James A. Chambers | Page 2 | Legendary Technology Blog

Raspberry Pi 4 USB Boot Config Guide for SSD / Flash Drives

July 5, 2020 / 612 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Raspberry Pi, Single Board Computers, Storage

Raspberry Pi 4 with Samsung 950 Pro NVME SSD

The Raspberry Pi 4 is finally here and has a lot of exciting changes. One very major downside is that it doesn’t support true USB booting yet out of the box (like the 3 series did).
The Raspberry Pi foundation states that it is being worked on and will be added back with a future update. No timeline has been given yet for that to happen but they state it’s one of their top priorities.

Most of my projects heavily depend on having good performing storage so sitting and waiting was not an acceptable solution. In this guide I’ll show you a workaround to use USB devices as your rootfs device and use a Micro SD card as bootloader only which gives us full SSD performance after boot!

Early Bitcoin ASIC Miner Pictures / History / Analysis / Prices

June 7, 2019 / 3 Comments / Bitcoin, Crypto Mining, Cryptocurrency, Hardware, Raspberry Pi

The most competitive Bitcoin mining operations today consist of entire warehouses of large ASIC miners usually located near sources of renewable energy or power plants selling off excess energy production for cheap. To get seriously involved in the Bitcoin mining space of today will require you to already be quite wealthy and to put up some *serious* cash.

But things were not always this way. I found a bunch of pictures in my photo library of my old mining rigs back from the dawn of Bitcoin ASIC mining and wanted to share them. Let’s go on a journey together back to the year of 2013 and explore what old school Bitcoin mining ASIC hardware looked like, how much it cost, and what we can learn from them today!

Join Mac OS X Mojave to Active Directory Using Built In Tools

August 1, 2019 / 5 Comments / Active Directory, Apple, Mac OS X, Networking, Security

Joining a Mac to Active Directory has continued to get more and more difficult over the years. High Sierra and Mojave now require a Active Directory functional level of Windows Server 2008 or later and are still pretty tricky to get to join it.

When I started researching the topic I saw a whole lot of advice to install third party software to join a Mac to Active Directory. In most corporate environments installing third party software is frowned upon due to licensing and security considerations so I was determined to get the native Mac OS X tools to work.

This guide will walk you through the basic steps to join Active Directory without having to resort to using third party software.

Official Minecraft Bedrock Dedicated Server on Raspberry Pi*

January 4, 2020 / 36 Comments / Linux, Minecraft: Bedrock, Minecraft: Java, Raspberry Pi, Single Board Computers, Ubuntu

One of the most requested features in my Raspberry Pi Minecraft server guide is support for the Bedrock edition of Minecraft. This is the edition that powers Minecraft on iOS / Android / Xbox / Nintendo Switch as well as the free Windows 10 edition.

There’s one big problem though. The official Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server is only compiled for Windows and Ubuntu X86_64. Without ARM support it seems impossible to run the Bedrock dedicated server on a Raspberry Pi. I couldn’t find a documented instance of anyone doing it anywhere.

So naturally today in this guide we are going to do the impossible. But right off the bat let me point out that there is an asterisk in my article title. Why you ask? That is because unlike my other guides this one will not yield you a well performing server. That is because we will be emulating a x86_64 processor on ARM. This is slow. VERY slow.

Minecraft Bedrock Edition – Ubuntu Dedicated Server Guide

August 2, 2019 / 218 Comments / Intel Compute Stick, Linux, Minecraft: Bedrock, Minecraft: Java, Ubuntu

Minecraft Bedrock Edition is the version of Minecraft that powers the iPhone / Android versions (formerly Minecraft Pocket Edition), the Xbox / PlayStation / Nintendo Switch editions and the free Windows 10 Minecraft edition.

Mojang has released a dedicated server which is considered to be in alpha testing. I have found it to be very stable and able to run on a wide variety of hardware.

This script and guide are written to help you get a robust Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server up and running in only a few minutes!

Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks 2019 + Benchmarking Script

January 4, 2020 / 60 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, MicroSD, Raspberry Pi, Single Board Computers, Storage

Storage options continue to advance at a very fast pace. We’ve seen a lot of changes in the past couple of years with viable storage options for your Pi. Solid state drives are now so cheap that it can be cheaper to outfit your Pi with a SSD than buy a MicroSD card! MicroSD cards also continue to evolve with the new “Application Class” A1 and A2 certifications.

This year I wanted to do something more than just benchmark my ever-growing pile of MicroSD cards and solid state drives. Although I have a wide variety of storage to test I don’t have everything! So this time I created a benchmark that gives you a easy to compare score and anonymously submits the storage specifications and the results to this site.

Running the benchmark is a one-liner:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

Kali Linux P4wnP1 ALOA Guide – Setup / Usage / Examples

July 1, 2019 / 40 Comments / Kali, Linux, P4wnP1, Raspberry Pi, Security, Single Board Computers

P4wnP1 A.L.O.A. is a tool for the Raspberry Pi Zero W that allows you to plug a Pi into a host computer and send remote commands and share networking with a host computer all without any user interaction. A.L.O.A. stands for “A Little Offensive Appliance”.

There’s practically no defense to this type of attack other than physically securing your USB ports. Let’s jump right in!

Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 Installation Guide

January 4, 2020 / 201 Comments / Linux, MicroSD, Overclocking, Raspberry Pi, Single Board Computers, Ubuntu

Ubuntu Server has been my favorite Linux distribution for years. On everything but the Raspberry Pi I run Ubuntu Server but felt stuck with Raspbian on the Pi. Until now!

The Raspberry Pi 4 is now supported. Previously Ubuntu Server for Pi (like many other distros) had broken or completely missing drivers for core components such as WiFi / Bluetooth. In the 18.04.2 update the firmware for the WiFi and other components is now included out of the box making it a fully functional distribution!

Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server Setup Script w/ Startup Service

July 4, 2020 / 396 Comments / Minecraft: Java, Raspberry Pi, Single Board Computers

Based on the comments and feedback from my older guides I have added many requested features and fixes. It has changed so much since 1.12’s World of Color that my old guide is now obsolete and it’s time for the 1.13 Aquatic era update!

This script and guide are written to help you get a great performing Raspberry Pi Minecraft server up and running in only a few minutes.

Install Ubuntu Server 18.04.2 on Intel Compute Stick Guide

August 1, 2019 / 5 Comments / Hardware, Intel Compute Stick, Linux, Single Board Computers, Ubuntu

My primary purpose for buying the Intel Compute Stick was to have an ultra portable x86_64 server to get around ARM limitations. Therefore the dated Ubuntu 14.04 GUI install had to go. In this guide we will walk through installing Ubuntu Server 18.04 on the Intel Compute Stick!