I was gifted a new Raspberry Pi. I already have a previous pihole setup and now looking for other ideas to run on my network.
I was considering a network monitoring tool. Any other suggestions?
You could create a NASpi! Check it on YouTube
PiHole, Jellyseerr, Radarr, Sonarr, Emby, Syncthing, Homepage, Home Assistant, and Snipe-IT.
PiHole is self explanatory.
Jellyseerr, Radarr, Sonarr, Syncthing and Emby are used for media management and streaming, alongside a remote seedbox.
Homepage is a locally hosted browser landing page with widgets for network monitoring.
Home Assistant for locally hosted home automation controls.
Snipe-IT for asset management. Way overkill for a home user, but it’s free to self-host. Make sure all my assets are listed, can upload receipts, photos warranty info, manufacturer info, etc. so it’s a single place to find all of that information if I ever need it.
Please don’t go the RaspberryPi route for serious self-hosting, you’ll regret it later when you’ll realize it’s not powerful enough for ie NextCloud. It can handle PiHole for example (minus digging through the historical logs / stats via its interface), but when adding more and more services (Nextcloud, Jellyfin, a VPN, home automation, etc), it will be easier to expand via VMs (Proxmox) / Docker on a single machine that you need to maintain, you’d have easier snapshot backups, single point for firewall rules, etc, than adding RPIs. Buy a mini server, you’ll have flexibility, room for upgrade, and the costs and power consumption will be justified when scaling to multiple services.
For some of us it’s a financial issue. I already own a Raspi 4, but don’t have money lying around to get a decent mini server (e.g. acceptable performance paired with low power consumption and no fan noise).
I still manage to run a few Docker containers on top of OMV, but need to be mindful of the load:
- Jellyfin (no transcoding)
- Immich (workers set to minimum)
- Backrest (restic frontend)
- Duplicati (phasing out)
- Heimdall
- changedetection.io
- Tailscale sidecar containers
But yes, when running a bigger backup job, I pause Immich indexing or shut down Jellyfin, just in case