You might have noticed that my site was down for maintenance on Wednesday, 2014-09-17. For better WordPress performance, I decided to migrate my blog to a brand-new Banana Pi server, featuring a Cortex-A7/ Allwinner A20 Dual-core CPU with Mali-400M2 GPU — that’s cheating — I know 😀.
It took me a couple of hours and some tinkering to move my WordPress installation including the MySQL database onto the new server. So here are my first impressions:
My laser printer is placed far away from my desk and automatically connects to my WLAN router when it is switched on. I do not use the printer frequently, so that it is idle most of the time. Recently, I started some experiments controlling the light of my aquarium using a 433 MHz remote switch, which worked like a charm. I thought that it would be nice to save some power by letting the printer start as soon as a new print job arrives to the printer. So here is how it works:
If you’re running out of space on your Pi’s SD memory card or want to share folders under Linux, you should consider using the Linux network file system (NFS). All you need to do is to install rpcbind, nfs-common and nfs-kernel-server on your Pi.
On a freshly installed you must enable the rpcbind service before you can start the nfs-kernel-server:
$ sudo update-rc.d rpcbind enable
The network file system is particularly useful if you want to merge folders across your home network which reside on different systems. In order to listen to my ogg/mp3 music collection I’ve attached a Raspberry Pi to the AUX input of my Hi-Fi equipment. The collection resides on a USB stick and can be accessed with the music player daemon (mpd) and Minion, so that I can use my smartphone as a remote. Another music collection resides on my AVM Fritz Box, which acts as a mediaserver and NAS.
Wireless LAN routers such as the AVM Fritz!Box can be particularly useful for integration of hard discs and memory sticks as a Network Attached Storage (NAS).
For MS Windows environments, access to these network drives is achived with the SMB and NMB protocols. However, the Fritz!Box firmware doesn’t support sharing of volumes through UNIX’s NFS protocol.
If you’re a lucky owner of a Fritz!Box, you’re probably not aware that an embedded Linux OS hides underneath AVM’s configuration frontend. With a few steps you can modify your Fritz!Box firmware, replacing it with Freetz to enhance your box’ functions.
Freetz is a firmware-extension (modification) for the AVM Fritz!Box and devices with identical hardware. The original firmware from the manufacturer is extended with new functions and programs which may be selected by the user.
As I’m hosting my blog on a Raspberry Pi, I did some research on the web about it’s performance as a server. I started this site with Apache and migrated after a while to Lighttpd which already reduced server response time (3.6 seconds, according to Google’s PageSpeed Insights it reached 72/100 points) and improved performance. With an DSL upload speed of only 676 kbit/s one shouldn’t expect miracles anyway. Google’s PageSpeed results, which suggested to make a couple of changes to my site, and a comparison of Lighttpd vs. Nginx convinced me to migrate to Nginx.
Continue reading What performs better on a RasPi: Apache, Lighttpd or Nginx?