answer all the relevant questions directly and always get to the point. So thank you, Jeff, for always covering fascinating topics and products. And best greetings to your wife and dad! I really hope you feel better soon!

[@Gerdoch]

Can you use something like this as a desktop replacement? I am not clear on if you can configure Linux to use all these Pis as 'one' system transparent to the user and just do normal desktop stuff with it.

[@juliannojungle]

AWESOME video! Superb content. But right now, TAKE A BREAK, take care of your health, please. That's the priority. We all are cheering for you, Jeff. God bless you and be better soon. 🙏🏻

[@Ryan-rz4ig]

I'd love to see some of the points per day it could generate on folding@home if that is possible.

[@annakissed3226]

Truly impressive video especially given that most of the time your being ill in bed But I have no idea how your keeping Red shirt Jeff under control handcuffs? Video games? A really long leash? So back to my bed to watch you till I fall asleep

[@b00573d]

If anyone is wondering why there are no rpis in stock its because Jeff has them ALL!

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh... those are literally all the Lite CM4s I have. I have a couple eMMC models too but I typically stick to the Lite modules since they're easier to re-flash (don't have to wait for slow eMMC writes over USB).

[@nexusyang4832]

No doubt!!!!

[@wsk-clown]

@@JeffGeerling totally sus how he has so many LoL he works for RPi maybe 🤔

[@Fabri91]

@@JeffGeerling That's what someone who bought *all* the Pis would say! :D

[@n0madfernan257]

dont forget red "shirt" jeff

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

5:19 I don't know why they're snipping off the pin. it's a really easy task to desolder the single pin and make it look good.

[@JeffGeerling]

Probably they enjoy the challenge of the "don't let the pin fly into your eyeball when you snip it" game!

[@TheNetworkingGuy]

Red shirt jeff has to have his moments too

[@someguy4915]

@@JeffGeerling It is a fun game but losing it sucks and even when winning you then get to play the second round of the game which is named 'Desperately search the floor on your hands and knees because you know that if you dont find the pin you will feel it in three days when you step on it barefoot...' So many times.....

[@perwestermark8920]

It's way quicker to cut than to desolder. Desolder on 100 boards and I'm pretty sure you will be quite tired. Even lots of massproduced motherboards has cut pins.

[@someguy4915]

@@perwestermark8920 I've never seen a mass-produced motherboard with snipped pins, do you have an example? Desoldering is usually quicker though, touch the pin with the soldering iron and pull it out just like that, no need to line up cutters and no risk of leaving a pin loose on the motherboard ready to short circuit everything when an unsuspecting customer connects power...

[@kofiampaduthicklenskat9512]

Great to see you are doing good Jeff

[@ksoonsoon]

Man it is good to see you up and around and cranking out these great videos again. I hope you are feeling better. You must be feeling some better since you’re up and around at least. That’s a great thing. Keep cranking man

[@ahmedb.hameed3330]

It is good to see you back healthy. Hope you are fully recovered Jeff! Like always awesome content +1.

[@JeffGeerling]

Not quite fully recovered, but we'll get there!

[@gus473]

​@@JeffGeerling 👍🏼Hang in there! Hope it's (relatively) easy for you and family! 😎✌🏼

[@lighthawk95]

@@JeffGeerling I was diagnosed with Collitis the day before you posted your video about your colostomy. Gotta say knowing someone I look up to has the same/similar issue to me healthwise has made it easier to cope.

[@ninianstorm6494]

@@JeffGeerling real clone wars is rhinos like bush=nute gunray invade naboo bush could of prevent europe migrant crisis since obama target Libya Sudan Somalia Syria was originally bush admin rumsfield idea pnac! we can give all medicare by reduce warfronts, no more allowing new daca abusers, force senators to cut their own wealth in gov by half if they want to keep above 70% of current daca population so inflation/living cost stay reasonable wesley clark foreshadow reveal 2000 to 2012 all rig for kill iraq to syria kzbin.info/www/bejne/lZ7Ve4V-rMeJfZo establishment kill 50 in vegas/portland, thugs attack with stand down cops san jose/charlotte, burn loot several months, sabotage afgan withdraw using russia bounty smear to give taliban equip, crash car in to wisconsin parade thanks to nbc follow jury bus smearing ritten house too kzbin.info/www/bejne/i6nSfWuqfbiUbck bush 14y ago said add ukraine to nato with nuland f eu coup 2014 support = kzbin.info/www/bejne/pIW0ZHdnlpKdaJI current ukraine gov is proxy since cia drew red line just like did in syria earlier arming rebels telling russia not to interfere while zelensky ethnic cleanse donbass region 7y= kzbin.info/www/bejne/qpKclYqImKmIhqM kzbin.info/www/bejne/f3PIg3Vtp7yelZo

[@raymondlarose9334]

Glad you managed to get to this, hope you're feeling better!

[@JeffGeerling]

Much better! Going to keep on with my break though, so next video will likely come in two weeks instead of one!

[@raymondlarose9334]

Take your time, health is always more important and the videos are worth the wait

[@rlocone]

Happy to see your up and aboard again. I'm waiting for my Turing Pi2 but no CM4s.

[@ronwatkins5775]

One of the features of a cluster is a reduction in the single-point-of-failure elements. For home use, you can't do anything about AC power, but your original cluster at least had separate power adapters and ethernet ports, although just a single switch. This board appears to have more single-point-of-failure components.

[@SoleLo]

Good to see you back and hope you are doing well. Also; leave some RPIs for us regular folks. Great videos as always!

[@QckSGaming]

I just randomly stumbled upon this video and just realized you are "The" geerlingguy. Holy frick mate, your tools have made my life so much easier. Thanks for all the hard work. Great video.

[@JeffGeerling]

Haha, thanks, glad you found the channel :)

[@jonathanbuzzard1376]

You could use multipath TCP for getting more speed, and as it's CEPH and storage you could use SMB3 multichannel feature which works with at least Windows 10 and modern Samba. Neither of these solutions require a managed switch.

[@someguy4915]

But both of these require multipath connections to the nodes. Here, each Pi has only 1 Ethernet connection and the switch has two ports exposed. Connect those two ports to another switch and you have a loop, causing a smarter switch to disable one of the ports or when using a not too smart switch will just lock up the network... So SMB multipath won't work here unfortunately, that is why it is hard to understand why they chose an unmanaged switch...

[@jonathanbuzzard1376]

@@someguy4915 Duh that was a Homer Simpson moment. However with a suitable managed switch you could put down MAC based ACL's that would mask half the PI's down one port and half down the second port, to get more upstream speed. That should shut down the loop, but yeah it's slightly wacho.

[@someguy4915]

@@jonathanbuzzard1376 True but even then you'd need a bunch of routing etc. to make sure that traffic sent on Port 1 also returns through Port 1 etc. which while certainly possible is just a bit of a headache when a simple managed switch would fix all of that and provide so much more functionality. Besides LACP port bonding you'd also get VLAN support, now you could just have the Pi's spit through VLAN tags and hope that the buffer of the switch is big enough, usually this does work, but it is unsupported and a great way to get very complex network issues (don't ask how I learned that lesson... :P)

[@BenKickert]

Glad to see you are feeling well enough to post again!

[@lostname1781]

Thank you for showing us the Ansible parts! I found that very helpful.

[@nevergonnabesilent]

"DNS is the root of all problems" I would ask for his autograph because of his shirt alone :)

[@punchar4161]

but why., dns is good

[@gklinger]

Looks like Jeff is feeling better! Thank goodness.

[@nexusyang4832]

Am glad to see an upload. I know this is from before but I hope you are taking care of yourself and that you are getting better. Get well soon dude! We miss you! :) 🤗🤗🤗👍👍👍❤️❤️❤️

[@BrianThomas]

This video forces you to want to purchase more Pi's. I love this board soooo much!

[@JohnAngelmo]

Hmm, I guess I would prefer a SFP+ slot for networking so you can use 1GE, 2,5GE, 5GE or 10GE depending on need if you can get 1GE from each pie.

[@JeffGeerling]

I do like SFP+, though just having an SFP+ cage wouldn't give faster speeds, the switch chip would also need an upgrade. 2.5G could be realistic but going to 5 or 10G on this board design might have issues with heat or signal routing. The other difficulty with this board in particular is there's not enough physical room for SFP+; you'd have to take out one of the Pis to do it.

[@JohnAngelmo]

@@JeffGeerling Oh, yes I see now, you are right. The advantage with a SFP+ slot is that it can run on less power than a 10GE copper connection. But perhaps one or two 2,5GE slots would be good? The Intel I225 should perhaps fit well? It had issues in the first two revisions. But yes the whole switch thing is an issue as well.

[@someguy4915]

@@JohnAngelmo But that Intel is a NIC, not a switch, you'd need to replace the entire Realtek switch chip for something more useful (managed and 2.5-10GbE) before adding SFP+ has any benefit.

[@littlemeg137]

Thanks for sharing your I/O shield design.

[@FUT-Franklin]

Why do raspberry pi videos bang more than most other computer videos... It's insane

[@Lyunpaw]

That Ansible wow made my day.

[@raymondpenn1066]

I can see this working really well in distributed TV editing storage, particularly for outside broadcast or mobile facilities. Low power requirements, easily configured to access 6TB at time. The whole thing, including monitor, keyboard and mouse could be put in a flight case and carried to the next job. The only downside is the gigabit connecting. 150 minutes minimum per terabyte is slow but that's where the price and portability come in. Two or three cases per reporting team would keep everything flowing nicely.

[@joetkeshub]

Thank you so much Jeff! In just this post you let me discover 3 solutions I ignored. Great post.

[@OnnieKoski]

Oh, Christmas can’t come soon enough🥰

[@Atylonisus]

I like this guy, he doesn't hide that 50% of his appeal for this thing are the beepy boopy lights

[@michaelvilain8457]

It's nice to see "Excited Jeff" again. The last video made want to send him a subscription to Harry and David's Chicken Soup of the Month.

[@alexzetaeffesse3297]

2:50 The board has it's own little PMU -> The board has ITS own little PMU.... for the rest great videoarticle!

[@RandallStephens397]

Love that WOPR ref.

[@thefirebuilds]

It's like these guys have never had an SD card barf its guts. What a crazy place to put the port.

[@JeffGeerling]

My guess is the signal routing would've been a bit more complex trying to get all the cards lined up along an edge. It could've increased the complexity of the board design and possibly required more PCB layers, which would increase the overall cost (and reduce margins). One nice thing I didn't mention is you can actually boot off the NVMe drives, so you technically don't need to use the microSD card slots at all, even if you have Lite modules.

[@thefirebuilds]

@@JeffGeerling oh well, that's ideal then. I trust my nvme at least 3500% more than an SD card.

[@wsk-clown]

I see your feeling better Jeff. I hope you stay that way for bit.

[@KSCPMark6742]

This is kind of sci fi to me. Building a cluster of six Pi's is just a wet dream unless you have some old ones sitting around. What is happening with the availability of PI's? That's the thing I want to know.

[@gorak9000]

Why are you building a cluster of pi's in the first place? Just go get 6 old small form factor desktops that are destined for the landfill already and you'd have more processing power and probably more ram too

[@KSCPMark6742]

@@gorak9000 I'm not building a cluster of pi's, I cant get my hands on a single one

[@gorak9000]

@@KSCPMark6742 But why is anyone building a cluster of Pi's - just get 6 old desktops - they get thrown out by the thousands every day

[@iam.jasonhoward]

Glad to see you back. 💯

[@kwinzman]

6 CM4s in one hand is like flexing a Rolex.

[@noslen954]

Love your channel. Keep up the great work.

[@movax20h]

The main reason to have 2 ports at the back is the chip supports 8 ports, and 6 are used by Pis, so 2 at the back are natural way to have it. It allows daisy chaining multiple clusters for example. Useful if you do not have much network traffic.

I don't know anything about advanced blending or programming, but I find this type of video interesting. Go figure...

[@seljd]

I'm starting to believe that Raspebrry pi foundation is sending every CM4 they make to Jeff

[@frogslayer4849]

nice work on the I/O shields! soon you'll printing the whole case lol.

[@JeffGeerling]

Haha, I actually considered it for this board. Would make mounting the fan a lot easier, for sure.

[@frogslayer4849]

@@JeffGeerling Man my 3D printer has paid off. Between RC stuff, gun stuff, tech stuff like a charging dock for a magic mouse, custom drip tray cover for the keurig, hooks and knobs and hinges for things, various custom ebike parts, it's a priceless skill to be able to design and print what ever you might need or just want. I have been having really great results with ESUN PLA+ lately. I think they switched up the formula or something because it used to not work that great for me probably 3 years ago.

[@chucklanman3315]

i cant wait to see a board that lets you make one huge raspberry pi with a bunch of raspberry compute modules.

[@echoptic775]

I love the part when he said its clustering time. It qas my favourite part of the movie

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh, we could've just gotten a F4 movie with The Thing and I bet it would've been as good as what we ended up with :D

[@H40XKM]

Feels like Raspberry Pi sends all their brand-new RPis directly to Jeff, resulting in no RPis available on the market.

[@JoelCHopper]

Great video as usual Jeff. Hope you are feeling better. I look forward to more big brained stuff from you in the future :-)

[@heatsingh2205]

Man I am going to change the world after watching your video, but then I remember I don't have that much money damn love for hardware is so exoensive

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh... that is the curse of being a techie. Too many projects, too little money, too little space.

[@heatsingh2205]

@@JeffGeerling well and I am in same situation in terms of health as you are in ,it lowered my productivity but I guess you are blessed 🙌 hope you recover soon.

[@fu1r4]

4:06 You don't get much air trough those hole when you try to suck trough them. You will only get a fan that spins at a high rpm without any air going trough. You can easily test it by holding a fan and with your hand you starts to covering the side the fan suck from. You will now hear the fan spinning up because less air going trough. Do the same thing on the blow side. You will not be able to block the outgoing air that easy.

[@darknessblades]

I hope they add a option to add a cooler shield on top of the PI's just like the compute module cooler shield. but then overkill where the heatsink are 3x as large, and can support a large fan on each heatsink

[@HShango]

Not bad on the pool of storage there. Mine is 2.7TB (pool storage of my OS SDD 1TB & 1.7TB HDD) in my laptop.

[@cobalt_3283]

I would love to see a video on setting up Ceph in Kubernetes using Rook.

[@nobody_nowhere_]

what can be updated: - smart switch - per-device power control - short press power button - just send 'shutdown' - change LEDs to multi-color, show current status (started, stopped, on-error,...) - switchable ipmi+usb (ip-kvm), maybe via onboard or external pi zero - auto change speed for coolers

[@DiyintheGhetto]

Hey Jeff, the two Ethernet ports on the back are not totally useless. You can have them both go to different network switches. So if one goes down you can have a backup so you don’t lose total connection. But it does stink about the power switch and fan always being on.

[@shanent5793]

Wouldn't that create a loop?

[@JeffGeerling]

It can; in my testing that didn't happen but basically the best case is you have a redundant path to your network. It would've been so nice if the switch was managed so you could set up VLANs or aggregation :(

[@DiyintheGhetto]

@@JeffGeerling true. Maybe you need to rewrite the network switch os next heheh

[@DiyintheGhetto]

@@shanent5793 to be honest I don’t know. My router is nothing special but it. Does have dial wan ports.

[@DJ-Daz]

Jeff: "Stuff Proxmox, I WANT BAREMETAL!"

[@JeffGeerling]

"You run 200 VMs, I run 200 Pis!"

[@mandelbro777]

Interesting. I wonder what use cases there are for this, for people who don't need the performance of the $12k setup but who could benefit off of having so many cores with efficient networking.

[@stale2665]

A 5 gbit ethernet port would be a good fit for this board.

[@Delibro]

By connecting both Ethernet ports to two computers or switches and transmit from two Pies it should be possible to get the full 2 Gbit/s. Every cheap desktop switch I tested could do it. Btw., connecting both Ethernet ports to the same switch without link aggregation or STP could work fine some time and then fail from looping.

[@timstein]

Could you have imaged the MicroSD's/SSD's using the online imaging from Raspberry PI instead of making individual MicroSD's?

[@scienceneighbourhood]

சிறப்பு Man You back with good health

[@TheNathanCarlson]

Super cool but only 1gbps NICs is very limiting.

If you want easy removal of SD card, stick a loop of tape to both sides of card, so you can pull it out with that tape.

[@JeffGeerling]

Not a bad idea; or heck, it just needs a tiny bit of upward pressure, a bit of tape on the top could be enough to pull it out.

[@mcskinz]

'Redundant Network Path' -story of my life

[@stephenlittle7534]

Wow Still loved the look of it all. Am I right in saying looking at that picture of the connector. They just snipped off the pin with a cutter. ?.

[@JeffGeerling]

Haha, yes, that looks like the fix they're currently using. I'm hoping they'll adjust the actual header pins for future production runs!

[@nikolaydachev9691]

There is no need of mgment switch for vlans .. you can do that via OS .. also is not a bad option for 2 eth on the board .. one for uplink and one to another super6c .. total of 12 nodes or 100+ ;) (do you need 100+ nodes via 1g is other story )

[@fixedbit]

Keep clustering on Jeff!

[@VincentSaelzler]

Having two Ethernet ports would be twice as if different Pis were offering independent network shares from each other.

[@dscott3421]

Jeff: this is fascinating stuff. I'm coming near the end of a 37-yr IT and programming career, but I want to stay sharp as I petrify into old age, and for me that's going to work through RPi! One of your images of the Turing Pi made it look like it could be a good stand-alone unit with some all-encompassing heat sinks on each Pi. Would the Ceph/Ansible combination serve either cluster? I'd like to run a good DB, and build my own credit card processing group (totally for fun, no actual $$ involved, except to buy good hardware). Could one of these configurations (ITX vs Turing) serve me well for such a setup? BTW, great to see you back after your medical care.

[@joecole1504]

Would love to do some of these projects... Must be nice to be able to get as many Raspberry Pi as you have access to, but don't see them affordably available.

[@musaplusplus]

can't wait for my channel to take off so that can get all the best gear directly from the manufacturers

[@jeffsadowski]

Sucks that you can't do Link Aggregation otherwise that was pretty cool.

[@jeffsadowski]

Curious if you can assign one network port for one pi and the other for another and do a kludge of link aggregation between the two pi's

[@JeffGeerling]

Not as far as I can tell, though this particular switch chip could be hacked to have some sort of VLAN tagging set, but it would not be for the feint of heart.

[@philo23]

I’m kinda surprised it didn’t come with an IO shield considering the form factor!

[@JeffGeerling]

It seems like a lot of hobbyist boards don't, though I wish they would. A nice metal punched out IO shield is a lot nicer to install than the 3D printed ones I've made.

[@danp8321]

Stoppit! I'm trying to save money!! 😄

[@tekidiots6863]

Brilliant Video, what are you using under the PiTray mini to mount it?

[@denvera1g1]

I wonder if you can get the Jetson Orin NX working on the TuringPi2. I know i have 2 different generations of the Jetson NX modules (a nano 4GB a pair of 2GB, and the TX2 NX) working in the Jetson Mate, but that might just be something they did special, i didnt consider looking up forward and backwards compatibility before tyying it, but i was fortunate it worked fine

[@epluribusunum6622]

Current cp4 cost would be $1500usd just to populate the carrier board

[@eggstraordinair]

The next logical step is making a cluster of this cluster

[@rehankhanali]

Hello bro fun project. will you please make a video on pc/laptop claster for crypto mining.

[@uibsen]

great review

[@f4nt4]

Thx!

[@gpturismo]

Ok, time to order 4 more cm4s, a case, a... damn it. LOL. BTW, glad to see you doing what you love. Suffer from Chronic Pain/Fatigue and more so I know how daunting it can be. Hope things keep going positively.

[@JeffGeerling]

Thanks! I've been wanting to get this video done for a couple months now... just glad I was healthy enough to finally finish up the edit this week :) I'll still be taking it easy a while longer, so I probably won't have a video ready for next week. You can just re-watch this one lol.

[@EMILE12345678901]

pi clusters are funny because they are usually less powerful than a lot of laptops from a few years ago and are way more work to manage and get working

[@myndzi]

I'm just setting one of these up, and having a little confusion about the chassis connectors. The booklet (which is more legible than the github photo) lists a PLED- pin but not a PLED+ pin. How did you get the front LED to work? (Not that it matters a great deal, but I might as well...)

[@Random-fi7dt]

if it is possible i would put that all into 1 PC, making it a home-made super computer, dont forget your RX or RTX guys and that will be a true killer only problem is those processors are so slow compared to the amd and intel cpus but can always help if u got many pis to throw away

[@dosomisolami]

looks like there is no 2nd power source for pi x4/x6 cluster on a board, and this is my concern to those single board cluster design :)

[@tjp3018]

Have you tried GlusterFS? I currently use GlusterFS but after your demo im considering switching. I just like the idea of a visual interface.

[@JeffGeerling]

Gluster is being deprecated in 2024 (sadly... I like it too), so it would be a good idea to start trying out Ceph!

[@tjp3018]

@@JeffGeerling Thanks for the tip, I setup a test VM cluster with ceph over the weekend and really like it. After the new SSD drives come in the mail ill be migrating my home swarm cluster to ceph.

[@JeffGeerling]

@@tjp3018 Good luck, hope it all works out!

[@chrisbuhneing3194]

The point being what, so what would you use it for storage?

[@BillyMcCord]

Can you try running MySQL and see what kind of performance this cluster can produce ?

[@JeffGeerling]

I haven't run it on this cluster, but I did benchmark MySQL through Docker on a Turing Pi and Turing Pi 2 cluster, as well as a Pi 4 cluster, and some of those results are up on pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/drupal

[@jeffsadowski]

Do you need to populate all the pi's or can you start with a lesser amount and upgrade as needed? Also do all the compute modules need to be the same or can you mix and match?

[@JeffGeerling]

You can have as many or few as you like, and whatever variety; I had 4x 8GB models, and 2x 4GB in this board (I've only ever been able to buy 4 8GB CM4s in the past two years!).

[@d4j4r58]

Would it work if you connect the cluster on two different networks?

[@webfreezy]

Jeff, please stop buying all those Raspis! No wonder there's such a shortage! 🤣

[@pilotsmoe]

With the price of PIs being like $200 a piece, Wouldn't it make sense to just build a Ryzen 9 5950 system? Would still have some money left over, too

[@cyberp0et]

In the meanwhile an old hp e-pc c10 e-vectra mini PC. The caps look fine, the external power brick works, yet the computer won't start. It only lights the LEDs of the ethernet for a split second and the fan as well and then nothing. I swithced the reset BIOS switch to "on", removed and replaced the CMOS battery and nothing. There is no tension (3V) at the pins that are connected to front panel- power button. I have no idea.

[@HalfInsaneOutdoorGuy]

Ceph sounds like hadoop.

[@cameronwright2847]

What tool do you use to flash the OS onto the micro SD and change stuff like hostname?

[@coltonj96]

Now would it be possible to cluster six of those clusters together? So 36 PIs?

[@JeevaDotNet]

I look after a 20PB+ ceph cluster. 380-480TB per 2U. Using Dell R740xd2 etc. Wish I could build a pi cluster at home but no CM4 in ZA since it was released

[@XVRickXV]

What would you use this for? Hosting a website?

[@declanmcardle]

Should the t-shirt say DNS is the . of all problems?

[@joemarais7683]

I'm sure those 6 pis alone are 12k dollars on their own by now

[@MirceaPrunaru]

Jeff since you have all of this cm4 modules why not try to build a "Pimox" cluster and see what you can do with that?!. I wonder how you can virtualize a PI and if its viable for anything? Also would you be able to encode video with it?!.

[@JeffGeerling]

I haven't done any Pimox testing but that's on my list of things to do at some point. I almost did it when I set up Asahi Linux on my Mac! Video encoding works, but is very, very slow on the Pi. It'd be much better to have an old used PC which can get 2-4x faster video transcoding, especially if you toss in an old video card that supports H.264 or a slightly newer one for H.265 or whatever other codecs you might need.

[@liquidmobius]

We need some prominent channels to advocate for the Raspberry Pi being made available to individuals, hobbyists and schools instead of industry and commercial interests almost exclusively. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has strayed from their original vision of teaching kids and individuals about computers and coding. According to their own statement (April 2022) they're producing around half a million boards per month, but sadly none are being made available to the average consumer. How is nobody talking about this?

[@btudrus]

"unmanaged switch" - this is just not true. The switch chip has some capabilities of a managed switch and can be configured through a SMI / I2C interface. It would be just a matter of connecting this interface to the nearest raspberry pi's GPIO pins and make a software to manage the switch chip. However, the chips is missing the LACP capabilities but you could overcome this by using two different VLANs for each 3 of the raspberry pi's and than mix those together somewhere on the uplink switch/router.

[@svenvanginkel4522]

is this board still a good value these days to run k3s at home?