I have an old Pi hanging around doing nothing. When I originally got it it had the latest Pi OS with desktop loaded and ran like garbage, not surprisingly. So I messed with it headless for a bit, then found RISCOS as an option in Pi imager utility and that is just a neat OS. Fun to play around with for sure. But now I’m wondering what else I could use the old thing for. I see folks run Pihole on it, but I’ve already got 2 instances of Adguard Home running.
Could this handle Syncthing? Or would the data transfer be so bad it’s not worth it? Wouldn’t mind having an off-site backup device at my parents house if it would work.
Anyone else got one in their homelab?
Related to OP's question: is it possible to have the 1B boot from something other than an SD card?
I ran it as a PiHole for awhile, until it chewed through two SD cards. I'd like to use it for the GPIO functionality but I don't want have it randomly crap out again.
Yes you have the kernel in the SD card and the root on usb
You may want to try sd cards designed for security cameras. They are meant to be recorded to 24/7 and have higher write endurance.
I don't believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.
An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It's trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don't know about a modern Linux.