Man, oh man, have I been dying to get this project up and running for a long time!
I got my first 4GB ram Raspberry Pi 4B, about a year ago. I went through some startup guides to help me set up the Raspbian LINUX distro, and use that as a server for my printer using OctoPrint.
For those of you who don’t know, OctoPrint is a cool interactive web interface for your 3D printer.
It lets you remotely control your printer, upload stl files, mount a camera to monitor your print and even produce a time-lapse video of the whole process.
Another awesome feature is an AI computer vision plugin algorithm that checks if the print is going ok, and prevent the abominable filament spaghetti we all fear.
Anyway, a couple of months ago Google had changed their “Google Pictures” app terms
from: “We host your pictures for free, but with lesser quality”
to: “We host your pictures using YOUR OWN storage drive”
That means you’d better buy some extra GBs and start sorting through ALL of your pictures. Pictures of your friends’ pets, your old scanned documents from the university years ago, hundreds of accidental screen shots taken while trying to hit the snooze alarm in the mornings, and of course, picking the best picture out of a series of twenty lavishly taken photos of the same exact moment, because why not? the age of film is no more.
So I tried the sorting thing. I really did. I tried coming up with a threshold for choosing which pictures were worth saving, and which weren’t. For each statue, road, friend or just plain scenery photos from a trip, I had to choose if its IN or OUT.
That did NOT work out, to say the least. I ended up quite decision-paralyzed from the process, and I wasn’t even half way through!. Just thinking about it gives me anxiety. I’m telling you. You want to torture information out of people quickly? let them sort through my photos. 5 minutes of that, and they’ll sing like a bird. Want it quicker? but I mean, banned-from-the-Geneva-conventions quicker?
Let them sort through a phone belonging to one of those gym members that go everyday just to look at themselves in the mirror.
…..
………
Umm, yep.
I got carried away there for a second….
Bottom line, I wanted to create my own media device, accessible from anywhere around the world. I wanted it to be secure, and to be able to sync my photos from my phone to an SSD attached to it with a backup drive, without depending on any other cloud service out there.
I wanted my own server, my own cloud.
I wanted a NAS – A Network Attached Storage device.
So I bought my second 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B and a couple of SSDs. I also designed and printed a nice mounting frame for it:
I called it The WayStone NAS.
All of my Pi’s and IOT’s are themed after my favorite book –
The Name Of The Wind
The Kingkiller Chronicle series,
by Patrick Rothfuss
Well, after installing docker I spun up my OpenMediaVault OS container, to manage my NAS and that opened up a whole new world of self hosting PARADISE.
My curiosity buds EXPLOADED with tons of awesome server apps I could run containerized. I started hosting my own websites using Nginx or Apache web servers, creating a media server with Plex, hosting a Nextcloud server for syncing all my photos and documents, adding Grafana and Prometheus to scrape and monitor the health of my server, BitWarden to locally store and access all of my passwords, Pi-Hole to act as my local DNS and block ads, Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, Readarr, Overseerr, and Prowlarr to manage all my media automations, requests, and recommendations.
Each of these is in its own docker container using a separate port on my local host, and I am using the Heimdall dashboard (also in a container) as my “one ring to rule them all“:
Locally, connected to my home network, everything’s all fine and dandy, but how do I securely enable access from the outside world??
Three ways to do that:
- Enabling port forwarding through my router to access each on of my services –
UNSAFE. INSECURE. NEVER do that! - Using Nginx as a reverse proxy server with SSL. Quite secure, but isn’t very flexible for adding/removing clients. I need more CONTROL.
- Hosting my own VPN server. UBER SECURE.
As you might have guessed, I went with the third option and installed a WireGuard VPN server.
It works wonderfully, giving me complete control over my clients. Configuring a new client is as easy as copy/paste. All I have to do is add a new client in the server to receive my handshake configuration. I pass the config file into my client’s WireGuard app and that’s it!. The app is also supported in Android, IOS, Mac and PC and it’s incredibly fast!
Now all that remains is to start scraping all of my data from Facebook and Google drive and migrate into the Waystone. I do think I’ll keep using my Google drive as a backup, until I am perfectly confident in the reliability of my system. You can never be too careful..
In the next posts, I intend to start sharing a bit more info about this build and dive into details . Future posts will detail specific app configurations, setting up docker and docker-compose and everything I host on my server. The ultimate goal is leading to my very own Pi-Cluster SUPER COMPUTER, which would be managed by Kubernetes.
I give credit when credit is due
Here’s a list of the self-hosting Jedi’s who guided me through the process –