Upgrade HW from Raspberry Pi to something a bit more durable

General Help
1

I’ve been running FreePBX on a Pi 2 for a few months now. I spent time figuring it out and have to say this is a great solution for getting to know FreePBX. I had some great help with one or two minor issues from this community and it is greatly appreciated.

Now I want to take things up a notch as although the Pi is great for projects and fiddling around, sooner or later the SD card will fail and I’ll have to start from scratch again. I’ve cloned the SD in the event that it all goes a bit Pete Tong, but want to put my FreePBX on some proper HW now.

More than likely I’ll go with an i3 NUC or something similar - I want to keep this as low power as possible.

So - how can I take the config from my Pi and place it on the NUC?
What files/folders can I copy to the NUC?

This is assuming of course that I have already downloaded and installed FreePBX on a newly formatted PC.

Many thanks
-s

2

If FreePBX major versions match use backup and restore: https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FPG/Backup+and+Restore+Module

Otherwise use the conversion script: https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/PPS/Elastix+and+PBXinaFlash+to+FreePBX+Distro+Conversion+Tool

3

Off question, but im curious if you’ve looked into something like LattePanda or AtomicPi. They would likely be a cheaper and somewhat smaller power footprint, but not as nicely packaged as the NUC, for sure.

4

IF you wanted to stay with a Pi, I believe that the Pi3 and some Pi2’s have the ability to boot and run from a USB attached hard drive. No need to worry about killing an SD card over time.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md

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5

Instead of booting from USB (which requires blowing a fuse, so that’s permanent), you can simply leave the boot partition on the SD card and put everything else on a USB SSD or hard drive. Unless you are updating the kernel, the boot partition never gets written, so it shouldn’t wear out.

For example:

~# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot vfat defaults 0 2
/dev/sda1 / ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime,nodiratime,commit=120 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,nodev,nosuid 0 0
/dev/sda2 /dvr ext4 noatime,commit=120 0 0
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6

Just as a point of information, cheap ssd usb disks and sd cards use the the same underlying technology, so wear-levelling is not necessarily as better as you would like.

I would definitely get an atomic pi as has been suggested for $40 (they are flying off the shelf so be quick) the emmc drives are well thought out.

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7

Guys,
Many thanks for all these great suggestions.
I’m planning on rolling this out over the next month or so.
Cheers

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