I recently completed a physical migration of my server, the one that hosts this very page! It all went successfully, and without any noticeable downtime for this site, which I am pleased to be able to do.

There was, however, a period of time during which this server needed to be physically switched off and moved to the new location. To enable zero downtime, something would need to be able to host the server during that period.

Enter my Raspberry Pi!

This amazing little thing is capable of running Raspbian, a modified version of Debian, which means I get access to the rich library of Debian packages that are available. I have a private Git repository containing a modular set of Puppet manifests. These describe the exact configuration of this server, so by applying the Puppet manifests, I can spin up a new instance of this particular server’s configuration on a whim.

So, I dusted off an SD card that was lying around, dropped Raspbian on it, and installed Puppet and Git and applied the manifests.

If I’m honest, there were a few components that weren’t quite so happy to run, despite packages being available. Varnish didn’t seem to like my VCL file, so I had to run the site here directly with Nginx pointing to PHP-FPM instead.

To cut a long story short, it worked! I was successfully serving up this site, from the Pi, using (almost) my existing configuration. Performance was not stellar, even compared to the modest hardware that normally serves this page, with page load times about 10 times slower than uncached page loads normally would be. The main blog page did take 1.5 seconds to render! For the short time I needed it though, I was very happy to have a very inexpensive and easy solution.

In other 2012 gadget acquisition news, I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi this year, too.

Ordered in the summer, and only delivered last month, due to the high demand, it is something I have not yet had an opportunity to play with as much as I would have liked. The advantage of having to wait that long, however, has been a beefier 512 MB version of the device!

In the spirit of my recent iPad mini post, here are some first thoughts on the device:

• It is amazing how much you can do on such a tiny and inexpensive device. With the Debian wheezy build that is the Pi’s default operating system, you have access to almost the same rich range of software packages on any other Debian system. I was able to install Nginx to serve up web pages at rapid speed, and I am quite sure it would be possible to completely replicate Van Patten Media’s Managed Hosting platform that I have spent much of the year working on, even on such a device!
• It is unashamedly geeky. This will probably be enough to put off some people who have received a Pi, but perhaps who don᾿t have the support in place to best use it. It isn’t that difficult to get started, but you do need to be able to get the OS onto an SD card. For me, though, I like that opportunity that it gives you.
• It legitimises the hobbyist again. This pleases me a lot. Many great things were achieved by (originally) hobbyist hackers; re-igniting that spirit has huge potential.

There is some irony in that the Pi is, in a number of ways, the polar opposite of the iPad — it is hobbyist rather than consumerist. The Pi gives you complete control but requires some fiddling, the iPad gives you little control but is so intuitive.

I leave this year much more satisfied about the state of computing because of these two devices.

Why? There is now opportunity for both consumer hardware, and hobbyist hardware, to co-exist and complement each other.