As described in a previous post, I use a Raspberry Pi as an emoncms server. And as it seems to occur for quite a number of users, SD card eventually gets corrupted after a week or so and Pi would crash and never reboots until I re-installed the OS.

First thing that came to mind was : “ok… the only thing that is quite write intensive is the mySQL database…” so I moved it to my Synology NAS. Now, emoncms barely writes anything onto the SD card. Did not last much longer…

So my second thought was “ok… SD card is not good enough, lets try another one…” My Pi worked for a while… a month or so… and finally crashed.

I came to the conclusion that I could not use a Pi for a reliable 24×7 system, and more specifically my emoncms setup… until I stumbled across this blog post : Rock-solid RFM2Pi gateway solution. The idea is quite simple but clever : set the file system as read only, using this version of Raspbian : IPE. But… hey… (almost) any apps needs some place to write to… Even if, in my case, I already setup an external database, apache probably won’t work on a read only file system out of the box. And worse, emoncms code probably writes some stuff on the file system (like traces or logs.)

So I thought I could mount the root file system from an NFS share that I created on my NAS. I will then have R/W capability on root file system but a read only SD card. I also had a look at iSCSI instead of NFS… but it way more complex and probably an overkill for a Raspberry Pi.

Stay tuned… I will try that soon !