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Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

cri.dev

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Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#141

The hardware is there (RPi + USB storage). The server software is there (NextCloud, Plex, n8n, etc). What isn't there is the plumbing. The next logical step after this blog post is making your services accessible to your phone over the public net. You'll immediately find yourself mired in domain name registration, VPS management, TLS cert management, dyndns, port forwarding, hole punching, etc etc. There are lots of…

Or just setup Tailscale, which takes about two minutes.

Wow, yeah Tailscale looks like it basically does everything you'd want for this: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/

I didn't even realize this was possible: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

I had seen some of the people working there comment on twitter, but I don't think those blog posts were written when I last looked them up and I didn't understand what they were actually doing.

This looks like the answer for most people if you don't need to give public access to the stuff you're hosting.

If you do though, I'm still not sure what the thing to do is. If I wanted to host my blog from home instead of via github pages or digital ocean, what's the right way to do that? Is there a reason nobody does this?

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#142

The pi4 even overclocked isn't a great number cruncher, and I don't think the gpu acceleration has landed yet.. So I might expect it to be on par with that old of a macbook but not beat it by nearly 2x, particularly if the macbook is being accelerated. (despite having 2x the core count) Which makes me think the MBP may be suffering from some serious thermal throttling, which wouldn't be uncommon on machines of that v…

Definitely, good points. Gotta try your suggestion regarding the missing flag on the ffmpeg side and report back, out of interest. I’m on service battery since a long time in fact I consider this setup only temporary, and will soon upgrade to a modern machine

Set the encoder to omx on the pi as well to take advantage of accelerated h264 encoding.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#143
post #78
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RPi 4 from about a month or so ago onwards will do this out of the box Are you saying you don't need an SD card at all and it will just boot off USB?

Yes, it can do that now.

Is the documentation outdated? https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... says “USB booting is still under development“ and https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... says “The Pi 4B bootloader currently only supports booting from an SD card.”

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#144

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean. It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more dece…

> How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). Wireguard, listening on the public IP with port forwarding, and using a dynamic dns client to ensure I can always connect even if the public IP changes. > It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? Not the case here in my experience (Spain), but if you're fine being the only one with access you…

I use WireGuard via Tailscale. it's been a breeze since switching from a self managed solution on my Pis. generating the keys, syncing them across the Pis, syncing the Pis keys to the clients, all too much work. Tailscale has automated this.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#145

The pi4 even overclocked isn't a great number cruncher, and I don't think the gpu acceleration has landed yet.. So I might expect it to be on par with that old of a macbook but not beat it by nearly 2x, particularly if the macbook is being accelerated. (despite having 2x the core count) Which makes me think the MBP may be suffering from some serious thermal throttling, which wouldn't be uncommon on machines of that v…

> The pi4 even overclocked isn't a great number cruncher, and I don't think the gpu acceleration has landed yet..

Well, you do get about 96 Gflops. That was pretty respectable hmm... 12+ years ago.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#146
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most home routers have functionality to do port forwarding and dyndns. Certbot for TLS/cert. Just get a free domain from the dyndns service. No VPS needed if you got your own hardware/Rasbery. Make sure you have backups. Just Dont expect a $30 PC to be without issues.

Of course they do, but a lot of people are behind CGNAT and do not have a public IP address assigned to their CPE, and as such reaching a device in the LAN from the outside - without the device reaching out to you first - is impossible. And, of course, it can't reach out to your phone because it's also behind CGNAT. So, you need a VPS to act as a bridge between your phone and the device, which would connect to the VP…

Huh? Why can’t you assign a port/s to the CPE? You can even implement a port knocking scheme if you’re worried about some service/s on your home network being wide open to the world.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they do, but a lot of people are behind CGNAT and do not have a public IP address assigned to their CPE, and as such reaching a device in the LAN from the outside - without the device reaching out to you first - is impossible. And, of course, it can't reach out to your phone because it's also behind CGNAT. So, you need a VPS to act as a bridge between your phone and the device, which would connect to the VP…

Huh? Why can’t you assign a port/s to the CPE? You can even implement a port knocking scheme if you’re worried about some service/s on your home network being wide open to the world.

The point is that outside traffic isn't even reaching anything you even have control over, because you don't have a public IP (i.e. the ISP won't set up port forwarding for you). Let's say you wanted to directly send a packet to my phone. There's no way we could make that happen even with both of our cooperation because my phone doesn't get a publicly addressable IP.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#148
post #123
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most home routers have functionality to do port forwarding and dyndns. Certbot for TLS/cert. Just get a free domain from the dyndns service. No VPS needed if you got your own hardware/Rasbery. Make sure you have backups. Just Dont expect a $30 PC to be without issues.

For me its not the 30$ pc that has issues but the 10$ microsd card the os is on. I had to replace it for the third time in about 6 years now. But this is not something new of course, everybody will tell you to either use good uSD cards or put the os somewhere else, like an external hdd or so.

It's possible to boot from USB with the Pi4, I wouldn't run anything important from the MicroSD.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#149

The hardware is there (RPi + USB storage). The server software is there (NextCloud, Plex, n8n, etc). What isn't there is the plumbing. The next logical step after this blog post is making your services accessible to your phone over the public net. You'll immediately find yourself mired in domain name registration, VPS management, TLS cert management, dyndns, port forwarding, hole punching, etc etc. There are lots of…

I tried running nextcloud on an rpi. It just doesn't cut it. I had the 4gb model and nextcloud runs but its a horrible experience. You go on the web UI and click a photo and it takes 10 seconds to load. Moved my server to a ryzen 5 based setup and now everything is instant. I'm not sure what the limiting factor on the rpi was because the ram and cpu usage was low. Perhaps it was memory or storage speed.

Agree, the pi is way too low power to handle nextcloud comfortably. In the same price range, it's much better to buy a used NUC (even with a celeron!) compared to the beefiest Raspberry Pi 4 out there.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#150

The hardware is there (RPi + USB storage). The server software is there (NextCloud, Plex, n8n, etc). What isn't there is the plumbing. The next logical step after this blog post is making your services accessible to your phone over the public net. You'll immediately find yourself mired in domain name registration, VPS management, TLS cert management, dyndns, port forwarding, hole punching, etc etc. There are lots of…

I use a VPN + static IP or DDNS to get access to my home cloud/server (both the VPN and DDNS can be setup on my router). Also, there are free DDNS providers.
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