> Especially since the setup requires a Raspberry Pi to run permanently.
Which they'll gladly do no?
If (poor quality) SD card corruption is a concern, you can have the RPi mount the SD card read-only or just keep a full backup of the SD card.
I've had a RPi 1 power 4 VoIP Cisco phones for years. Zero issue.
I've got another one constantly establishing a remote SSH-tunnel so that I can easily troubleshoot my brother, who lives in another country, 's LAN. The uptime is more than a year.
One is routing (well, doing SNAT really) and firewalling between two non routable LANs. I set up the thing once and it's so reliable there's neither a screen nor a monitor hooked to it: just the power adapter and two ethernet cables (including one in a USB-to-ethernet adapter).
Another one is running unbound. Same: no monitor, no keyboard, no nothing. The power adapter and one ethernet cable. Simple. Not much can go wrong. No moving parts. It's happily null routing hundreds of thousands of crappy domain names 24/7.
I've got another one in a vintage arcade cab with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. In years it never failed to boot once. As we the others, just in case, I still have a "dd" of the entire SD card. Should something happen I'd just dd the image to a new SD card.
The shortage of RPi is apparently due to companies snapping them all for industrial uses.
I haven't heard of many people complaining "my RPi died overnight" (unlike, say, the Apple M1 laptop's screens).
They're incredibly reliable pieces of equipment for their gentle price. In case something goes wrong on one of mine, I just have a dump of the entire SD card.
I don't disagree that they may be a pain in the butt to set up, just like any server. But once setup, they don't move under your feet so the maintenance is really minimal.
I hate that there's a shortage of Pi but I'm not sure that criticizing them as "non reliable" is a criticism made in good faith.
I'm not sure OP was necessarily implying that the Pi specifically wasn't suitable for the job -- perhaps just that requiring /any/ other additional computer to achieve this is not without additional administrative overhead and power costs.
It does seems likely that a Pi is going to consume a fair bit less energy than the x86 SFF PC, so it's probably a net gain there, but that admin overhead thing isn't necessarily one to ignore -- it's not entirely set and forget.
Man I loved my RPi remote SSH-tunnel for being able to access my home network from anywhere... until my kid needed a Pi for a robot he got for Christmas and I decided to donate mine to the cause :)
Which they'll gladly do no?
If (poor quality) SD card corruption is a concern, you can have the RPi mount the SD card read-only or just keep a full backup of the SD card.
I've had a RPi 1 power 4 VoIP Cisco phones for years. Zero issue.
I've got another one constantly establishing a remote SSH-tunnel so that I can easily troubleshoot my brother, who lives in another country, 's LAN. The uptime is more than a year.
One is routing (well, doing SNAT really) and firewalling between two non routable LANs. I set up the thing once and it's so reliable there's neither a screen nor a monitor hooked to it: just the power adapter and two ethernet cables (including one in a USB-to-ethernet adapter).
Another one is running unbound. Same: no monitor, no keyboard, no nothing. The power adapter and one ethernet cable. Simple. Not much can go wrong. No moving parts. It's happily null routing hundreds of thousands of crappy domain names 24/7.
I've got another one in a vintage arcade cab with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. In years it never failed to boot once. As we the others, just in case, I still have a "dd" of the entire SD card. Should something happen I'd just dd the image to a new SD card.
The shortage of RPi is apparently due to companies snapping them all for industrial uses.
I haven't heard of many people complaining "my RPi died overnight" (unlike, say, the Apple M1 laptop's screens).
They're incredibly reliable pieces of equipment for their gentle price. In case something goes wrong on one of mine, I just have a dump of the entire SD card.
I don't disagree that they may be a pain in the butt to set up, just like any server. But once setup, they don't move under your feet so the maintenance is really minimal.
I hate that there's a shortage of Pi but I'm not sure that criticizing them as "non reliable" is a criticism made in good faith.