Orka Controls The (Pi) World

If you deploy a lot of Raspberry Pi computers, you might find it inconvenient to log into each one to perform different tasks. Orka, an open source project by [Karthik K], is a server that runs on a desktop PC (Windows, Linux, or Mac) and can control multiple Orka clients (that can run on a Pi, or a desktop PC). We understand that [Karthik K] is looking for Mac testers, by the way.

From the server, you can execute commands and create tasks. You can also receive notification when a client PC reaches a threshold (for example, over temperature or too much CPU or RAM usage). You can open a shell on a client and do other operations.

You can find both the server and the client Javascript source on GitHub. The project is brand new, so we wouldn’t be surprised if it has some rough edges, but since it is HTML and Javascript and it is open source, you can probably fix or enhance anything you like and feed it back to the project.

We’ve been seeing a lot of Raspberry Pi clusters and we’ve talked about exposing a Pi on the Internet. If you have a lot of Pi boards out there, Orka might be a useful tool.

12 thoughts on “Orka Controls The (Pi) World

    1. Check out salt a configuration management program at saltstack.com It is easy to use and setup. salt-cp ‘pi-lab*’ /tmp/sourcefile /home/student/dest
      setup a salt-master and install salt-minion on the clients you can use dns to direct the clients for the first connection. Then on the master you check the use salt-key to accept the keys from the clients. It really is easy to use and you only have to have the server open on a single port or a small range. It uses zeroMQ and is very responsive. I use it to manage hundreds of computers. It has more advanced features to manage installs and configurations but it is simple to setup and use for day to day grinds where prep is is not needed.

  1. Crapping UNIX through a Javascript opened socket, hiding the disaster under a neat eye-candy UI, it´s enough to be featured on HaD. On one hand we get told that IoT is a botnet paradise, on the other hand we got shown horrors like this.

  2. The web UI sounds like it could be a useful feature, but apart from this, how does it differ from existing solutions such as Chef, Puppet and Ansible? These three are all relatively mature orchestration tools that are already widely used and deployed.

    We use Ansible a lot to manage big clusters, including ARM devices. It is command line, uses SSH for communications, only requires Python 2 on the target machine, and has a UI in the form of Ansible Tower if you need that.

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