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?
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
You could pihole
Some great light lightweight apps for a 4GB Pi:
- Homeassistant
- Fresh RSS
- Paperless NGX
- Syncthing
- PiHole or Adguard home
- Syncthing
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.
BirdNet Pi!
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.
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.
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…
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.
You can run an (emulated) IBM mainframe on it!
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.
Joplin notes. A really nice notetaking app you can selfhost. Simple enough but stil verry advanced.
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?
