Hiya!
I have a Raspberry Pi 4B set up as a print server, so it has to run 24/7. But it irks me that it’s mostly idling.
I’d move my website to it, but I don’t want to deal with it being open to the internet. The same goes for an e-mail server.
I was also thinking of running a Minecraft server on it. (Being able to play on the same world from different devices is kinda cool.) Alas, my RPi only has 4 GiBs of RAM. I worry that such a load would interfere with the print server.
Any ideas what I could run on it?
So I have a smart plug set up on my printer and print server (old HP 4P with separate network print server.
I have NodeRed watching my CUPS queues via HTTP scraping, and if it sees a job in the queue for that printer, it turns on the print server and printer via the smartplug over wifi. I have seen someone link a project that does something similiar.
Check out BOINC: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Raspberry Pi I’m not sure if it’s worth it. But in short you can advance some science with spare CPU hours. Should be possible to limit it so it doesn’t heat up and use just a bit of the cycles depending on other load…
You could pihole
Some great light lightweight apps for a 4GB Pi:
- Homeassistant
- Fresh RSS
- Paperless NGX
- Syncthing
- PiHole or Adguard home
- Syncthing
BirdNet Pi!
PiHole is a pretty light load, as are Home Assistant and Music Assistant. Frigate starts to make some heat, so don’t expect to get a full blown video classification / recording system.
Airsonic music server… There are a few quirks getting it all set up properly, but once it works, it just seems to work forever. Samba file sharing server. Also miniDLNA server can make it easy to watch your movie collection on a tv. The airsonic DLNA doesn’t seem to be working currently. I also have a few mastodon bots running from a Pi4. Also could run a tor relay node, which would make it so it’s less idle. I have a lot of stuff on my Pi4 and it is still mostly idle most of the time. Thats fine though. For me it’s not a huge problem, since overall, my goal is to make it use as little power as possible for all those things. I think thats the whole point is to really use the most lightweight computer that can do what you need. If you just need the print server, you could always get a lower power Pi so you can really optimize how much power needs to be used and maybe even do some sort of Wake on LAN setup so it can be sleeping while not in use.
You can run an (emulated) IBM mainframe on it!
mine is my reverse proxy, using the nginx proxy manager docker install method
As a general thing because I found myself trying to justify my Gear Acquisition Syndrome – it’s a good idea to split services across devices, rather than having some monolithic home server (which is where most people start). That way if one box goes down, it doesn’t take down your whole stack.
If you have some machines scattered about doing different things, it might be time to consider logically grouping services and splitting them across that hardware.
let it run dwarf fortress from within the terminal, then ssh into it from wherever you are so you can play df from anywhere in the world. i did this at work.
Pihole, homeassistant, a music server using moodeaudio
Another vote for Pi-hole here. I don’t know how I lived without it before!
Does PiHole ever break a family member’s browsing, and then they don’t know to fix the issue because it would involve understanding opening up the PiHole web interface?
Yes, that does sometimes happen but the frequency depends on the blocking list used, or if multiple lists are used. When a family member encounters something like this, I can usually quite quickly identify the relevant blocked item and whitelist it.
And if you aren’t home or available?
Well, it takes a while longer to fix. The only times it’s happened (perhaps twice in 6 months) it’s been when a family member has been trying to buy something from a website. I can also access the Pi-hole remotely and—in the worst case scenario—just turn off blocking altogether for a short period.
Thanks for sharing.
It does look like there’s a way to use PiHole personally for those who share the network with those who don’t want it: leave default DNS server setttings alone except for your own devices.
I use an adblocker on both my PC and my phone. Does a Pi-hole have many advantages over that?
Running those adblockers on your devices is extremely insecure. They register as a VPN and intercept HTTPS traffic. They decrypt the encrypted traffic, filter it, and encrypt again meaning all your communications are signed by this single app’s certificate. Not to mention any vulnerability would wreak havoc.
PiHole is DNS based ad blocking and local DNS for everything on your network. So, even things that can’t run their own adblocker.
Not just ad blocker, but tracking blockers too. Also, if you’ve got a simple little device like a WiFi controlled outlet switch, and through PiHole you notice it “phoning home” frequently even though you’re not using it… that’s a clue that you might not want to be keeping such things inside the same network where you check on your 401(k) account…
So it can block ads in Google Chrome on my moms phone? Then I’ll have to figure out how to set it up!
Do you often run into issues when blocking traffic like this? I can imagine some software (i.e. Samsung’s or Google’s bloatware) kicking up a fuss.
Ive been using the OISD list for myself and family members for the past couple of years without issues. It’s specifically made to to be unnoticeable, by whitelisting hosts that would cause issues.
One thing to note is that it’s not a full replacement for adblockers, as DNS blockers can only block full hosts and not all ads and tracking are served from dedicated hostnames. Things like YouTube ads will be unaffected by DNS based blocking. It does really make a difference, though, including for apps with banners.
Sometimes it can. Google and Samsung never had an issue though. The more ad lists you setup the more false-positives you get.
But 99% of the time it’s fine. The other 1% you open the dashboard and look at the last few blocks and whitelist whatever it causing issues.
Sometimes I’ve found a site that gets partially blocked and causes a fuss. There’s an option to allowlist domain(s).
Also, some sites try to use ad domains to serve legit traffic, and some use legit domains to serve ads, so it’s not perfect, but it works pretty darn well overall.
Depends on the level of block lists you add. The defaults are pretty sane and it doesn’t need any configuration, you configure your router to use it
One major advantage is that on the domestic TV channels here in the UK which have ad breaks (essentially all of them except the BBC) it removes the ads altogether and the programmes run seamlessly from the part before the ad break into the part after. I still smile every time it happens!
That sounds cool as heck! But I am very confused about how television broadcasting works in the UK. This only works with some sort of over-the-internet TV, right?
Yes, that’s right. It would only work with TV over the internet and not with a digital signal transmitted direct to the TV via aerial.
AdGuard Home (I prefer it to PiHole)
OtterWiki
Wireguard
Forgejo
Tandoor
Can I please ask why you prefer Adguard over Pihole?
The sd card in my raspberry 3b recently died, and my pihole with it. I am now using Adguard but not sure it’s working well for me, consider going back. What’s the winning argument for you?
I find the interface feels more modern and interactive, I didn’t like how static PiHole felt with adding to a list then manually restarting Gravity.
AGH has support for more list types, it has more features built-in, such as DNS over TLS so I can use it on my phone even when I’m not home.
And personally I feel like its less buggy, I’ve never encountered a problem on AGH, whereas I did on PiHole.
Interesting points, thank you.
Today I wanted to block everything with facebook and Instagram, it looks like I am hand-editing a config file to do so. And it applies to the entire network; AGH has no concept of user groups. Am I missing something really obvious?
That would be something you do within the Client Settings page. You can have custom settings that are separate from the Global Default.
Get yourself and adsb antenna and feed flightaware, flightradar24, and adsbexchange. Help track the skies!
Paperless ngx
