[AnimalMuppet]

Welcome back, diskless workstations! We've missed you... oh, wait, no, we really haven't.

This is technically neat, but... How often does the memory card break on a Raspberry? How often does the network break (either Raspberry hardware or upstream)? There are fewer things to break when you run from local hardware.

[Semaphor]

I'd say sd card failures are the most common rPI failures.

[BobbyTables2]

Only because people treat them like harddrives and stubbornly run desktop distos on them.

Keep log files and other things frequently written in RAM and the sdcard will last forever.

When was the last time an sdcard in a digital camera wore out?

[eek2121]

You are thinking about this wrong. Imagine having a single disk image for 100 Pis. Now imagine having to burn that image to a hundred MicroSD cards, now suddenly you want to update the disk image.

As others have said, you can also use PXE, but http is a bit easier to deal with.

There is a hosting company with something like 44k Raspberry Pis. Are you going to be the guy to update them?

[ssl-3]

That's one improvement, but network booting can also help us home-gamers who don't have a hundred Raspberry Pis that are all doing the same thing.

Many of us have a handful of Pis at home doing whatever they do, each with their own unique MicroSD card. In this configuration, every time the number of Pis doubles, the overall MTBF for their collective storage halves. Backups are a pain since each Pi is a unique and special snowflake, and are thus somewhat unlikely to actually get accomplished. When a MicroSD card does die, that Pi's configuration and all of the work that went into making it do whatever it likely disappears with it.

However, when booting over the network:

A handful of Pis are at home doing whatever they do, and booting from a reasonably-resilient NAS (eg a ZFS RAIDZ2 box) somewhere in the house (which is a great idea to have around for all kinds of other reasons, too). Adding more Pis does not decrease storage MTBF at all, since there is no MicroSD card to die. Backups become simple, since ZFS snapshots make that kind of thing easy even if each Pi's disk image is a unique and special snowflake. Space-efficient periodic snapshots become achievable, making it easy to unfuck a botched change -- just roll back to an hour ago or yesterday or whenever things last worked and by using that snapshot instead. Undetected bitrot becomes zero. Speeds (for many workloads) might even increase, since at least the Pi4 can handle wire-speed network traffic without any real sweat.

It's not a great fit for everyone, but it may result in a net long-term time savings for some of us folks here who tinker with stuff at home if enough steps are automated, and it seems likely to result in fewer frustrating surprises.

[paranoidrobot]

> How often does the memory card break on a Raspberry?

I have no data on this, only anecdata - since I've started being interested in the Home Assistant project, I've seen countless problems with people who've done an upgrade, rebooted their HA Pi and had some kind of Disk IO issue because the card died.

As I understand it, it's the constant logging to disk for logfiles and databases that ends up killing MicroSD cards. It seems to be particularly bad for clones and cheap ones off eBay/Amazon. It's still apparently a problem even for high quality "endurance" MicroSD cards.

[ssl-3]

Amusingly, most of the things I regularly use Raspberry Pi hardware for require a functional network as well as functional storage on that network.

If I were to netboot these things, then I'd have fewer points of failure than I do now.