My Home Server Journey

Hello there.

I had a Raspberry Pi 4 – 4GB sitting there quite a while, waiting for me to do cool projects. I had even forgotten about it. With the new Pi 5 is introduced, I remembered long due projects.

I have an Android TV, and I got so used to Chromecast, everything was easy and working perfect, almost. When I wanted to cast my media from PC to TV, I realized that is not an easy task.

After searching through Reddit, I saw the potential, that I can many stuff with my Raspberry Pi 4. However, at that time I was away from home, and while I was discovering stuff, I got super excited and not to lose that excitement I used AWS free tier EC2 servers.

The first thing I wanted to try was Pi-hole, since I already tried that previously. But it was not so easy, since I needed to configure VPN in order to use the filtered DNS coming from Pi-hole.

The search about home server though, was quite frustrating. Every post is related to Docker, Proxmox, virtualization, hypervisors, etc. What are they? Do I really know everything about them to get started?

Apparently no, but if you don’t know about those things, it is quite time consuming to get to know and try those things out. While in the discovery phase about these kind of stuff, I figured out there is a project that some people are working on in order to make the complicated stuff easier.

CasaOS helped me get started with my home server, but it was not a smooth or easy process. So, you cannot install everything as you do on your computer. Programs can interfere each other. There are probably some other reasons why you should use Docker, but I’m not gonna discuss that here.

With more discoveries, I managed to install Pi-hole to block ads, Jellyfin to stream my media, Gluetun to connect to my VPN, Tailscale to connect my home server when I am away, and not forget, Home Assistant to unify all my apps that controls lights and vacuum basically.

I was amazed with Jellyfin, it was working perfectly, collecting posters of movies and series, retrieving IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes scores, cast, topic, duration, shows at what time media finishes. It literally turns your media to Netflix.

I had to calculate the cost of electricity though, since the server should run 24/7, right? But it was no big deal with such low power consuming SBC (Single board computer).

To be continued.