Decommissioning my Raspberry Pi

Thu 28 June 2018

A few weeks ago I decided to retire my beloved raspberry Pi (model 1 B) which I have been using as a dedicated home media center and a file/DNS/web/proxy/vpn/torrent/tor server for the past 3 years. I had purchased an Amazon firestick which took over media player duties (I highly recommend it) and this got me thinking whether I could upgrade from the model 1B.

The Pi always got the job done but it was definitely on the slow-ish side. I wanted to know if I could do better. I looked into the latest model which is a much more beefy little machine with 1GB of RAM and a 1.2 GHz CPU. But then I remembered that I had a Dell Mini 10 netbook languishing in the corner of my room. The last time I had used it was a good 2-3 years ago while experimenting with Arch Linux.

So I decided to use that instead. It is equipped with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM so would definitely be an upgrade. Power consumption would be low due to the ultra low power nature of the CPU making this an ideal home server. I wiped the disk, installed Debian Stretch on it and copied over my settings and files. Within an hour or two I was up and running

Understandably it is running a lot faster than the Pi and will probably serve me a good few years barring any hardware failures.

I'm not sure what use I can put my little Pi to now though. I bought it just to tinker but it ended up inadvertently becoming a reliable home server. The fact that it was able to reliably carry out all those duties for so long is a testament to its hardiness and also the power of a good stripped down Linux distro.