Matt Gerega

Tag: Banana Pi

  • Building a new home for my proxy server

    With my BananaPi up and running again, it’s time to put it back in the server cabinet. But it’s a little bit of a mess down there, and I decided my new 3D modeling skills could help me build a new home for the proxy.

    Find the Model

    When creating a case for things, having a 3D model of the thing you are creating becomes crucial. Sometimes, you have to model it yourself, but I have found that grabcad.com has a plethora of models available.

    A quick search yielded a great model of the Banana PI. This one is so detailed that it has all of the individual components modeled. All I really needed/wanted was the mounting hole locations and the external ports, but this one is useful for much more. It was so detailed, in fact, that I may have added a little extra detail just because I could.

    General Design

    This case is extremely simple. The Banana Pi M5 (BPi from here on out) serves as my reverse proxy server, so all it really needs is power and a network cable. However to ensure the case was more useful, I added openings for most of the components. I say most because I fully enclosed the side with the GPIO ports. I never use the GPIO pins on this board, so there was really no need to open those up.

    For this particular case, the BPi will be mounted on the left rack, so I oriented the tabs and the board in such a way that the power/HDMI ports were facing inside the rack, not outside. This also means that the network and USB ports are in the back, which works for my use case.

    A right-mount case with power to the left would put the USB ports at the front of the rack. However, I only have one BPi, and it is going on the left, so I will not be putting that one together.

    Two Tops

    With the basic design in place, I exported the simple top, and got a little creative.

    Cool It Down…

    My BPi kit came with a few heatsinks and a 24mm fan. Considering the proxy is a 24×7 machine, and it is handling a good bit of traffic, I figured it best to keep that fan in place. So I threw a cut-out in for the fan and its mounting screws.

    Light it up!

    On the side where the SD card goes, I closed off everything except the SD card itself. This includes the LEDs. As I was going through the design, I thought that it might be nice to be able to peek into the server rack and see the power/activity LEDs. And, I mean, that rack already looks like a weird Christmas tree, what are a few more lights.

    I had to do a bit of research to actual to find the actual name for the little plastic pieces that can carry LED lights a distance. They are called “light pipes.” I found some 3mm light pipes on Amazon, and thought that would be a good add to the build.

    The detail of the BPi model I found made this task REALLY easy: I was able to locate the center of the LED and project it onto the case top. A few 3mm holes later, and the top is ready to accept light pipes.

    Put it all together

    I sent my design over to Pittsburgh3DPrints.com, which happens to be about two miles from my house. A couple days later, I had a PLA print of the model. As this is pretty much sitting in my server cabinet all day, PLA is perfect for this print.

    Oddly enough, the trick to this one was to be able to turn off the BPi to install it. I had previously setup a temporary reverse proxy as I was messing with the BPi, so I routed all the traffic from the BPi to the temp proxy, and the shutdown the BPi.

    Some Trimming Required

    As I was designing this case, I went with a best-guess for tolerances. I was a little off. The USB and audio jack cutouts needed to be taller to allow the BPi to be installed in the case. Additionally, the stands were too thick and the screw fan holes too thin. I modified these designs in drawings, however, for the printed model, I just made them a little larger with an Exact-o blade.

    I heat-set a female M3 insert into the case body. I removed the fan from the old case top and attached it to my new case top. After putting the BPi into place in the case bottom, I attached the fan wires to the GPIO ports to get power. I put the case top on, placing the tabs near the USB ports first. Screwed in an M3 bolt and dropped three light pipes into the case top. They protruded a little, so I cut them to sit flush while still transmitting light.

    Finished Product

    BPi in assembled case
    Case Components

    Overall I am happy with the print. From a design perspective, having a printer here would have alleviated some of the trimming, as I could have test printed some smaller parts before committing.

    I posted this print to Makerworld and Printables.com. Check out the full build there!

  • An epic journey…

    I got all the things I needed to diagnose my BananaPi M5 issues. And I took a very long, windy road to a very simple solution. But I learned an awful lot in the process.

    Reconstructing the BananaPi M5

    I got tired of poking around the BananaPi M5, and decided I wanted to start from scratch. The boot order of the BananaPi means that, in order to format the EMMC and start from scratch, I needed some hardware.

    I ordered a USB to Serial debug cable so that I could connect to the BananaPi (BPi from here on out), interrupt the boot sequence, and use uboot to wipe the disk (or at least the MBR). That would force the BPi to use the SD as a boot drive. From there, I would follow the same steps I did in provisioning the BPi the first time around.

    For reference, with the cable I bought, I was able to connect the debug using Putty with the following settings:

    Your COM port will probably be different: open the Device Manager to find yours.

    I also had to be a little careful about wiring: When I first hooked it up, I connected the transmit cable (white) to the Tx pin, and the receive cable (green) to the Rx pin. That gave me nothing. Then I realized that I had to swap the pins: The transmit cable (white) goes to the Rx pin, and the receive cable (green) goes to the Tx pin. Once swapped, the terminal lit up.

    I hit the reset button on the BPi, and as soon as I could, I hit Ctrl-C. This took me into the uboot console. I then followed these steps to erase the first 1000 blocks. From there, I had a “cleanish” BPi. To fully wipe the EMMC, I booted an SD card that had the BPI Ubuntu image, and wiped the entire disk:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M

    Where /dev/mmcblk0 is the address of the EMMC drive. This writes all zeros to the EMMC, and cleaned it up nicely.

    New install, same problem

    After following the steps to install Ubuntu 20.04 to the EMMC, I did an apt upgrade and a do-release-upgrade to get up to 22.04.3. And the SAME network issue reared its ugly head. Back at it with fresh eyes, I determined that something changed in the network configuration, and the cloud-init setup that had worked for this particular BPI image is no longer valid.

    What were the symptoms? I combed through logs, but the easiest identifier was, when running networkctl, eth0 was reporting as unmanaged.

    So, I did two things: First, disable the network configuration in cloud-init by changing /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-fake_cloud.cfg to the following:

    datasource_list: [ NoCloud, None ]
datasource:
  NoCloud:
    fs_label: BPI-BOOT
network: { config : disable }

    Second, configure netplan by editing /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml:

    network:
    ethernets:
        eth0:
            dhcp4: true
            dhcp-identifier: mac
    version: 2

    After that, I ran netplan generate and netplan apply, and the interface now showed as managed when executing networkctl. More importantly, after a reboot, the BPi initialized the network and everything is up and running.

    Backup and Scripting

    This will be the second proxy I’ve configured in under 2 months, so, well, now is the time to write the steps down and automate if possible.

    Before I did anything, I created a bash script to copy important files off of the proxy and onto my NAS. This includes:

    • Nginx configuration files
    • Custom rsyslog file for sending logs to loki
    • Grafana Agent configuration file
    • Files for certbot/cloudflare certificate generation
    • The backup script itself.

    With those files on the NAS, I scripted out restoration of the proxy to the fresh BPi. I will plan a little downtime to make the switch: while the switchover won’t be noticeable to the outside world, some of the internal networking takes a few minutes to swap over, and I would hate to have a streaming show go down in the middle of viewing…. I would certainly take flak for that.

  • Going Banana

    That’s right… just one banana. I have been looking to upgrade the Raspberry PI 3 that has been operating as home lab’s reverse proxy. While it would have been more familiar to find another Raspberry Pi 4 to use, their availability is, well, terrible. I found a workable, potentially more appropriate, solution in the Banana Pi M5.

    If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…

    Then the Raspberry Pi Foundation should be blushing so much they may pass out. A Google search of “Rasbperry Pi Alternatives 2023” leads to a trove of reviews on various substitutes. Orange Pis, Rock Pis, Banana Pis…. where do I begin?

    It is suffice to say that Single Board Computers (SBCs) have taken a huge step forward in the past few years, and many companies are trying to get in the game. It became clear that, well, I needed a requirements list.

    Replacing the Pi3 Proxy

    I took a few minutes to come up with my requirements list:

    • Ubuntu – My Pi3 Proxy has been running Nginx on Ubuntu for over a year. I’m extremely comfortable with the setup that I have, including certbot for automating SSL and the Grafana Agent to report statistics to Mimir. My replacement needs to run Ubuntu, since I have no desire to learn another distro.
    • Gigabit Ethernet – The Pi3 does not support true Gigabit ethernet because of the USB throughput. I want to upgrade, since the proxy is handling all of my home lab traffic. Of note, though: I do not need Wifi or Bluetooth support.
    • Processor/Memory – The Pi3 runs the 1.4 GHz Quad Core Cortex A53 processor with a whopping 1GB of RAM. Truthfully, the Pi3 handles the traffic well, but an upgrade would be nice. Do I need 8GB of RAM? Again, nice to have: my minimum is 4 GB.
    • eMMC – Nginx does a lot of logging, and I worry a bit about the read/write limits on the SD cards. As I did my research, a few of the Pi alternatives have eMMC flash memory onboard. This would be a bit more resilient than an SD card, and should be faster. There are also some hats to support NVMe drives. So, yes, I want some solid memory.

    Taking this list of requirements, I started looking around, and one board stood out: the Banana Pi M5.

    Not the latest Banana in the bunch

    The Banana Pi M5 is not the newest model from Banana Pi. The M6 is their latest offering, and sports a much stronger chipset. However, I had zero luck finding one in stock for a reasonable price. I found a full M5 kit on Amazon for about $120 USD.

    The M5’s Cortex-A55 is a small step up from the RPi3 and sports 4GB of RAM, so my processor/memory requirements were met.

    Gigabit ethernet? Check. The M5 has no built-in Wifi, but, for what I need it for, I frankly do not care.

    Ubuntu? This one was tough to source: their site shows downloads for Ubuntu 20.04 images, but I had to dig around the Internet to verify that someone was able to run a release upgrade to get it to 22.04.

    eMMC? A huge 16GB eMMC flash chip. Based on my current usage, this will more than cover my needs.

    The M5 looked to be a great upgrade to my existing setup without breaking the bank or requiring me to learn something new. Would it be that easy?

    Making the switch

    After receiving the M5 (in standard Amazon 2 day fashion), I got to work. The kit included a “built it yourself” case, heatsinks, and a small fan. After a few minutes of trying to figure out how the case went together, I had everything assembled.

    Making my way over to the M5 Wiki, I followed the steps on the page. Surprisingly, it really was that simple. I imaged an SD card so I could boot Ubuntu, then followed their instructions for installing the Linux image to EMMC. I ejected the SD Card, rebooted, and I was up and running.

    A quick round of apt upgrade and do-release-upgrade later, and I was running Ubuntu 22.04. Installed nginx, certbot, and grafana-agent, copied my configuration files over from the old Pi (changing the hostnames, of course), and I was re-configured in easily under 30 minutes.

    The most satisfying portion of this project was, oddly enough, changing the DNS entries and port forwarding rules to hit the M5 and watching the log entries switch places:

    The green line is log entries from the M5, the yellow line is log entries from the Pi3. You can see I had some stragglers hitting the old pi, but once everything flushed out, the Pi was no longer in use. I shut it down to give it a little break for now, as I contemplate what to do with it next.

    Initial Impressions

    The M5 is certainly snappier, although load levels are about the same as were reported by the RPi3. The RPi3 was a rock, always on, always working. I hope for the same with the M5, but, unfortunately, only time will tell.