[TriLUG] tips for a new, RPI-based house server

Fri May 1 12:54:17 EDT 2020

I would look at Ubuntu 20.04 server for the OS.

If you are interested in blocking spam, ads, trackers, I would look into PiHole/Unbound.  PiHole will take care of the DNSmasq stuff and Unbound will be your caching DNS.  PiHole has a web admin interface that will let you easily whitelist domains that you don’t want to block.  Here is a link to the guide for using unbound with PiHole (the guide assumes PiHole is installed, but you can find the docs for that on the site I’m linking as well): https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/.

I have PiHole/unbound running on a raspi zero w and a raspi 2.  Both working great. Both are running raspbian, but I’m going to switch to 20.04 at the earliest opportunity.

Chris Bickhaus

> On May 1, 2020, at 10:57 AM, Pete Soper via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear Supremo System Designers and Maintainers,
> 
> Roughly seven years ago I slapped together a Samba server on an original Odroid C4 (think Raspberry Pi 2, but well before that came out) running Ubuntu 14.04. The rotating drives were set to spin down after relatively short idle times and I just lived with the few seconds pause while they spun up (i.e. this has zero pain factor). It has silently done it's job while emulating a night light wrt power dissipation, but it's time to swap in something better before my luck runs out. I want to swap vs upgrade to avoid any down time or time spent with no service 'cause I hosed something in the middle and can't figure out how to recover.
> 
> I have a 4GB RPI 4 with heat sinks and fan, a USB 3 powered hub and pair of 2TB USB 3 interfaced drives for a RAID 1. I may or may not use the old trick to have the RPI's root filesystem on another USB drive vs using an SD card (i.e. the SD card would be for boot loading only).
> 
> The questions are what OS to use, whether Samba is still the right choice, and , as I may want the thing to provide local DNS caching, spam sink, etc, what the best combo of software infrastructure for that might be? My wife has to be able to access some of the storage with zero hassle using Windows (7 and 10) but she could live with a bit lower performance than what I might get with another Linux system as her accesses are few and far between (and she's used to Windows being dog slow anyway!) The RPI will have wired ethernet connection to the house router and I have no current plans or desires to touch the RPI 4's wifi or bluetooth, let alone it's GPIO et all: that's well over the horizon and not on the table here.
> 
> Left to my own devices I'd go with Debian 10 + Samba and either bind 9 or a more recent equivalent but without much clue about advantages of one or the other. This won't be a general purpose system, so, for example, the fact that app X won't run on Debian but does on Ubuntu is not relevant. All my experience for maybe 15 years has been with Debian or derivatives, so I'm not keen about Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, etc. The spam sink is appealing but up to now I've never tried one: I just use Adblock with my browser. But I'm both ignorant and conflicted about the latter, as, for example, when I visit the amateur radio classifieds at qth.com I don't want to disable those ads and can "pause" the blocker for the specific site, as those ads are the means of support and the guy that runs it is a personal friend. I guess I can just "white list" sites like these? (No idea what I'm talking about with this last question).
> 
> So, what do you recommend?
> 
> -Pete
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> This message was sent to: Chris Bickhaus <bick at bickhaus.net>
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