Can he make it available without the cost of a battery?   Seems like it would last longer stored away without a battery.  I’d rather run it off of a usb babbler pack or car battery if we are expecting to serve data when nothing else works.

So it’s a $250 raspberry pi with a download of Wikipedia?

I know there are more knowledge repos than that but they all appear to be open source and could likely be replicated without much effort. And maybe with a little better curation since I can’t imagine a survival situation where this would be useful and I’d need a reference on Buddhism, chess, economics, movies, etc. they’re listed mostly as “popular q&a” on each topic so I’m curious how much useful information there is.

Is there non-FOSS software that makes it work? It’s pretty vague.

The concept is interesting but still seems like something that could be replicated in a weekend for a fraction of the cost. And the final project doesn’t appear to be open source, so I’m not sure what the value add is.

TLDR #1: don't rely exclusively on the cloud, not even during "normal" times, use proper backup procedures and strategies. For those who are even mildly knowledgeable about information technology this is the most basic information imaginable. For those who are totally clueless there are much better videos out there that will teach how to do this, not just try to scare you to death.

The tip of the iceberg: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3-2-1+backup

Everyone has to find their own salvation. Personally I stay off the cloud. I use the classic 3-2-1 strategy but I don't use multiple media types, everything goes to a NAS somewhere, and my offsite NAS is one that I control (not everyone has that luxury).

One way to be substantially in control and have offsite backup is to have a friend host your offsite backup device, and maybe host one for him/her in exchange.

I didn't listen to every word he spoke, but the words "safety", "privacy" and "encryption" do not appear in the transcript. Any backup you can't physically control should be encrypted, and it's not a bad idea to encrypt your data locally, either.

TLDR #2: pocket-sized, off-line copy of Wikipedia. This is not a new concept. People have been doing this since Wikipedia became large enough to be useful. Super-prepper types will also include the kitchen sink of operator and maintenance manuals for stuff they own and even stuff they don't, medical info, survival info, etc., etc. Calling it "pocket internet" is BS, of course. Pocket encyclopedia/reference library is more accurate, but of course that doesn't get the clicks. Here's a couple of search links along these lines:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=local+copy+of+wikipedia

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=prepper+digital+reference+library

My point isn’t “I can make it cheaper” - it is that I’m unsure what this is that a $35 off the shelf pi isn’t. That’s why I asked about non-FOSS software. The website doesn’t show any screenshots of the web server in operation. Is it just an unindexed collection of directories? Does it have a search engine? Will it let you download selected content as an epub or pdf for reference on the phone?

Also, has any effort been put into securing it? Since it’s designed for use in a hostile environment, security is critical. If it’s being used as a store-and-forward messaging system, or even if some of the static content can be edited to give incorrect information, lack of security can quickly turn it from an asset to a liability.

I’m not ripping on it. This is an interesting idea that could be developed into something very useful. Especially if it integrated other types of wireless links like P2P ISM modems or packet TNCs or even digital modes on HF. It’s just that as it is described on the web page, it looks like a pi with some scraped web pages on it.

Without knowing if there is custom software, it’s hard to say exactly.

Pi, case, usb battery, flash card, waterproof box - $35-$75.

Pi Linux (probably a ham radio flavored one) - $0

The knowledge repository - $0 plus time to collate. There are several big lists of knowledge sources already compiled, so if you’re handy with curl and a little scripting, anywhere from 1-10 hours.

Web server, web crawler, local indexes - $0 and maybe 1 hour to set up.

The idea of archiving critical information is cool, but it's not much beyond this.

Attached File

Portable server?

How does his stuff mesh with atak?

That is for the first one. Once you have one configured the way you want it, you just clone the sd card. 5 seconds to initiate it, 5-20 mins for the data transfer.

Is there a mechanism to update this periodically? Does it require sneaker netting drives? Is there an online repo it will pull from? Do you have to rewrite the image each time?

Ask why he hates meshtastic so much.

None of this stuff is at all "special" or "tactical". It's just a web server that provides access to a repository of data. It's more a question of cheap/small/elegant.

You can roll your own on literally any hardware from an Arduino on up. Most people are building them using some sort of Pi hardware platform, for which there are endless off-the-shelf components. This one is the smallest I've seen--very cool! It's only $20 to buy one, plus you need an SD card. Spray it with some urethane conformal coating and then dip it in some Plasti-Dip to ruggedize it. After setup, plug it into a USB battery pack and Bob's your uncle.

As for ATAK, to serve up files to TAK users there needs to be a TAK Server on the network, and the network needs to have some bandwidth, i.e. it's not going to work over a narrowband radio link. If you are running a TAK server then you simply run a web server on that same device (the TAK server) and use a browser plug-in for TAK to access it.

The server is the neat part. Installing Kiwix and downloading articles to it for local use is kindergarten stuff.

Interesting. I was unaware of Kiwix. I'm more of a do-it-yourself guy, so I'd point people to here, but I can see how many folks would happily pay to play with Kiwix just for the simplicity of it.

The more I look into it, the more it looks like this project might be using Kiwix. Lots of the Kiwix content looks very similar.

I came here to link the wikipedia article on getting an offline copy of wikipedia which has already been linked.


Also - keep in mind SD cards aren't really appropriate for long term use as the main disk of any OS.  You need to take steps to ensure writes are prevented / avoided after you've finished building your appliance.

Smarter thing to do would be not to use something that uses and SD card for its OS, use something that uses EMMC or takes a standard NVME drive.

For some applications that makes sense. Such as a base station or semi permanent install, maybe vehicle mounted. It’s true that SD cards aren’t archival media, but they have become extremely reliable. Given the proliferation of rpis, GoPros, not to mention professional photography equipment that uses them (yes I know some pro cameras write to two cards simultaneously as backup), in my experience it is extremely rare to hear about a card failing even after extended r/w use in some pretty extreme environments.

Is there better industrial PC hardware and storage? Absolutely, no question. Is it possible to build a better solution without increasing the build cost by 2 orders of magnitude? Dunno, and I’d love to see the parts because I have a number of ruggedized industrial PCs that cost $500-700 and a cheaper solution would be great.

Rpis have been used in tons of crazy applications that were never imagined by the designers, which is fantastic. They’ve also held up to extremely demanding environmental conditions that would normally require bespoke or at least extraordinarily expensive equivalents. They’re cheap, low power, low to moderate spec, general purpose computers. I wouldn’t want one flying a missile or a rocket, but I’ve put them in high altitude balloons. Would I put one in a short-lived nanosat? Probably not, but I’d listen to the arguments for it, especially if there were 3 configured for consensus.

I have a lot of questions and concerns regarding this project, but the hardware isn’t even on the list. Especially given that the data is more or less static, it would be easier to carry a spare SD card, or even an entire spare unit as the A in PACE. If the use case tolerates this as a single point of failure, no worries. If not, rpis are tiny and cheap (not to mention lightweight) enough to carry spares.

IVs for keys presents a challenge, but nothing different than with any other COTS hardware. I can think of a few solutions off the top of my head, some made easier by having the full expansion header that rpis do.

I had a $250k piece of test equipment fail on me a couple of years ago.  Opened it up, it was a Raspberry Pi with a high end SDR and it had eaten its SD card -- the SD card was one of the highest end cards you can buy, it lasted about 3 years.  I don't know how they misconfigured it -- I'm sure they did, they weren't very competent, but that really pissed me off.  Obviously there are ways to configure a pi so it's less likely to eat its card, but I've seen it often enough that I generally don't use PIs anymore for anything.  

Balloons, sure.  Rockets, I'd want a real time OS, but you can sort of do that on pi.  

Where people just want a small PC I tend to go with those cheap little zotac/qtom/ whatever other name they sell them under for the really basic intel SBCs, with a nice metal case that doubles as a heat sink.  I've been running one of those for years as a firewall and I've used several of them for jump hosts in other systems.

I'm genuinely curious, was there actual damage to the SD card or was it just a corrupt filesystem? Depending on your FS choice, a rpi is just as likely to corrupt its filesystem upon power failure or hard crash as a Windows or Mac system (well, APFS has some nice design choices that lessen the risk vs HFS+, and probably MS has added some in recent years but I've still had multiple Windows systems wrecked in the last 3 years due to power failures or crashes - all with M.2 or SATA SSDs, giving those a higher failure rate than SD which over the same time period was 0 out of ~30 vs 3/40). Given the nature of SDRs (e.g. lots of data really fast) it's entirely possible that they made some "performance over reliability" choices that caused the inevitable to happen - especially if for some crazy reason they were writing data to the OS volume. There are plenty of options to add SATA to a rpi, and you can even add an M.2 controller for $10.

Atom and Zotac machines certainly have their place, but besides being 5-10 times the price, they all require more power than a USB battery pack can provide, not to mention dissipate much more heat resulting in the need for active cooling and thus increased noise and different installation requirements. They're certainly more capable machines but have a completely different set of requirements (and have a completely different use case) than we're talking about here.

I run a small meshtastic system in my AO, but I have my doubts over the security. governments HATE privacy and very actively hacks anything private or encrypted

ETA and OST

Actually wrecked it. Couldn’t get it to take an image or format anymore at all. Had to replace it and get them to send me a new image. I assume they were writing to the SD card, they knew it was a problem because they really stressed to get only the one with the right numbers on it for a replacement.

No fans in the zotac devices. Just half of the case is a heat sink, and they barely get warm. I never paid attention to the power consumption but it’s pretty low from what I remember. They’re certainly not desktop equivalent machines.

And yes, of course if battery life is important one will want something appropriate for that.

I have not lost a windows or Mac system due to hard drive corruption in at least fifteen years. I’ve never lost a ssd or m2/nvme drive at all. Back in the 90s, maybe up to the mid 2000s, definitely had issues with hard drive corruption that were a problem. SD cards, sometimes, thumb drives more than I can count, those things are almost all garbage.

Before that, I remember HP-UX could handle no more than two dirty shutdowns and then had to be rebuilt from tape.

That's almost a perfect use case for AREDN, or just off-the-shelf WISP stuff running peer-to-peer.