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I figured these SBCs I'm pointlessly accumulating might not be powerful enough by themselves to be a server, but if I split services into components that can be run on independent servers, not only would them be able to handle the load together, but I also could get some pretty good security through hardware isolation. For personal computing, I see people talking about using multiple virtual machines to enhance security by isolating programs. In this context too a bunch of SBCs would work, yet I've never seen that idea talked about. Is this something that makes sense? Do sysadmins already do that kind of thing? Where can I read about this kind of stuff?

most inter-board connections are pretty slow, hence you will have a pretty slow system unless you're designing it specifically for highly parallel workloads

Depends on which board you have. You would be surprised at how powerful they are. What do you have and what are you looking to do with it?

As far as splitting services into multiple different VMs, this is very common practice. If you have a half dozen raspberry pis, you can have one run pi-hole, another running openvpn, one for syncthing, another running a piratebox server, etc. The sky's the limit. If you are concerned about individual machines getting compromised, and that's why you'd like isolation of each service, then look into what service you're running and how to secure the services. Running something like nginx or Apache? There are plenty of guides out there on how to harden your installation. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-on-ubuntu-14-04

You don't know distributed computing? Look up Plan 9

>>8055 Yeah, I guess that rules out splitting apart integrated and inter-dependent systems. >>8074 Only Raspberries and Arduinos. I'm thinking of buying some Hardkernel boards as well like this: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ I was thinking of self-hosting things like Pleroma, Synapse (Matrix server), email, websites. All isolated from each other. When I try to install those things on a VPS, each of them pulls a ton of dependencies that I don't understand and it really bothers me. >>8075 Yeah, I'll do my best to secure the OS itself, but I feel like hardware isolation is much more foolproof, hence my interest. I figured this idea might not have made much sense in the past, but with the abundance of cheap hardware, that may have changed. >>8083 Would be cool to have Plan 9 running too, but I think I wouldn't be able to run most things I might want on it.

people definitely do this and its a pretty efficient way to set up a home lab. i'm considering doing something kind of similar. i have less sbcs sitting around so i'll probably only break some of the networking and security services out into their own boxes. someone just showed me pic related the other day. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/c8c1t8/rackmount_pislice_design/

https://freedombone.net/ Set all this soykaf up on a Beaglebone but with I2P instead of Tor and you have a really fuarrrking cool untraceable underground clubhouse in the wired.