Thanks so much for sharing this. A few months ago I was looking up these kits on ebay and was floored to see how much they go for. The pirate sets are some of my favorite and earliest memories. I remember getting the Cross Bone Clipper and playing with that thing daily for maybe two years.
You can specify the behavior in a few places, gui, occ command, config.php. By default no, but if you have an app you want to force in regardless of the version compatibility you can make it so https://help.nextcloud.com/t/help-what-is-app-install-overwrite-for/71523
i ran this setup for years! One controller, three worker nodes, all Pi4b’s. Someone mentioned that 4gb would be rather limiting; it certainly can be, but I never hit the ram ceiling. For me, disk writes and cpu were the noticeable constraint. In my first iteration I was using the fastest sandisk extreme pro whatever sd cards were at the time. My second iteration was running all hosts on usb-sata enclosures, and this was a huge improvement. I really can’t recommend that route enough. If you can commit to a little cable management and maybe figure out something clean for stacking or standing the enclosures, it doesn’t have to look terrible.
Regarding matching hardware, for a year I ran an old i5 lenovo thinkpad as just another worker node. It was fine, and was a pretty useful experience in running a cluster with mixed architecture. The only hiccups were those that come with a headless laptop setup. Sometimes rebooting could be dicey, stuff like that.
The only databases I was running at the time were sqlite (for the various *arrs). These would corrupt every few months, but these were not running on the sd cards, but on ssds and mounted over nfs. So yeah, don’t go running sqlite over nfs.
edit: I imagine the warning about not running databases on the cards are about prematurely wearing out the cards. Seems like there are a few pi-oriented projects that lean on sqlite, though, so I’m not sure.
edit: Also just remembered that I experimented with running one node on one of those ssds that are pressed into the form factor of a usb stick. Again, sandisk extreme pro line, 128gb. I ended that after getting total freezes every few weeks. I can’t say whether it was a faulty device or some incompatibility at play. I never did proper benchmarks with this against the ugreen sata usb enclosures, but it certainly did not feel any faster than the enclosures.
Yep, same. I would add that if you get a compatible usb sata enclosure and run the OS off that the performance improvement is tangible, but i still felt it wasnt worth running nextcloud this way. Even on a pentium nuc i feel this just barely put nextcloud over the acceptable threshold.
I try various 1 cup recipes from time to time and I still wind up back on this one.