I have a unused RPi4 (the 8Gig one) running DietPi. I did use it as a playground but ever since I am renting a Hetzner machine for (playground) stuff that I want web accessible, I don’t have particular use for the Pi.
I am currently running (outdated) Home Assistant on it but there isn’t much I can connect it with (yet, getting the flashable/compatible ikea smart lightning zigbee? bridge thingy is on my bucket list). Obviously I do have a pihole there.
Shoot me any other ideas I could run there. Some kind of monitoring of my rented infra would be cool (I already have uptime kuma on the dedi hetzner box). One idea I had was if there are some OSS security scanning “daemons” I could use on to monitor my other infra.
Thanks a lot!
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Donate it to your local school.
I ran HA on mine for a while before I moved it to a VM. Right now I’m using my Pi as a secondary wireguard VPN in case my primary is down for some reason.
Also, quick tip, I found that ikea zigbee bulbs work really well but have really bad coil whine when off, don’t use them for bedside lighting.
RPi4 + USB Storage works as a network connected backup space for home PCs. With dyndns and a split vpn tunnel I imagine you could have your Hetzner machine place backups there too.
Seems both nagios and zabbix work on RPi:
https://peppe8o.com/network-monitoring-with-raspberry-pi-and-nems-nagios/
https://bestmonitoringtools.com/how-to-install-zabbix-on-raspberry-pi-raspbian/
Already got ssd as a nfs share in my openwrt-based router before that I did have it set up on the rpi. I did want to do offsite backup into that disk originally but I’ve got “only” ~100Mb/s up/down speed here so I didn’t want to risk slow-downs etc (but now that you remind me, borgbackup should be rather light on traffic!).
NEMS being a whole OS is a pitty, I like the possibility to have multiple different services there.But you are absolutely right I could have a offsite resource monitoring for my Hetzner setup with these, thanks!
You can also install Nagios the traditional way with apache instead https://www.howtoraspberry.com/2021/05/how-to-install-nagios-on-a-raspberry-pi/
The port 9090 nems UI is based on Cockpit and just an apt install away https://cockpit-project.org
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
14 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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You can setup a tunnel from your Hetzner VPS to your home with say Netbird and then run stuff that would be a bit to expensive to run on rented hardware. Like say Nextcloud, Matrix or game servers, on your RPi while still having them web accessible thanks to the tunnel.
I rent dedicated machine so the HW I have is the limit - I pay the same rate every month, no matter the usage, so with the bit outdated but still performant Ryzen 5 3600 and 64GB of RAM I was very happy to throw minecraft/zomboid/vallheim servers at it and few more services, aye aye;)
Though the possibility of tunneling services out from the RPi is something I am aware of, but except for stuff that would benefit from video HW accel there isn’t much that would be better to run on the RPi instead of on the server directly.
Cool, but I’m guessing that ain’t especially cheap right? I pay $60 a year for 4 cores and 8 GB RAM (400 gb storage). Which I consider a pretty OK price. $5 a month.
Yeah it’s not it’s closer to paying your yearly cost but per month. L
A local jellyfin installation so you can watch/listen to your media even if your internet is down.
Immich! It’s an amazing self hosted Google Photos replacement.
Zigbee definitely fun with HomeAssistant. I have an SLZB-06M adapter which has PoE (important for me) and is a fairly “open” product (don’t need to jump through hoops to flash firmware). I read somewhere that it may offer Thread support at some point but wouldn’t count on that.
Make an uber-pwnagotchi that can hash at it’s own pcaps
Vaultwarden password manager
Vaultwarden is super, but I’d be hesitant to run it on a Raspberry Pi unless I had good backups in place. I’ve always run stuff off MicroSD cards with Pi’s, but I’m sure there’s a way to use real drives which would make me feel better.
I’m running mine off an SSD using an M.2 to USB adapter
You could just plug an external drive in it
You don’t need permanent backups of it. Vaultwarden is more like a secure “syncthing”. I crashed a system with vaultwarden had to rebuild everything but after connecting it to my devices I got the passwords from them back again and nothing was lost.
Yeah that’s true, your devices will still have a cached copy. Still… losing the host would be a pain. It looks like (from the browser extension at least) I can export the vault, so maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.
It has some amazing caching, but that doesn’t mean a backup is not necessary or recommended.
A tor guard/middle relay or bridge/snowflake and i2pd node.
I might have a look actually, though if any of these require publicly accessible IP then that won’t be possible because of CGNAT :(
Snowflake and i2pd could work but not in the best conditions.
First, you should something decent, not DietPi. You’ve Armbian for a ready to go experience or official Debian.
Once you get into something Debian 12, you can run LXD/LXC as a containerization / virtualization solution and use the same Pi to run the official HA VM image and whatever else you would like.
Why is dietpi a worse choice? it’s still basically debian (11).
I’ve chosen DietPi because of their sane defaults that I would have to setup myself like vm swappiness, fs noatime, tmp journal, and some more I am not even aware of.
Armbian has sane defaults for SBCs as well (yes log2ram so you won’t burn SD cards) and it is way more stable and polished than DietPi with less overhead. About bare Debian, you’ve the images I linked to and you can make it log to the ram with a simple line in systemd’s config.
That’s my actual mess.
I wish you hadn’t posted this \s. Now I have so much more to play with on my server. Great software here!
Thanks for sharing! The only thing I’m surprised to see in your list is paperless - how long does OCR take on a pi?
Idk, exactly I put near 500 pdfs in it, and after 3 days it was complete
About a minute, 1:30 maybe (edit: per page on a pi4). I use an app to upload jpegs though, I don’t have a normal scanner at the moment. The higher quality scan and smaller file size may make some steps of the process quicker (no need for alignment and color correction for example) if you use a normal, proper scanner.
It doesn’t matter though. When I get home and see I got a letter I scan it and by the time I drank something, put away my clothes and stuff i had with me, the pi is done and I can edit the metadata in the web ui.
Thank you! That’s really interesting, the performance with a pi 3 was way worse - even more than the pure spec difference would’ve lead me to believe.
The OCR devs have made a really awesome job!
I have a pi4, 4GB. And running off of an SSD (connected via SATA to usb adapter). Sorry, forgot to specify.
Even slower would still be worth it IMO, digital document management is just so much better than keeping multiple folders of paper organized. Also I can access all my paperwork from anywhere, because the pi and my phone are both in my wireguard VPN network.
Yes, had some cool moment a few days ago, boss asked me face to face if I did this special training 5 years ago.
I took my phone out, open paperless, did a full text search and tada, there it is. The cert for this one.
Wait aren’t the system requirements for Mailcow crazy high? How can you run it + other software on a mere Pi? Also: do you have a static IP?
Yes, that’s correct, mailcow runs on a vps outside with a static IP, I missed that op only asks for RPI hosted.
Make it into a router and access point. Connect your phone to the AP and use tcpdump to capture packets from your phone for a few minutes. Look through the packets with Wireshark and see how much data is being leaked.
Luckily I already have a OpenWRT based router here (https://turris.com) and PiHole that says 22% of traffic blocked, not a small amount indeed.
When the otherhalf plays games on her phone i watched the blocked % rise dramatically.
Navidrome is neat
I run a modded Minecraft server for my friends, PiHole for my home network, DDclient, and a discord bot for my discord server on a RPi4 8GB. I also use another as an emulation station.