Sunday, January 31, 2021

31st of January

After a bit of break Marks Rpi Cluster is back online. I had building and painting happening so they were powered down while this took place. The cluster is busy again with Einstein and Rosetta work.

I powered up the farm starting with the two support nodes. They came up but for some reason couldn't be found on the network. I tracked this down to an issue with the power adapter for the switch that they were connected to. Once fixed I brought up the remaining Pi4's without any further incidents.

The following day I tried to get the Pi3's going and none of them would work. I had to plug a screen and keyboard into one to see what was happening. It seems all 6 of them had corrupt SD cards. I ended up having to re-image them and reinstall each one which took a little time. They're now running Einstein work.

I've ordered another Pi4 (2GB) to take over the time keeping role. At the moment the storage server Pi also has a GPS plugged in to provide time. I will move it over to this dedicated Pi, once it arrives. GPS's send strings of data every second that is interpreted and passed onto the NTP client. Its a constant CPU load (around 2-5% on a Pi4).

I will be chasing up the 3D printing studio regarding the revised Pi case tomorrow to see if I can get them sorted out. The last contact I had was on the 13th of January saying they would have the design finalised in a week. Its now been a fortnight. 


Saturday, January 9, 2021

10th of January

 I bought a couple of these

They call these the Heatsink Case. These cases are basically 2 pieces of anodised aluminium, some thermal pads and 4 screws. They are also available in a gold colour. With an ambient temperature of 25 degrees C they hover around 67 degrees when crunching so they help but are not as good as a fan case.

Having done the cases, both of these Pi4 4GB have been added to the cluster until the Pi^4 cases are sorted out. That brings Marks Rpi Cluster up to:

3 x Pi4 8GB
2 x Pi4 4GB
6 x Pi3
2 x Pi4 2GB support nodes


Kernel update
In other news the Raspberry Pi Foundation upgraded the kernel from 5.4 to 5.10 which has only recently been released. Debian haven't even got their 5.10 kernel out of testing yet.

The Rosetta app doesn't like being stopped and started which means I have to run each machine down so it has no work on board before upgrading it.