this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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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I am currently running (outdated) Home Assistant on it but there isn't much I can connect it with (yet, getting the flashable/compatible ikea smart lightning zigbee?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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[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 17 points 8 months ago (3 children)
  • Wireguard + wireguard-ui
  • Linkwarden
  • Filebrowser
  • Dockge
  • Trilium
  • Paperless-ngx
  • OCIS
  • AdGuard Home
  • Jellyfin
  • Rocket-Chat
  • Vaultwarden
  • Mailcow

That's my actual mess.

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Thanks for sharing! The only thing I'm surprised to see in your list is paperless - how long does OCR take on a pi?

[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago

Idk, exactly I put near 500 pdfs in it, and after 3 days it was complete

[–] Turun@feddit.de 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

About a minute, 1:30 maybe (edit: per page). 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.

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] Turun@feddit.de 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] huquad@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago

I wish you hadn't posted this \s. Now I have so much more to play with on my server. Great software here!

[–] mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 8 months ago

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?

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 14 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Most people seem to just want to use RPIs as a very slow Linux server for some reason...

Use it to play around with hardware integration with the GPIO pins. Get a sensor HAT and start recording temperatures, write some code that turns on/off an LED, build a robot controller, etc. There are lots of kits and documentation on the various things you can do!

[–] mlaga97@lemmy.mlaga97.space 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

SBCs like the RPi are kind of awkwardly in-between a microcontroller like an Arduino or ESP32 that you can actually trust with handling GPIO and data logging, and a real Linux system that can actually do meaningful computational work.

Pretty much the only task I've found them reliably appropriate for is running OctoPrint, really really light computer vision tasks for robotics, or hooking up an RTL-SDR to use as a police/HAM scanner. Outside of those, it's so much easier to use either a cheaper and more reliable MCU or a much more powerful old laptop or desktop.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago

That's one of the nice things about them.

You can write code that has access to more resources. I had a RPI once that showed code build status on an led strip (red failed, green passed). It was a Java program that connected to AWS SQS for build event notifications. A micro controller would be much harder to do that on.

[–] anamethatisnt@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've been wanting to use multiple raspberry pi zero w with sensory hats to feed data to a central home monitoring system. Would be a fun project.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago

It is! Especially if you want to write the code yourself. It's an interesting design problem if you start to consider cases where the PI may be offline (mobile on a battery in my case). Do you lose that data? Store and forward? In memory or to a local data store? It's a fun rainy-weekend project.

Word of caution - HATs can be a rather inaccurate in their temperature monitoring. The Pi gets warm. I had done my work using a PTC thermistor that was distanced from the Pi itself. I've got a friend using a HAT and it's been very off (up to 10C above ambient!). A Pi Zero may not give off as much heat as, say a Pi4 though. YMMV.

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Unluckily last time I wanted to do sensor stuff the ~20 euro air quality multi-sensor (co2, pm1-10, humidity, voc?) board got lost in transit and I didn't bother since :(
The original plan was use it with my esp32 dev board (wroom32, so wifi) to have a portable sensor, this RPi was supposed to be the collection server (mqtt, influx, grafana).

I should revisit this idea soon, thanks for reminding me!

[–] supervent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A tor guard/middle relay or bridge and i2pd node.

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I might have a look actually, though if any of these require publicly accessible IP then that won't be possible because of CGNAT :(

[–] supervent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago

Snowflake and i2pd could work but not in the best conditions.

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 8 months ago

A local jellyfin installation so you can watch/listen to your media even if your internet is down.

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
AP WiFi Access Point
CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
IP Internet Protocol
LXC Linux Containers
NAT Network Address Translation
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
PoE Power over Ethernet
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
VPN Virtual Private Network
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices

14 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #439 for this sub, first seen 19th Jan 2024, 13:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] Jyek@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] stown@sedd.it 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Vaultwarden password manager

[–] walden@sub.wetshaving.social 9 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] walden@sub.wetshaving.social 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] cron@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago

It has some amazing caching, but that doesn't mean a backup is not necessary or recommended.

[–] lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 8 months ago

I'm running mine off an SSD using an M.2 to USB adapter

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.de 2 points 8 months ago

You could just plug an external drive in it

[–] Flying_Hellfish@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 3 points 8 months ago

Donate it to your local school.

[–] anamethatisnt@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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/

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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!

[–] shalva97@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

try Jackett + sonarr + radarr + qBittrorrent or sell it

[–] nodsocket@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Use it to make a webcam server. You could probably afford to plug in multiple webcams since it has USB 3. Great for checking on the home when you're away.

[–] TheBuenasTardes@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Someone posted the code for circadian whole home lighting, running on a pi not too long ago. Might be kinda cool to try out.

[–] ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah it's not it's closer to paying your yearly cost but per month. L

[–] bfg9k@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Make an uber-pwnagotchi that can hash at it's own pcaps

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

OpenVPN host to keep mobile devices behind pihole and able to access non-public lan services.

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

got CGNAT here :( that's why I am renting the hetzner machine

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Ah; then host the OpenVPN server from hetzner, the pi as a client, then configure the server to route traffic out through the pi client into your LAN. Your own little vpn tunnel, instead of using something like cloudflare tunnels.

Wan client > Hetzner > pi client > lan service

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world -3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

Storage= Controls where to store journal data. One of "volatile" (...) If "volatile", journal log data will be stored only in memory, i.e. below the /run/log/journal hierarchy (which is created if needed).