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Self Hosting with Raspberry Pi 4 (Part 1)

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Self Hosting 101

This lockdown I managed to get a Raspberry Pi 4 (RPi) for me, it was a bucket list item to have a secondary Linux machine, to spin up containers and run necessary services 24x7. (And to avoid buying expensive hardware). Well, definitely RPi fits the bill, and consumes less power as well.

List of things required in for the server

  • Should be able to run a lot of programs :P
  • Simple Media server.
  • Network wide Ad-blocker (Almost a necessity these days).
  • Music Streaming (MPD, just love it too much)
  • Secondary VPN client for connecting to my VPN.

Hardware required?

  • Raspberry Pi 4
  • A HDD for storage. (SSD would be awesome if you have the budget)
  • Fans cause RPi4 has a bad reputation for heating up, and the heat dissipation not being that good in the board.
  • A proper 3A Capable USB C Cable (recommended) (Side note: turns out the length of the cable is equally important 1)

Things I Installed?

MPD

The best music player I ever encountered, combined with ncmpcpp, it allows me to remote control my songs on Raspberry Pi.

Pi-Hole Ad-blocker

Slightly annoying on the docker install, so defaulting to normal install. Can’t run nginx/apache now on port 80

Docker

Well the fastest thing to get something deployed, pretty useful for testing things out.

You can always docker rmi x :)

Wireguard VPN Client

:\ (Well not everything is accessible everywhere)

Media Server

Share all types of files easily and instantly.

I tried using Jellyfin which felt feature rich but too much for my needs, I ended up browsing for some good simple file servers.

  • GoHTTPServer, seemed like a good choice for use at home for sharing things, but the release was quite old, and it looked slightly heavy.
  • Gossa, was the best choice I felt, only required Go and was simple enough for the features I need.

Thought about running a Samba,NFS or WebDAV, but lot of things to configure, a single binary with CLI flags is what I was interested in.

That’s about it for now, maybe later on I get sometime to do more stuff and write about it.

  1. Raspberry Pi and the dreaded undervoltage notifications ↩︎

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