Lorgo NumputzTL;DR: Yes but performance is unacceptable.
So if, like myself, you are using your Raspberry Pi 1B (not B+!) to do the following:
- Run BIND
- Run ISC DHCPD
- Run keepalived (this Pi is 1 of 2 identical systems) to manage the running of BIND and DHCPD
- Run scripts via cron every minute to check on new DHCP and DNS configurations via git+ssh
- Run a script every minute to see if the SCRAM beacon (custom local code) has been activated (meaning we should shut down right now - unusual but possible)
- Monitor the UPS and, if it is discharging and the battery is below 51%, light the SCRAM beacon itself (power event)
- Pull changes from the DHCP reservation/assignment list off of the master keepalived host (so our DHCP mapping is as up to date as possible in the event of failover)
The question was: Can you do this on a Raspberry Pi 1B with Debian 13?
The answer is: Yeah, not really. The baseline load average rose from 0.33 - this is a single core host - - to 2.49 and that was before it was actually handing out any DHCP addresses or DNS records.
Command execution and keepalived failover took far longer than it did previously; in fact so long that I was beginning to think it had failed altogether.
So, the 2 Raspberry Pi 1B's are up for retirement or some other assigned light duty. Not bad for 2 boards I bought in 2014. I have a couple of spare Pi3B+ boards and those run Debian 13 wonderfully.
It's hard to believe that the older of the 2 boards was once my main backup host / network node. How did I live in something so small?