This Pi3 B and is very interesting device. I operate a small DevOps Lab of a handful of servers and workstations including 2 Acer chromebooks modified to include 16 Gb ram and SSD's running Xubuntu 16.04.
I recently put together the lowest cost server using a $35 Pi 3 board. A similar cloud server from Digital Ocean includes a recurring monthly cost around $10. Make no mistake about it, the Pi 3 at 1.2 GHz and only 1 Gb ram is not fast but it can be a useful device in the DevOps lab.
The board boots from a micro sd card and I worked with a few OS alternatives before loading the Ubuntu minimal OS on a 32 Gb card and leaving it for now. I will likely revisit this and try the Ubuntu Snappy Core on a 64 Gb Samsung EVO sd card.
Nevertheless this is quite a capable little device as far as ubuntu servers go. I loaded it with the latest 16.04 server minimalist version. I managed to get a 1 Tb drive attached to it and created swap space and storage volumes. I can use it as my local git repository and run nginx as well for the web server. The only limitation as far as my work is concerned is that it will not run virtualbox. I installed docker and experienced no issues, just pleasant surprises.
Since I manage several other machines in this lab with ansible and ssh the Pi server can be operated in a headless fashion. I do have a keyboard and monitor hooked up but I really find the best utility is via ssh. The keyboard and monitor are easily shifted to other devices if necessary in the lab and they frequently are.
I tried using the nextcloud server but could not get the supplied sd card to get far enough into the boot sequence to be useable. It is likely I will try this again next week with another Pi 3 board I have on order.
That's it for now, stay tuned for more reports from the Tessaract DevOps Laboratory.
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