I’ve dreamed of having servers in my home to do various things and, I guess, it’s finally taken on a life of it’s own!
See, it started with me implementing Pi-Hole, to stop annoying advertisements from websites. Of course, I have a bunch of IoT devices and have controllers.
Then Raspberry Pi announced the 8Gb Raspberry Pi 4. I bought one as soon as I could and wondered, what should I do with it? I’ve always wanted to install Home Assistant should our network connection ever go down, we can control our devices.
I added a Synology NAS as I needed the space and the redundancy for backups and the Raspberry Pi Retroconsole project I’ve been curating. This also allows me to run Docker containers – the ability to run a particular piece of software in it’s own little – are pretty cool.
The thing with Home Assistant, you don’t want to run that off an SDCard as it will burn it out. So I bought an Argon One M.2 case with a 250 Gb SSD. A Raspberry Pi running off an SDD is pretty quick! It surprised me.
So, Home Assistant doesn’t use that much space, so I’m wasting the space on a 250 Gb SDD! Also, admittedly, the fan on the Argon One M.2 case started making noises and I had situation where I thought I lost the SDD, so I decided to switch the case to a SunFounder Pironman – I’m all about the LED lighting.
So far so good.
So with that done, I’m deciding to experiment with a bunch of services hosted on both the NAS and my Pi 4 8Gb:
Pi-Hole – I’ve already mentioned, this is my Ad Blocker
Home Assistant – i’ve mentioned this too, which allows me to run my IoT devices independent of their cloud brokers
Mealie – This is a new addition, a recipe manager that will scrape website pages for recipes. I really like this concept, and have been somewhat fascinated by recipe managers since my Timex Sinclair 1000 days
WordPress – This was the first iteration of a dashboard, more a page of links to servers and such inside our home. I’m not sure I’ll use this much, but having the option, I might be inspired to put it to use
Homarr – is everything I ever wanted in a Dashboard for a home. It’s easy to add new buttons for internal web services and more! The perfect starting point!
OwnCloud – With the space on the Raspberry Pi, I could put some important files on here as a just in case backup fron the NAS and cloud; accessible anywhere.
Kasm – I heard about this from a YouTube video on servers people are running at home. I’m completely blown away that my Raspberry Pi 4 with 8Gb can run two streaming Docker containers running a game of Doom and a full Debian Linux instance! It’s pretty awesome and gives me a bunchmark for just how powerful a Raspberry Pi is.
Plex – I run Plex off my Mac server for streaming videos
Apple Music – Last but not least, my music streams off my Mac server
I also have dedicated systems that run a web browser, PHP and control LEDs for saying a room is busy.
There you have it – what
