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?
AdGuard Home (I prefer it to PiHole)
OtterWiki
Wireguard
Forgejo
Tandoor
Jellyfin music server. It needs about 1.2 GB of RAM for itself, plus the system.
Get yourself and adsb antenna and feed flightaware, flightradar24, and adsbexchange. Help track the skies!
Paperless ngx
You could also setup a git repo for your config files. That way you could revert changes, if you break something.
If you don’t want do open your pi up to the internet you could take a look at tailscale. I use this script on my laptop and home pc to share files with sshfs while having any other traffic go through mullvad. Set this up on your pi with it as an exit node and you basically have access from anywhere.
Pihole, homeassistant, a music server using moodeaudio
Another vote for Pi-hole here. I don’t know how I lived without it before!
I use an adblocker on both my PC and my phone. Does a Pi-hole have many advantages over that?
PiHole is DNS based ad blocking and local DNS for everything on your network. So, even things that can’t run their own adblocker.
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.
Another vote for PiHole. It keeps your home network cleaner by ignoring the ads.
On my Rpi4B I run syncthing 24/7. It acts as my sync hub. All other machines are connected to it.
I run AdGuard Home, WireGuard and a couple of other things on my 4B, all in Docker.
I used to run HomeAssistant on our for a while, but they stopped supporting that architecture (armhf?). Also used to run Unbound on it.
SANE scan server? Paperless ngx also comes to my mind, find it pretty useful.
I was trying to set up a scan server last week. No luck yet. 😅
Paperless ngx looks looks amazing. I was actually thinking of finding a solution for this type of thing as pdfgrep was getting kinda slow.
Maybe Nextcloud? Jellyfin?
I’ll add Jellyfin to the list! Do you need a specific client to receive a stream or can say VLC or mpv do it?
Typically a web browser or dedicated app, but it’s open source so there are options. You might be able to stream directly with VLC, not sure.
You can use VLC if you get the stream url via a web browser, first. MPV can do the same.
The problem is VLC/MPV don’t have a built-in way to browse and pick what you want to play.
Nextcloud seems a be an alternative to the G-Suite, did I get that right? That move to the cloud kinda missed me. I’m happy with LibreOffice and having everything stored locally.
Do you have experience with running a single-user Lemmy instance? I remember trying out some smaller instances, and they weren’t as federated (i.e. I could see less content) than on the bigger ones.
PiHole, PiVPN, maybe a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager to make connecting to your various web management portals you have an easy way to map it to a human readable url
qbittorrent (docker) 😁😎
Another vote for a music server. Gonic/Navidrome is pretty low power and super useful!
Home assistant is another option, but I’ll say that if you’re serious about home automation you’ll quickly outgrow a Pi. It’ll run if you only have a handful of devices though.
I like the music server idea! Where do you get your music? Many artists don’t even sell CDs nowadays.
Home assistant is probably not for me. The house I live in is still very analogue. I enjoy not having to debug software when investigating why there’s no hot water.
Plenty of artists still do sell CDs though. I often buy them at the merch stand at shows. Many also sell DRM free digital files on sites like Bandcamp. I also buy a lot of music at the thrift stores and rip them. If all else fails, there’s always the high seas.
Almost every time I look on Bandcamp, the artist I am looking for isn’t there. :( Also, last time I tried buying something there they only accepted PayPal which I stopped using a while ago. But it seems they accept normal card payments now. Neat.
I buy CDs – I even bought a CD drive to rip them – but international shipping really kills me. I guess brick-and-mortar music shops are still a thing…
There’s also quobuz for your more mainstream music needs. And you can always use a YouTube downloaded like yt-dlp together with a music tagging tool like MusicBrainz Picard.
Weird. It must be that my taste is very indie/alternative. You can always also check if the artist has their own shop.
That’s how Jonathan Coulton does it. They Might Be Giants does it as well (in addition to a Bandcamp), but most of their stuff from 1990-1996 is stuck on their former label, so they can’t sell DRM-free audio, only vinyl and/or cassette.
For CDs, Amazon, ebay, or discogs. Digital music I usually get from the artist’s webstore if possible, otherwise I’ll buy it from Amazon or BandCamp.
One heads up, Buying and downloading digital music from Amazon is a pain in the butt if you have an Amazon Music subscription. Easy and straightforward though without.
Apple music is also possible but you have to burn the tracks to CD using itunes to move it out of Apple’s ecosystem.
I also hear good things about Tidal but I’ve never used them.
I did not know that Amazon sold digital music. But it kills me that Amazon and Apple are the two big choices. Out of the frying pan into the fire…
I thought that Tidal was a streaming service, and that you can rip music from there like you can from Youtube or Spotify.
Nowadays, Apple is only really big for digital music if you are (or were) already really deep in their ecosystem. Not sure I’ve heard of any devices that play nice with their DRM in a while and last I had looked (admittedly many years ago) they did not have a compatible app for Android.
Apple music was bigger back 15 or 20 years ago for digital downloads due in large part to the iPod, though I occasionally hear of some odd band or another that only releases their stuff on iTunes.
And since this is a linux community, as a heads up, iTunes is only marginally functional, last I heard, in linux. Apparently it can’t detect connected devices. You’ll probably need a Windows or Mac system to run iTunes if you want to go that route.
There’s also a lot of smaller solutions, like smaller record label websites, and legacy music stores in whatever country you are.
