4w ago

What else to run on a RPi?

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?

90 comments

Pihole, homeassistant, a music server using moodeaudio
- Another vote for Pi-hole here. I don’t know how I lived without it before!
  
  I use an adblocker on both my PC and my phone. Does a Pi-hole have many advantages over that?
  
  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?
Another vote for PiHole. It keeps your home network cleaner by ignoring the ads.
On my Rpi4B I run syncthing 24/7. It acts as my sync hub. All other machines are connected to it.
SANE scan server? Paperless ngx also comes to my mind, find it pretty useful.
- I was trying to set up a scan server last week. No luck yet. 😅
  Paperless ngx looks looks amazing. I was actually thinking of finding a solution for this type of thing as pdfgrep was getting kinda slow.
Paperless ngx
PiHole is a pretty light load, as are Home Assistant and Music Assistant. Frigate starts to make some heat, so don't expect to get a full blown video classification / recording system.
Get yourself and adsb antenna and feed flightaware, flightradar24, and adsbexchange. Help track the skies!
Some great light lightweight apps for a 4GB Pi:
Homeassistant
Fresh RSS
Paperless NGX
Syncthing
PiHole or Adguard home
Syncthing
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?
  
  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.
  
  I wouldn't recomend Jellyfin if it will transcode anything on a rpi4b.
BirdNet Pi!
https://github.com/Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi
PiHole, PiVPN, maybe a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager to make connecting to your various web management portals you have an easy way to map it to a human readable url
You could pihole
You could also setup a git repo for your config files. That way you could revert changes, if you break something.
If you don't want do open your pi up to the internet you could take a look at tailscale. I use this script on my laptop and home pc to share files with sshfs while having any other traffic go through mullvad. Set this up on your pi with it as an exit node and you basically have access from anywhere.
Nextcloud is very useful, or a lemmy Fediverse Instance
- Nextcloud seems a be an alternative to the G-Suite, did I get that right? That move to the cloud kinda missed me. I'm happy with LibreOffice and having everything stored locally.
  Do you have experience with running a single-user Lemmy instance? I remember trying out some smaller instances, and they weren't as federated (i.e. I could see less content) than on the bigger ones.
AdGuard Home (I prefer it to PiHole)
OtterWiki
Wireguard
Forgejo
Tandoor
- Can I please ask why you prefer Adguard over Pihole?
  The sd card in my raspberry 3b recently died, and my pihole with it. I am now using Adguard but not sure it's working well for me, consider going back. What's the winning argument for you?
  
  I find the interface feels more modern and interactive, I didn't like how static PiHole felt with adding to a list then manually restarting Gravity.
  AGH has support for more list types, it has more features built-in, such as DNS over TLS so I can use it on my phone even when I'm not home.
  And personally I feel like its less buggy, I've never encountered a problem on AGH, whereas I did on PiHole.
let it run dwarf fortress from within the terminal, then ssh into it from wherever you are so you can play df from anywhere in the world. i did this at work.
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.
  
  For CDs, Amazon, ebay, or discogs. Digital music I usually get from the artist's webstore if possible, otherwise I'll buy it from Amazon or BandCamp.
  One heads up, Buying and downloading digital music from Amazon is a pain in the butt if you have an Amazon Music subscription. Easy and straightforward though without.
  Apple music is also possible but you have to burn the tracks to CD using itunes to move it out of Apple's ecosystem.
  I also hear good things about Tidal but I've never used them.
  
  Seconding Bandcamp & Qobuz, or ripping CDs. I use fre:ac to get accurate FLACs.
- Yeah, I'm running home assistant with 43 Zigbee devices, 20 Wifi connected devices including about 150 channels of medium-high (once a minute) data logging (temperature, humidity, signal strength, sensor positions, radar occupancy info, etc.), and a Music Assistant instance, and while it's streaming net-radio I've only got 98% idle on my Pi's CPU, feeling the squeeze already /s.
  Your Zigbee hub will run out of capacity long before the Pi. Solution: run multiple Zigbee hubs when you get to that point.
  
  I have around 100 ZigBee devices, roughly 40 WiFi devices, three dozen integrations, Music Assistant, etc. And yeah I was feeling the squeeze. 🤷 Let alone security cameras....
qbittorrent (docker) 😁😎
Jellyfin music server. It needs about 1.2 GB of RAM for itself, plus the system.
- My PI with podman jellyfin and flatnotes is sitting at 600 MB ram
  
  Mine needs 1.3 GB with an itunes library of 160 gb.
Another idea: dokuwiki, to document your process setting up various service for future reference
- Neat idea! If I were that orderly (I'm more of the mindset that what I don't remember probably wasn't important), I'd set up a normal website. I enjoy writing HTML by hand.
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've got Jellyfin running on an odroid, and it's pretty solid.
Not sure if you're the type to need access to your home network while away, but I also use a pi zero as my "login gateway"--I forward just port 22 to it from the WAN, and I have ssh set up to only allow logins with a key. I can set up dynamic port forwarding and tunnel through to my home network, and that pi zero has no other function (so even if I screw something else up on another server, I can still access my network).
You can seed Anna's Archive, the largest public collection of texts:
https://annas-archive.org/torrents
Can also do the same for scihub or archive.org but I think only on an individual basis.
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...
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.
You can run an (emulated) IBM mainframe on it!
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.
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.)
The latest versions won't work. It has problems loading the chunks.
Source: Tried it myself
- Thanks for the info. I won't even try then.
Kavita, Komga, or calibre-web? I love having a book and comics server.
Joplin notes. A really nice notetaking app you can selfhost. Simple enough but stil verry advanced.
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
mine is my reverse proxy, using the nginx proxy manager docker install method
As a general thing because I found myself trying to justify my Gear Acquisition Syndrome -- it's a good idea to split services across devices, rather than having some monolithic home server (which is where most people start). That way if one box goes down, it doesn't take down your whole stack.
If you have some machines scattered about doing different things, it might be time to consider logically grouping services and splitting them across that hardware.
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.
Skimmed the title. Brain registered words "rpi" and "linux" underneath it. Instant reaction: "Not another app package format please". 😶‍🌫️
I should spend more time reading properly & less time being an old man yelling at tech.
irks me that it’s mostly idling
Well it's a small processor and relatively efficient one at that so... how about going the opposite direction? How about measuring the power draw on idle? With other task? I don't actually know if that architecture handles that but I saw some things on the do https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100095/0002/functional-description/power-management/dynamic-power-management?lang=en
Also what about using a RPi Zero instead?
- I'll look into how to make it draw less power. Thanks! That didn't really cross my mind.
  Why not use RPi Zero? That would require buying additional hardware. I'd rather use what I already have.
  
  require buying additional hardware.
  Trade with someone?

90 comments