!!! This software is in alpha stage, i dont recommend using it in production !!!

About

Ever wanted to just install a new system or backup your RPi4 node in your cluster without the hussle of pulling the sd card out, flashing it on a PC and putting it back in? This is exacly the reason i started this. Awsome raspberry pi cluster management software you can host on your PC, server or one of your nodes.

This software is designed with RPi4 and CM4 in mind, but can also work with RPi3 and older. Just not all features will be available (boot order change, needs to be done manualy).

Features

• Manage Raspberry Pi cluster
• Reboot / Shutdown nodes remotely
• Netboot node for recovery
• Backup / Restore node
• Easy reinstall through netboot, without removing sd card or usb device.
• Agentless
• Change boot order (only RPi4+)
• Tested on Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu

For updates see CHANGELOG.md

Quick start

docker run -d -v ~/data:/.data -v ~/backups:/nfs/backups --restart unless-stopped --privileged --network host knobik/rpicloud

• --privileged is needed to have control over nfs kernel module and loop devices for mounting the base image.
• --network host simplifies network configuration for the dhcp, tftp, nfs, http services.

Login to web UI:

login: [email protected]
password: admin

Node setup

Set RPi4 boot order by editing the eeprom settings. Netboot then sd / usb boot order. (i use BOOT_ORDER=0xf132 which means netboot -> usb -> sdcard -> restart, to boot faster you can also set DHCP_TIMEOUT=5000 and DHCP_REQ_TIMEOUT=500).

This is simplified by a boot order change tool for RPi4 in our software. RPi3 and older need to be hand configured for netboot.

Development

Requirements

• Docker version 19.03 or newer
• docker-compose version 1.25 or newer

Setup

Clone the repository and build the image

git clone [email protected]:knobik/rpi-cluster-pxe.git
chmod +x build-dev.sh
bash ./build-dev.sh
docker-compose up

This will take a while, it needs to download all php and node dependencies and also download the latest raspberry pi os and set it up for pxe booting.

All operations are made inside the docker container, so you need to ssh into the container. You can do it easy with ./ssh.sh

Frontend development

$ cd /web && npm run dev

Hot reloaded frontend: http://localhost:3000

Backend development

$ cd /api

Side notes

• One netbooted PI at a time, booting multiple PI's from one image might corrupt the image or lead to operation errors.
• In the background, dd is used to make an img of your sd card and then a script is used to resize it so each backup doesnt take 16/32+ GB of space ;) This means you need atleast as much free space on your host as the size of your sd card / usb drive.

Todo

• Validate free disk space before making a backup
• User management (now the user is [email protected], we need to change that!)
• Export inventory to ansible
• Multiple netboot images, preferably one per node or a netboot pool. (maybe, each netboot image takes atleast 3GB+ of disk space)****