Pihole is easy and light enough. I used to host Transmission (transmission-daemon) on a 3B+ and it worked alright for seeding around 300-500 torrents. FreshRSS also worked alongside.
Selfhosted
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Pihole my is choice too. It’s pretty good, but for some reason video ads still get through even off YouTube? Is it possible to block them?
You can't do that with Pihole as the ads come from the same domains, and basically need a browser extension or an app with a built in equivalent.
If you're in the UK though, it does block the ads on All4 which was a nice surprise. It even works for the TV app.
I am in the UK and that’s really useful to know. Thanks
YouTube ads don't come from a separate server. They come in the same way as the video. They pretty much need to be filtered out at the player end (e.g. browser plugins).
Use firefox with uBlock Origin to get rid of YouTube ads.
Pihole blocks ad domains. YouTube ads are still from youtube.com, so you have to block them on the browser level with something like Ublock Origin
You can block ads on your computer with basically any browser plugin adblocker.
If your phone is Android, using an app called ReVanced, which is a modified version of the official YouTube app that essentially gives you all the Premium features (including adblocking and picture-in-picture) for free. You can even sign in with your Google account and interact with playlists, comments, etc.
It has to be side-loaded, of course, since Google wouldn't allow that in the Play Store.
Pihole is the best starting point in my opinion, helped a lot of my friend to get started !
Goes against the spirit of self-hosting but for some stuff(Email, DNS, Passwords), I just SaaS it out. As much as I love my lab, nothing self-hosted in my prod environment is critical.
Exactly, I can barely maintain a media server I really don't want to be responsible for my passwords and photos. There are secure alternatives that are private and open enough for my needs...
I haven't found anything software-wise (self-hosted or SaaS) that I'm satisfied with for photos. Thankfully, those are easy enough to backup and aren't used day-to-day. What have you tried, and do you like/dislike of each?
At first I tried some self hosted solutions but I didn't like anything, eventually I landed on ente.io/ which I really like.
It has a lot of ways to import your photos, really nice mobile and pc (windows, Linux, and Mac) apps that can automatically upload your pictures in the background, the devs are really responsive (there was a bug with one of the importers so I opened a ticket and I got a lot of help in order to debug the issue and solve it).
The only thing that I don't love is that while the clients are all open source, the back end isn't because they claim they are too small of a team to keep it both open source and secure.
I'm hosting https://www.home-assistant.io/ on raspberry pi's.
I just started with HA as well and it's a massive rabbit hole haha. So far set up thermostats for rooms, motion sensors with smart lights and integration with Frigate for my security cams. Also set up a tablet with HA which displays all our photos from the NAS as screensaver.
Add outside environmental conditions from your national provider and purpleair, and you can figure whether it's better to run HVAC or open a window. I have an aspirational project to motorize some windows.
For the cost of a rpi, just get actually capable hardware. Once you actually get anything running you'll wish you had real hardware.
I've been leaning this way lately. From a cost/capability standpoint, RPis were easy to justify when they were ~$30, but not as much at their current inflated prices unless you have specific power consumption and form factor requirements. Used/refurbished Dell thin clients and MFF PCs can be had for $40-100, ranging from fanless systems with low-power Atoms and Celerons to full-fledged desktops with Core i-series CPUs, all with memory and storage included more often than not. I personally just picked up a Dell OptiPlex MFF with an i5-9500T, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD for $100.
Refurbished thinclients really are fantastic if you don't specifically need a pi for the formfactor. I got a bunch of Fujitsu S920 with 4GB RAM for roughly €35 a piece and I've been pretty happy with them so far.
If you have a 3d printer also check out Klipper, Octopi etc. I run mine off a pi zero 2 and it is a leap in performance over the stock board on the Ender 5.
honestly it is good to start with and for controlling machines like an array of 3d printers but a dumpster dive laptop will be faster. RPI4 is quite old now.
with that done:
- jellyfin
- smb server
- syncthing
- tftp with wake on lan / clonezilla to backup your other machines
PiVPN is a simple home VPN solution that's worth exploring.
Is you are interested in smart home/home automation Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform and makes a great Pi project.
I’ve recently set up pivpn with duckdns. Are there any security related steps I should take or is the out of the box config good enough?
Pihole is a good start, though I personally use my Pi 3B+ for printer server over WiFi since I have a dumb Epson printer.
I have two Raspberry Pi (4 / 2) and I use them to selfhost:
- AdguardHome (two instances)
- HomeAssistant
- NextCloud
- Forgejo
- VaultWarden
- NTP server
Those are all as Docker services so I can easily switch to new devices in case I need to. All of them work like a charm.
One suggestion might be to load a Debian build on it and use it for docker containers. With docker containers you can do so many different things. I have a PI 4 and it does all of the following:
PiHole - For blocking ads. (Everyone should have one of these)
OpenMediaVault - For NAS
Portainers - For loading docker containers
Radarr - Downloading Movies
Sonarr - Downloading TV Shows
Tautulli - Monitors my plex server
Overseer - Allows members of my plex share to request content.
NZBGET and Real-Debrid Torrent Downloader Clients - For downloading content from usenet or real-debrid.
I have one Pi4 running all of these as docker containers. Have fun!
Any chance you can point to a good tutorial for setting up these apps on the RPi?
Generally nothing that requires capable hardware, but benefits from a standardized computer that I can just flash an SD card image from my computer to deploy.
MQTT broker. Usually this does not require even a fraction of the processing power available in a RasPi.
AutoSSH. Why? So it sets up an SSH tunnel to a cloud VPS. Then I use a reverse tunnel to get terminal access to the Pi from the Internet, ignoring all firewalls / ISP NAT etc. I install this (with permission) in a client office or at home so that I can maintain local network services without driving to their office. Then they can unplug it when I'm done. This also uses only a tiny fraction of the RasPi's processing power, but the standardized hardware makes it easier to deploy (SD card image) and maintain.
Oh also it can probably run a Deliantra (http://www.deliantra.net/) server. That's a fun little game to play with some friends.
My list for my raspberry pi 4 (4 GB):
- Nextcloud (synced cloud storage, like Dropbox; it can do more with plugins but this is all I use it for)
- FreshRSS (RSS reader)
- Wallabag (read it later, like Pocket or Instapaper)
- Gitea (git project hosting like Github; admittedly I don't really use this one much)