Less that 48 hours after the construction of HiFiPi, everything has been stripped down and rebuild following a house server meltdown.

The house server used to be a Raspberrypi B which connected to an external hard drive. After a lightstrike took out the Pi, I replaced the server with an old white donated EeePC 900A. This is a handy little light laptop, with a real keyboard and touchpad. There is one little problem - The internal SSD harddrive is 3GB. The initial debian install weighed in at 2.9Gb and stripping everything back to the barebones made a working computer system.

With time, the OS expanded and a couple of piece of magic managed to extend the system onto the external harddrive. On Sunday, enough was enough and the harddrive was 100% full and subsequent recoveries lead to the system completely dying.

The old laptop server still worked, it just had a full hard drive. I couldn't find a small version of a debian-esq system which would fit onto the harddrive. Puppy Linux worked amazingly with Eeepc but the thought of repurposing a whole OS to become a server with no certain of the installation working and

The only option, as the server is our house media server and a house without TV with one person on bedrest and a young baby is a recipe for disaster, was to repurpose the HiFiPi as the multi-purpose server. A careful back up via DD of the OS (dd bs=4M if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=./Backupimg) provide to be a wise move.

The initial attempts of installing a new OS failed due to :

1. a corrupt sdcard 1. numerous dodgey under-powered power supplies. (it seems that the Rpi3 needs 2A for the most reliable operation as a heavy load draw more current that most adaptors can give resulting in a continuous reboot loop

Using the original HIFI os, I expanded it to run as NFS/tv downloader server but running syncthing draws too much current. It also appears that the NFS implementation in Jessie has a problem with rpcbind and requires new services to be installed (see here

I've ordered a new RPI and case and have two power adaptors on the way and have a working media server and a new mini-laptop which will be used as a chromium-based webbook - The keyboard makes using Google docs a lot easier than with a tablet.