PiShrink VS log2ram

To resize images from a Raspberry Pi to the actual used size you can use https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink. With a little luck, this can also be applied to other images. Or you can create your own solution based on it.

I run a full dd to create an image and then run pishrink https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink on it. I used to manually size the partition down with gparted and calculate how much to dd and then gparted the new card to expand the partition - too much work. Pishrink does all the work for you and is fast.

Reducing logging, logging to ram and writing to the sdcard once a day helps longevity a lot, especially with quality sd cards.

99% of the time it's the verbose logging of application servers that is the culprit of sdcard failures.

https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

If you've got other issues then it's quite likely that lots of small writes from logging and similar has worn out the SD card, mounting the SD card as read only or installing log2ram could prevent it happening to another SD card.

> writing permanent its log files and swap partition

If this is the problem, the solutions are no swap and log2ram https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

I also noticed that Armbian logs to a ramdisk. I didn't investigate the implementation and if its contents survive a reboot.

The only real problems for me are that the SD card will eventually fail no matter what (I mean, much sooner than a SDD or HDD) and that there are basically no Pis at sale at a reasonable price. As a platform it is nearly dead.

In addition to the other helpful suggestions you’ve received, look into using Log2Ram. It does what it sounds like, puts log writes in ram and then writes them to disk on a slower cadence that doesn’t work your SD card that much.

https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

SD cards are not the most overall durable medium out there. I'm not sure what cards does Pi Hut offer but something like Sandisk Endurance is what people usually recommend for the Pis. Consider installing log2ram to put less stress on the SD card. You could also set up the OS to sit on two USB sticks in RAID, as some people do for higher reliability and uptime. Personally I've been using my Pi4 with a SSD since the beginning, as I've had SD cards act very unreliably on other SBCs I owned. I also run Pi-hole on my Pi4 and I really don't want to deal with family stressing me out about no internet connection while being forced to diagnose a dead SD card haha.

Thanks for sharing, didn't know that.

Similar PSA: a common Pi complaint is that SD cards wear out quickly under 24/7 use. Routing most logs to memory rather than disk vastly reduces the wear on the SD: https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

This kind of SD abuse was precisely what log2ram was designed to solve.

Setting the address pool was needed to use Unbound (goes great with Pihole), but isn't necessary. Instead of this base, you can use any subnet defined [https://www.arin.net/reference/research/statistics/address_filters/](here) and it will work with Unbound. The storage driver was already like that. The data-root is self-explanatory. More details - install https://github.com/azlux/log2ram to lower sd card usage - sudo apt install -y ufw UFW is an awesome yet simple firewall. Look into it. - I personally email myself at every SSH login and shell use. Look into setting up exim4, then add echo "message" | mail -s 'subject' [email protected] at the end of ~.bashrc and /etc/ssh/sshrc (create this one if it doesn't exist). I also added SMS notifications, your phone provider likely has a system setup that you can trigger too. Check your_provider sms api to see how to do this. - look into setting up unattended-upgrades, you will likely have to sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades to change default settings. Add packages by checking sudo apt-cache policy. - Look into setting up a backup system, it is very important. I like Duplicati because it's easy, find something for you. - Rootless Docker doesn't update automatically for now, remember once in a while to upgrade it manually. - Look into setting up logrotate whenever you install a new package and it has logs in a file in /var/log. The default settings are in /etc/logrotate.d, it's not complicated. I do it for all my public Internet facing containers in order to avoid growing 10GB log files and wonder why my system is bugging. - Set up fail2ban in a container for all your public Internet facing services (I avoid this for SSH, if Docker bugs then you can't ban IPs for SSH). crazymax/fail2ban is great. - containrrr/watchtower:arm64v8-latest is nice to auto-update containers - pihole/pihole + klutchell/unbound is great for recursive DNS + filter queries - SECURITY: setup a network every time you need 2 containers to talk. I currently have around 40, and that caused some network collisions with default settings (Docker gave the same address to 2 networks) so I setup every network manually (just copy-pasting).