I recently have decided that there are some things that I want to host myself. This site for now is being hosted through github pages and being routed through my domain, sirobles.com.
Through the graces of labs and such, I have acquired a Jetson Orin Nano and a few Rasperry Pis (raspis), I think 2 3s, a 4, and a 5. I am wanting to set at least one of these up to be a home-server for hosting basic information.
I recently set up my banking through actual, which is nice because I have some more control of the information that is being seen as well as generally how my budget is organized + it is cheaper.
This being said, this means that in order to work with the app, I must have my information hosted somewhere, hence the server.
I have also had a gym coach project that I want to touch a little more on that is storing some data. Beyond this, I think it'd be nice to rely less just on apple icloud for my photos, so I'll pay exorbitant costs for storing my own information.
I'm deciding on what else I eventually might want hosted, but I think for now, I've decided that it's worth it to start thinking about a home server.
I have been using tailscale for the past year already, so I have gotten several devices on there. I think my main current obstacles to setting up a server are 1) good power source, 2) access to WiFi, and 3) not having a monitor or keyboard at home for setting up the Pi. I was trying to set stuff up earlier this weekend, but I was struggling. I think there's a chance the cords I have for the Pi are insufficient for powering it (I am just using phone chargers). I am ordering one for the Pi 4 that will be here tomorrow and I"m hoping that I will be able to use this more.
Also, I realized that my SD card that was plugged into one of the pis no longer works. It just snapped in half somehow. So yeah, that was bad.
I've done some amount of reading + AI summarizing today + asking friends for help and I've come to decide on my next few steps.
- Flash my pi (again) after the new power source comes in.
- Rsync my basic tailscale set up script
- Rsync the ActualBudget setup
- Set up offsite hosting - potentially through BackBlaze for now. I'll likely host small files for now, so I'll just use their free version
At some point, I think i'd like to upgrade from the Pi. I'm going back to mit this weekend and want to see if I can crust a mini-pc or anything small that I can use for a server. I'm not really paying for electricity generally, so I think that crufting generally should be fine.
Ideally I can just fine a mini-pc that somehow is intact and use that. That's what I'll be looking for when not celebrating a friend's birthday or at the lab.
Anyway, this is a blog post for now since not a lot has been done. Hopefully it gets moved over to a project post more soon.