Raspberry PI

John Kotches

SatelliteGuys Master
Original poster
Supporting Founder
Nov 21, 2003
6,765
197
Troy, IL (STL Area)
I just picked one of these up after work today and am using it as a DHCP server. I will also be adding caching-only DNS capability to it tomorrow. Didn't feel like futzing with it today.

It installs a Debian distro which is just enough different from RedHat/CentOS to be mildly frustrating, mostly around things like managing services. Overall it's very good, and frankly as a DHCP server it is no slower than the Mac mini which was serving up addresses. Yes, I could use something else for DHCP, but I prefer giving all of my known devices static dhcp addresses. What this means is that the config file contains a fixed-address for all of my devices at my house. So only unknown/guest devices should have a dynamic address inside the defined range I set up.

This makes administration easy, as the device sets to DHCP and the system gladly leases the same address over and over.

The cost was:
$44 / Raspberry PI with case.
$10 / Charger.
$13 / 16GB class 10 SD card.

Very cool, but not much to look at to be honest.

To manage I installed VNC server and connect via Chicken of the VNC for MAC.

How many "known" devices do I have?
pi@raspberrypi:/etc/dhcp$ grep -c fixed-address dhcpd.conf
31
pi@raspberrypi:/etc/dhcp$

I'll freely admit there was no compelling need for me to do this, I wanted to do this. For cheap, it's a good little device. Of course the height of weirdness was connecting this little computer to my new 27" Dell WQHD monitor for initial setup.
 
Adding caching DNS, made very easy with dnsmasq. Updated dhcpd.conf to make the raspberry pi the primary DNS server.

Not bad at all.

DNS results went from ~30 msec to ~1 msec once the entry was cached.



Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk
 
I've been tempted to get a Raspberry Pi but don't have a bunch if free time to spend on it. Creating a DHCP server that doesn't use much electricity seems like a great idea and is probably 1000% better than the DHCP server on my 2Wire Gateway.

Know How over on TWiT showed how to make a Nintendo MAME using a Pi and a bunch of game ROMs. While watching it, they showed a custom case for the Raspberry Pi:
 

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