Homelab Runner
(Alternatively titled "Of Coaches and Cartoons")
This week our home's Pi-Hole suddenly stopped working. I'm not sure exactly what happened, the week before I attempted to upgrade it to Pi-Hole 6 and the upgrade failed because the Raspberry Pi was on a previous OS version. My best guess is that the system actually stopped working at that time, and the lag for DNS updates, etc., made it only noticeable this week.
So, the past few days I've spent a fair bit of time completely redoing our home infrastructure. I did a complete clean install and upgrade on that Raspberry Pi to the new Raspberry Pi OS and even more than that, really diving into Docker.
Previously my installs were standalone and not containerized. Now I've got it all running through Docker. Docker is a tool which contains these applications in their own environments.
So, the infrastructure in the house is run on basically two systems:
Pep (named for Pep Guardiola, I name my Raspberry Pis after coaches.) - Pep previously ran two things: Pi-Hole and Home Assistant. Now, I am just using it for Pi-Hole.
Pi-Hole is a fantastic tool that you can integrate in your network to block ads, trackers and more. The way it works is you tell your router to put every DNS request through your Pi-Hole, and it filters these requests and basically tells your router that the problematic URLs don't resolve as if they didn't exist. It's like uBlock or other ad blocking tools in your browser, except for your entire network.
You can subscribe to URL lists like ad blockers in your browser, etc. It's a huge quality of life improvement to have that blocking across your network, not just your computer, but also TVs, iPads, etc.
The other machine is Marvin (named for Marvin the Martian, I name my desktop PCs after Looney Tunes characters.) It was my old desktop PC and has been working as the house's media machine, and now, I'm having it do more.
Previously it just ran Plex, an internal streaming app for watching movies and TV. Now I have it running Home Assistant, and I am experimenting with a few more things.
Home Assistant is a tool that manages home automation. Theoretically Pep could run both Pi-Hole and Home Assistant, and did in the past, but I am beginning to question if the Raspbery Pi for Pep may be going out on me since I've had it for six/seven years. So, I am leaving Pep to do one job and expecting it to do it well, and putting Marvin (which is leagues more powerful than Raspberry Pis) to do more.
The truth is I'm only barely using Home Assistant. It could do so much more. I basically have it to run two automations for lights around the house.
So, more than Plex and HA, here are some of the new things I'm experimenting with on Marvin.
- DoneTick - A shared to-do / task app. I envision being used by Katie and me for house chores, etc.
- Actual Budget - This is a finance management app, however I have been coming up a core issue
Actual Budget is supposed to be fantastic. However, I can't get it to work yet. The issue I am facing is that when it isn't run on the computer you're using, it requires HTTPS for web access. Which is completely logical for a finance app, however when dealing with home networks that isn't straightforward. And that is the issue I'm running into. I've tried a few times this week to figure out the HTTPS certificate but it continues to elude me. I'll get it eventually.
Both of these systems contribute to what people call a "homelab." Homelabs are basically this, technology and networking and computers used for home projects etc. Interestingly, I can't seem to find where the term originated. Maybe I'm overlooking it.
So this has been my work for the past few days. I've enjoyed it, as of course something new for my ADHD to glom onto.
Now, back to trying to crack the HTTPS issue I have.
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A raspberry pi cluster hosting websites
I always love projects like this and it definitely makes me think maybe this little blog of mine should move to a Raspberry pi cluster soon.
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Schmetz on TV
My household has two Raspberry Pis.
One, 'Klopp,' runs our home automation, spam blocking, etc. The other, 'Schmetz,' had been a little dev machine but I've since stopped using that (at least for the time being.) So it's been sitting largely idle for a while.
After acquiring a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, Schmetz has been relocated to the TV. As I explained on Mastodon, primarily to easily enable some streaming to the TV (Twitch which cannot stream on Roku, thanks Amazon.)
It will also prove useful on days where I need to stream multiple games of soccer, etc.
Now I need to update our Harmony remote to properly handle inputs.
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Schmetz is Live
After a fair bit of fiddling, Schmetz, the newest Raspberry Pi in my house, to be used as my home development webserver, is up and running! Apache, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin... it took some fiddling for various weird behaviors but we got there and I'm now developing on a local instance of my current coding project. Later tonight or tomorrow I'll set up Glowbug on it.
Up to now my secret shame has been web developing on live. It's not something I'm proud o,f but for the scale of projects I'm working on, it's been fine. But this is obviously far better and will make bigger developments for ongoing projects possible.
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A Raspberry Pi Cluster vs. Macbook
This video is neat because the code he uses to test the performance ends up being a fairly simple script that looks for prime numbers. This was hugely nostalgic for me as, in high school, I had a coding challenge with a buddy of mine named Josh to do this. We wrote code to find the primes between 1 and 1,000,000. But ours wasn't about processing power so much as optimized code.
My big realization, which seems so obvious looking back, was that I only needed to check a number up to it's square root for factors. So if I have the number 81, I don't need to look past 9. If there are no factors for 81 below 9, then it is a prime number. Obviously, 81 is not prime, it's a perfect square.
I also have a love for cluster Raspberry Pi projects and still have idle plans to build my own cluster one day. The only reason I haven't is that I don't have any need at all for it. The closest I've come is the idea of running this blog on a raspberry pi cluster out of my house, but that also comes with a number of headaches and challenges. Maybe one day.
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Running Pi-Hole as a recursive DNS server
I came across this on YouTube last night. I run Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3b in our house, but up to now I've solely done it as a filter for ads. However when I learned I can increase it to be more of a complete local DNS server I knew I had to give it a try.
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Lego AI Sorter - 2 years in the making
Very fun and neat project! Legos truly are amazing.
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