A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I own a raspberry pi 4. Every time I try to use it, I spend half my time trying to fix the stuttery/non responsive UI by fucking with the compistor and such. And then I give up.
I eventually got a new gaming PC and turned my old one into a Linux server, and haven't really touched my Raspberry Pi since.
RPI4/400 is perfectly capable as a little home server. All it needs is a good SD card.
Owntracks,photoprism,monocker,brave go m-sync,libre photos,wallabag,radicals e,Baikal,Firefox sync,Joplin web,webdav server,jellyfin,vaultwarden,wireguard
Get an eMMC module ($10) for the Pi or buy something similar with one built-in. Much faster and more reliable.
I snagged an enclosure with a little adapter for a SATA m.2 drive. It’s amazing!
This lemmy instance is running on my Pi
Lets see...
Those are just docker containers, it also is a backup server for all the devices I own. It also runs all non sensitive data on an unencrypted partition then will auto decrypt the sensitive partion through ssh via my desktop. This means my vpn server will always run so I can connect, wake on lan my desktop, decrypt it and log in. Im sure I'm missing things.
I have one pi (rpi 4b) that I still use. I have it in an Argon One V2 case for the daughter board that lets me boot from an M.2 SATA SSD. I got tired of the corrupted SD cards. It’s actually reliable now.
Anyway, I mainly only use it because in the event of a power outage, as soon as power is restored, it automatically turns on. If I’m not home, I can SSH back into my network and send a WoL packet to my actual server to turn it back on.
The pi also runs:
I feel old, I don't understand 90% of words in this thread lol.
I just have kodi on Libreelec with a jellyfin plugin on my rpi4 and even that struggled with overheating at times. So I run most stuff on my pc instead. I'm tempted to try the portainer to get some experience with docker tho.
I have a Pi4 running octoprint, pi-hole and some of my own containers.
The rest I run on a Hetzner VM.
Cluster of Pi4 8GBs. Bought pre-pandemic; love the little things.
Nomad, Consul, Gluster, w/ TrueNas-backed NFS for the big files.
They do all sorts of nifty things for us including Nightscout, LanguageTool OSS, monitoring for ubiquiti, Nextdrive, Grafana (which I use for home monitoring - temps/humidity with alerts), Prometheus & Mimir, Postgres, Codeserver.
Basically I use them to schedule dockerized services I want to run or am interested in playing with/learning.
Also I use Rapsberry Pi zero 2 w’s with Shairport-sync (https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync ) as Airplay 2 streaming bridges for audio equipment that isn’t networked or doesn’t support AirPlay 2.
I’m not sure I’d buy a Pi4 today; but they’ve been great so far.
I have one Pi 4b for my Homeassistant. It is fixed to a wall, next to the routers, running 24/7.
I did not want to include this on my other Homeserver to avoid the dependency.
I made a python soft that uses the pi camera and scans qr codes, and plays the playlist that's on the eventual qr code. Just show the album and it plays.
But they have become so incredible expensive, and banana pis etc just doesn't work that well, so I just stopped the whole Raspberry Pi craze.
Today I just collected a 55€ Lenovo thinkcenter (like 18cm squared x 3.5cm) with a quad core, 8GB/256GB. I think it will replace my next rpi quite well and when it breaks, I can get another one quite simply.
If I want to do more to the metal electronics stuff, I'll just use a 2560 Mega or an esp8266 or similar.
Home security system, VPN, DNS server with pihole.
security? For surveillance or something more?
Wireless Z-wave module, door sensors, fire alarm, motion sensors, hidden on/off switch. Raspberry itself works as the camera and has motion detection if needed. Event notices are sent using xmpp.
RPi 4B > DietPi > Pi hole + Unbound.
Octopi
I use it as a media remote for my computer via infrared. IR sensor sends analog data to an arduino which converts it to digital and sends it to a raspberry pi which then invokes commands to control media on my computer by invoking rest apis on a “unified remote” server running on the computer.
Feeling impressed here...
If I want to have this, too: is there a kinda tutorial or quick-setup, or is it more like 6 weeks of tinkering? :-)
Yeah but they’re really only good for single purpose things I keep killing sd cards trying to do more.
Boot from USB is your friend! Use a USB to SSD connector and boot from SSD. Havent had a single storage problem since I switched to SSD :)
I used to run pretty much all my workloads on Raspberry Pis, mostly in docker containers. I've since moved over to some ex enterprise servers and Proxmox, so I really only have a couple of Pis left in service, running:
Yes, it's probably pretty demanding of the hardware but my Pi4 4GB runs:
I have 6 4b's running PiCorePlayer for home audio. I control them with LMS and can sync them or play different things in different rooms.
I wanted to reuse one for octoprint, but it turned out to be unreliable. So I switched to my NUC instead.
I have the feeking that those SD cards just don't perform well and wear out more easily, and I really use good ones.
RP4 running Home Assistant. Running HA in a docker container is harder than running it as the OS on a Pi4. Running HA is how I get into this, i kept trying to put more crap into HA as addons before realizing i should set up a proper server.
I assembled a handful of temp/humidity sensors (that are actually running on Wemos D1 minis).
What makes it harder in the container?
Maybe it isnt as bad as i remember, or maybe i tried doing HA Core on the debian server or something... maybe it got better or maybe im a fool? (I definitely am a fool).
I guess it just as much came down to that I already had the pi, so just running it on that like i had for a year was less hassle than starting it via docker on the other machine?
I run PiHole on mine
Home Assistant
I use mine as a minimalistic NAS and media server
I used to run everything with Pis, but then got a x86 USFF to improve Nextcloud performance.
With the energy price madness last year in Europe, I moved most things to cloud VPSs.
One Pi is still running Home Assistant, hooked to my heating/ventilation unit via RS485/modbus.
I had a ZFS backup server with 2 HDDs hooked up over USB to a Pi 8GB. That is just way too unreliable for anything serious, I think I now have a lot of corrupted files in the backups. Looking into getting some Synology unit for that.
For anything serious that requires file storage, I'd steer clear from USB or SD cards. After getting used to SATA performance, it's hard to go back anyways. I'd really like to use the Pis, but family photo backups turning gray due to bitflips is unacceptable.
They are a great entrypoint to self-hosting and the Linux world though!
pihole and an always-on syncthing node.
One 3B+ runs my network services - things I need to stay up if I restart the production server. Another one has a specialist role - IP gateway into the ham radio AllstarLink network - connected to a 70cm radio with a modified USB sound dongle.
Not much love here for the Pi Zero W. I love them for being so flipping cute. I have a couple I use when I am learning a new system admin tool or service and I need to be able to let it run undisturbed to observe stability and function.
Lately I am learning MQTT so am using one as a broker to manage some homemade smart devices.
If I can ever find one in stock, i want a couple of Zero 2 for similar projects that would benefit from the extra oomph.
I don't buy any pis because they are $100+ in Canada.
Remember when it was supposed to be a cheap computer? Ya..
Have a pi4 8gb and every time I need it for some mini graphics project, the GPU lags no matter how much vram I give it, so I usually end up using some old laptop with a GPU and the pi goes back to random things like data collection with sensors or some funny breadboard projects.
Also use it to evaluate lightweight linux distros.
I'm new to the party and am still experimenting, not super tech savvy but I've been doing a few things.
I have one SD set up for retro gaming via Lakka. Wish Lakka had an option to add a desktop like RetroPie but just really love the interface and ease of use. Tried recalbox and it's nice as well! Can't remember why I settled for Lakka.
Another SD is for experimenting at the moment. As mentioned I'm brand new to the pi community so I've installed Raspbian on it and have just been testing the waters. Set up iirc my first VNC network between it, my PC and my phone. Also have been using it to rip and burn DVDs via brasero. Don't have wifi at home, I use a hotspot which complicates using my printer wirelessly so I'm considering using the pi as a network for that. There's also a cool program I found where you learn musical coding? It's pretty interesting though I still don't really know what it's for haha.
I'd really like to do more with it but as mentioned am just learning. Hell, I just got it running a few weeks ago after it had been down for a couple years so I'm sure I l'll be doing more when I find the time.
I'd love to set it up in my vehicle and have Spotify, gps navigation, retro gaming etc through it but seems like a big project with my limited understanding ATM.
Yes. I use it for my PiHole and Wireguard VPN.
I use a RPi3 for pihole and a RPi4 with debian + docker to host a bunch of stuff (in no spécific order): goaccess-for-nginxproxymanager
filebrowser
smokeping
searxng
duplicati
whoogle
nginx-proxy-manager
flaresolverr
linkding
ntfy
changedetection.io
librex
shlink
speedtest-tracker
unbound
wg-easy
I have a pi 3 running my primary instance of Adguard Home, a pi 4 I don't know yet what to do with, and a Pi B that has RISCOS on it for fun. Seriously, if you ever just want to poke around a unique OS, download the official RISCOS image in the Raspberry Pi imager. Any UK folks reading this know what I'm talking about. But as an American I'd never heard of it and it's just friggin' neat!
Using Pi's to run services in my homelab which I want to keep separate from my server (to have some sort of failover in case the server goes down). Status/Monitoring, VPN server and so on
I've been running OSMC (Kodi on Debian) plus a few useful things like maintaining a reverse SSH connection to a VPS.
I am actually using a OrangePiPC as: