That's a pretty good article, but I expect more in-depth information on booting modern Intel CPUs ... I am very interested in modern UEFI / BIOS firmware development and how do they bring up x86 CPUs, but unfortunately there are very little source (I guess, except for EDK2), and the majority (?) of x86 firmwares are proprietary. Booting x86 is much more complicated than writing a linker script with a vector table for your microcontroller ... so, this seems very interesting.
I have been running my homelab for 2 ~ 3 years, and I never considered rpi to be one of the servers ... It is just for toys or some "high school robots" stuff, with 0% availability and are very fragile. How many times your SD card fail / filesystem break / undervolt occurs / accidentally short-circuit? If you want to have a host running Linux 24 * 7, go with a used Thin Client on eBay (they are at least x86). If you are like me who want to build a rack at home, go with some used PowerEdge / ProLiant gears from eBay. They do way better things than your Pi (with BMC, Xeon cores, and ECC memory, possibly), and they are cheaper as well (my PowerEdge R520 servers only cost less than C$200 each). These machines have proper CPU, hard drive, and power supply. Do not use a Pi unless you are building some IoT experiments that require GPIOs.
Indeed. Parsing files is a less robust way compared to calling some APIs or at least parsing some files with a schema (e.g. JSON or XML). For example, uptime(1) on Linux:
I don't see the whole point. It's like creating yet-another-ntp-implementation while other well-known implementations are known to be working good and safely on billions of devices.
It is easier to report a security issue to ntpd or chrony instead of creating a new one.
Thank you. I'm using sshfs every day to remotely access my computer and servers from my laptop. Although it's slow, it works. I'm considering to switch to NFS instead.