Raspberry Pi
I’ve long been a fan of the Raspberry Pi.
We’ve given them away as prizes at the New Zealand Moodle Moot, and I’ve got a mini-farm / stack of 4 Raspberry Pi’s on a sub-network (known as a “Bramble” lol) so I can model a full Server, Database, Moodle, and Repository system.
It’s not super-fast, and I run them all headless (no keyboard or mouse), but it’s been a fun and relatively cheap project.
Managing Director at HRDNZ
Stuart is interested in all things e-learning, with specific interests in Moodle, e-learning strategy, and business development.His experience in education over 30 years, MBA in International Business, and knowledge of e-learning systems implementation, together with graphic design background, give him a unique skill set for e-learning projects.
Latest posts by Stuart Mealor (see all)
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I love the ‘Pi’ too and now have three! My first was an early model B, but sadly died due to the SD card slot failing. My second is a B+ and third a 3-B. I think they are great machines. I did once get Moodle 1.9 up and running on the model B but found that it needed a HD attached to speed up the swap / cache process, even then a page load took around five minutes. I’ve not tried on the model 3-B yet which is much more powerful and has more memory.
I managed to get Moodle 3.0 running OK on a mini-Pi network (called a “bramble” lol) using one Pi as the webserver (using nginx which is more lightweight than Apache) and then another RPi for the database, and another for the data files, all on a little sub-network. I did some serious tuning of the PI’s, and only accessed via ssh (saving GPU). I got a small page load down to about 10 seconds 🙂 Even so, it was more an experiment and personal challenge, and I don’t think it would be a viable option in reality (possible good for teaching a bit about networking though? 🙂 I could have used my final Pi as a proxy/cache and maybe got even quicker … but I ran out of time … so far ! lol