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What to do with older Pi's
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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I use a 3B as a low-power NUT server and power orchestrator with my UPS and a managed PDU. It's set up with a read-only file system to protect against corruption. It's connected to the UPS for status so that if power goes down it can manage the power off timing for servers and network gear. I have a low power rack and a long runtime UPS to keep the core Internet access components up as long as possible.
If the UPS runtime ends the 3B gets a bad shutdown. But with the read only fs it'll happily boot when power returns and then it brings up all the gear in a controlled way. This has saved me a couple of times already while traveling.
I always have my sdcards just be the grub disk and all the root and other partitions are on a USB drive that is on it (I moved mostly to clones that have eMMC but this is what my older pis use).
Same here. I have 2 other Pi servers and they've got no SD card - one has a USB SSD and the other is NVMe on the Pi 5.
On this one I was only somewhat concerned about SD rot. It was more that on a read/write file system any bad shutdown has a small chance of corrupting something. I wanted it to be bulletproof since it's got to come up to start the other gear when I'm far from home and unable to fsck and troubleshoot.