Hiya!
I have a Raspberry Pi 4B set up as a print server, so it has to run 24/7. But it irks me that it’s mostly idling.
I’d move my website to it, but I don’t want to deal with it being open to the internet. The same goes for an e-mail server.
I was also thinking of running a Minecraft server on it. (Being able to play on the same world from different devices is kinda cool.) Alas, my RPi only has 4 GiBs of RAM. I worry that such a load would interfere with the print server.
Any ideas what I could run on it?
You could pihole
Some great light lightweight apps for a 4GB Pi:
- Homeassistant
- Fresh RSS
- Paperless NGX
- Syncthing
- PiHole or Adguard home
- Syncthing
Pihole, homeassistant, a music server using moodeaudio
Another vote for Pi-hole here. I don’t know how I lived without it before!
Does PiHole ever break a family member’s browsing, and then they don’t know to fix the issue because it would involve understanding opening up the PiHole web interface?
Yes, that does sometimes happen but the frequency depends on the blocking list used, or if multiple lists are used. When a family member encounters something like this, I can usually quite quickly identify the relevant blocked item and whitelist it.
And if you aren’t home or available?
Well, it takes a while longer to fix. The only times it’s happened (perhaps twice in 6 months) it’s been when a family member has been trying to buy something from a website. I can also access the Pi-hole remotely and—in the worst case scenario—just turn off blocking altogether for a short period.
I use an adblocker on both my PC and my phone. Does a Pi-hole have many advantages over that?
One major advantage is that on the domestic TV channels here in the UK which have ad breaks (essentially all of them except the BBC) it removes the ads altogether and the programmes run seamlessly from the part before the ad break into the part after. I still smile every time it happens!
Running those adblockers on your devices is extremely insecure. They register as a VPN and intercept HTTPS traffic. They decrypt the encrypted traffic, filter it, and encrypt again meaning all your communications are signed by this single app’s certificate. Not to mention any vulnerability would wreak havoc.
PiHole is DNS based ad blocking and local DNS for everything on your network. So, even things that can’t run their own adblocker.
Not just ad blocker, but tracking blockers too. Also, if you’ve got a simple little device like a WiFi controlled outlet switch, and through PiHole you notice it “phoning home” frequently even though you’re not using it… that’s a clue that you might not want to be keeping such things inside the same network where you check on your 401(k) account…
So I have a smart plug set up on my printer and print server (old HP 4P with separate network print server.
I have NodeRed watching my CUPS queues via HTTP scraping, and if it sees a job in the queue for that printer, it turns on the print server and printer via the smartplug over wifi. I have seen someone link a project that does something similiar.
Check out BOINC: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Raspberry Pi I’m not sure if it’s worth it. But in short you can advance some science with spare CPU hours. Should be possible to limit it so it doesn’t heat up and use just a bit of the cycles depending on other load…
I run a asterisk PJSIP VOIP server on my raspberry pi 5 8GB. I had to use the git and build and recompile and manually load all PJSIP modules because for some reason I couldn’t even find an asterisk package on apt db for ARM64 for some fucking reason. Also had to containerize it within a docker because the shit couldn’t properly compile without interfering with native system binaries. Shit is so fucking goated and can do PSTN via twilio trunking (call numbers outside of the phone server’s number base so basically anyone as long as you make the phone numbers parsed in extensions.conf for each country you wanna call XD). Currently works within LAN but I am planning on making it accessible over the internet using my domain and a tunnel for UDP if possible or just a VPN since my router is being a removed with SIP packets rn. I am having trouble with that part but once it’s done I can quite literally ditch any phone plan and use it. Twilio hardly even charges shit for voice rates 🤣🤣🤣. You could also self host your domain + email providing service and then connect that to thunderbird for full schizo-level privacy or sum shit. That’s what I do to ditch web-email BS
Paperless ngx
Airsonic music server… There are a few quirks getting it all set up properly, but once it works, it just seems to work forever. Samba file sharing server. Also miniDLNA server can make it easy to watch your movie collection on a tv. The airsonic DLNA doesn’t seem to be working currently. I also have a few mastodon bots running from a Pi4. Also could run a tor relay node, which would make it so it’s less idle. I have a lot of stuff on my Pi4 and it is still mostly idle most of the time. Thats fine though. For me it’s not a huge problem, since overall, my goal is to make it use as little power as possible for all those things. I think thats the whole point is to really use the most lightweight computer that can do what you need. If you just need the print server, you could always get a lower power Pi so you can really optimize how much power needs to be used and maybe even do some sort of Wake on LAN setup so it can be sleeping while not in use.
Another vote for PiHole. It keeps your home network cleaner by ignoring the ads.
Get yourself and adsb antenna and feed flightaware, flightradar24, and adsbexchange. Help track the skies!
SANE scan server? Paperless ngx also comes to my mind, find it pretty useful.
I run AdGuard Home, WireGuard and a couple of other things on my 4B, all in Docker.
I used to run HomeAssistant on our for a while, but they stopped supporting that architecture (armhf?). Also used to run Unbound on it.
HomeAssistant is still supported on Pi4b
It’s support for the rpi3 that is getting fased out.
Odd, it must be the Docker image I’m using, then. Thanks for clarifying.
I suppose it works best with haos installed on the Rpi
Maybe Nextcloud? Jellyfin?
I’ll add Jellyfin to the list! Do you need a specific client to receive a stream or can say VLC or mpv do it?
I wouldn’t recomend Jellyfin if it will transcode anything on a rpi4b.
Typically a web browser or dedicated app, but it’s open source so there are options. You might be able to stream directly with VLC, not sure.
You can use VLC if you get the stream url via a web browser, first. MPV can do the same.
The problem is VLC/MPV don’t have a built-in way to browse and pick what you want to play.
There is an official Jellyfin plugin that adds DLNA support; content can then be accessed via any DLNA client including VLC (built in support). MPV can also use DLNA with it’s own plugin.
I use my Pi 4B as a DVR for movies and OTA television (MythTV).
There are other tools that handle playback better (OSMC/Kodi, etc) but Myth’s configuration and handling of recording schedules is incredibly powerful. Conflict management works well and it can record multiple streams off the same tuner so conflicts are reduced in the first place.
Another vote for a music server. Gonic/Navidrome is pretty low power and super useful!
Home assistant is another option, but I’ll say that if you’re serious about home automation you’ll quickly outgrow a Pi. It’ll run if you only have a handful of devices though.
I like the music server idea! Where do you get your music? Many artists don’t even sell CDs nowadays.
Home assistant is probably not for me. The house I live in is still very analogue. I enjoy not having to debug software when investigating why there’s no hot water.
Plenty of artists still do sell CDs though. I often buy them at the merch stand at shows. Many also sell DRM free digital files on sites like Bandcamp. I also buy a lot of music at the thrift stores and rip them. If all else fails, there’s always the high seas.
Almost every time I look on Bandcamp, the artist I am looking for isn’t there. :( Also, last time I tried buying something there they only accepted PayPal which I stopped using a while ago. But it seems they accept normal card payments now. Neat.
I buy CDs – I even bought a CD drive to rip them – but international shipping really kills me. I guess brick-and-mortar music shops are still a thing…
There’s also qobuz for your more mainstream music needs. And you can always use a YouTube downloaded like yt-dlp together with a music tagging tool like MusicBrainz Picard.
Its Qobuz 😅
You are right. I’ve corrected my comment