WebDrive
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I am in no way affiliated with WebDrive, but I'm an avid fan who has supported them for years and thought I'd toss it out there how useful it's recently been in managing all our RPis. However, I guess I should mention this is likely going to only interest Windows users..
It works by creating "real" network drives within windows from any FTP source. I have all my RPi's mapped and can easily backup, push files, etc.
It's not free, but I've found it to be worth the price. Check it out if interested here: https://webdrive.com
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there are options for sshfs for windows which is free, as well as adding samba to the RPi is also an option that is free.
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Alternatively, just automounting a networked drive with symlinked folder per pi works just as well and means that it plays nicely across all the machines.
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I see now there are multiple ways to skin this cat.. I originally picked this up to mount drives across the Internet and realized how well it was also working for managing our RPIs. I should have known there were plenty of other ways to achieve this - including free alternatives.
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++ for sshfs
but I normally have samba on all my rpi's (I run 20 attm and I recently got another batch of 20 that are not installed yet) for ease of access and it works great.
With 40 of them soon to run I'm actually thinking about using a completely different approach (will start testing as soon as my hands are back in the operational state) and that is to run them diskless. Rpi 3B+ and Rpi 4 can boot from the network, RPI team even made a special "RPI desktop" distro you can run from a pc or RPI that has all the necessary tools to host images of your pi's on the network so basically all your data is on a single place, easy to access and no need to worry about crappy dying sd cards. now that's theory, we'll see what reality is in few weeks
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With 40 of them soon to run I'm actually thinking about using a completely different approach
pxe
(pi4 even has pxe rom!) -
@bearer yes, 3b+ is also pxe enabled (3b is not by default but can be enabled easy you just need to boot from sd card once) and as I said there's supposed to be a special distro for the host node (that I'd probbly run inside VM) .. I found the info here: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/network-boot-raspberry-pi-without-microsd/ and they talk about new feature in Raspbian, PiServer and single server runs the Raspbian x86 distribution as a server, now as I said, have not tried it yet .. I did try regular PXE boot using fedora box as a server and it worked ok but with 40 of them I hope they have some nice tools in that "piserver" thingy
