Episode: 2049
Title: HPR2049: My Raspberry Pi Home Server
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2049/hpr2049.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:44:32

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This is HPR episode 2049 entitled My Raspberry Pi Home Server.
It is hosted by NightWise and is about 25 minutes long.
The summary is NightWise talks about how he uses his Raspberry Pi to get things done.
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Hello, Hacker Public Radio, this is NightWise from NightWise.com calling in with another quick
recording in the car, chip in into the long and hungry queue of shows for HPR.
I'm racing through the night or the dawn here, it's still very dark at 7 a.m. on my way
to an assignment with my client and my client's location.
And it's a very peculiar ride because I live in an interesting part of the country, it's
on the border separating the French and the Flemish part of the country.
As I cross that invisible border that separates the balloons from the Flemish, which sound like
two tribes at a Star Trek or something, you start to see there's white stuff on the ground
because we have a not too thick but quite persistent layover of snow if you cross that
border towards the south and that's what I'm seeing all around me.
Here's guys, stars and rolling hills covered in snow, oh black and white, and black and
white was kind of what I wanted to talk to you about today because I want to share my
experiences about working with my, well, most interesting computer in my whole setup.
I'm a geek, I'm a cross platform geek so I have multiple pieces of gear as you might
have heard in previous episodes.
I have a Dell XPS 13 Linux notebook, I have any Surface Pro 4 running Windows 10 and I've
got a MacBook Pro so I'm kind of a cross platform slider and these three pieces of gear which
I absolutely love are really, you know, my bread and butter, I make my living with them
and I also have a lot of fun and, you know, those are my, that's my geek setup.
I don't even really use desktop anymore.
Well, not really because there's one little computer that I use quite a bit and that's
not in this list and that computer is Tata, my Raspberry Pi.
Now I've heard many of you talk about the Raspberry Pi and what your projects are with
it and they're all very brilliant, you know, they involve programming and scripting and
Python and Pearl and some people even do, you know, food who's soldering and stuff but
I'm not really good at all that, you know, I'm a Linux novice at best.
I couldn't program myself out of an open, out of an on-locks room so yeah, so how
come I mentioned my Raspberry Pi?
Well, quite frankly because that is the PC that gets, well, if I can call it a PC, that
gets the most use and the reason for that being is that my Raspberry Pi has become my 40
bucks home away from home wherever I am.
And today I wanted to share with you what I do on my Raspberry Pi, what I use it for.
My Raspberry Pi is a Raspberry Pi generation 2 model, it has a 16GB microSD card and I run
Ubuntu server on it.
You can download that ISO and you basically get the 4004 version of Ubuntu server to put
on there.
The reason why I chose this as opposed to using Raspberry Pi or any of the other operating
systems that you can put on there is because I'm familiar with Ubuntu and Debian and you
know, I like some consistency across my different platforms and the last thing I need in my
life right now is to overcomplicate it by actually running three or four different flavors
of Ubuntu or of Linux and forgetting which thing I have to type into the command line
to get stuff done.
So there, Ubuntu 4004 on the Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi is hooked up directly to my ISP modem
router in front of my router, so it's kind of in a little BMZ.
My setup at home is I have my ISP router, I have the Raspberry Pi and behind that's my
router on a different subnet with everything that I have for the company and stuff.
So it's there and I can access it from both sides of the network, you know, from the
big bad internet but also from my local area network.
What do I use it for?
Well, it is hooked up to a TV that I have in the office but that doesn't really mean
much because I'm just running a command line interface on it.
I don't have the need right now for graphical user interface to be running on that Raspberry
Pi, so I just use the command line mostly.
One of the first things that I do when I either get to work or when I'm at home is SSH
into my Raspberry Pi and I do a variety of things on there and those are the ones that I
want to share with you.
The first important function of my Raspberry Pi is a VPN endpoint.
I use SSH Apple Shuttle as my SSH client on my Linux machine, SSH Apple Shuttle, lets
you tunnel a VPN over SSH through the internet to your home and it routes all traffic through
there.
It's basically like setting up a VPN and it's a one line command and you can choose either
to set up a split tunnel from your laptop, now SSH Shuttle, sorry SSH Shuttle, only runs
on Linux, it ran on the Mac but it broke because OSX changed something but so Shuttle runs
on my Linux laptop and I use it very regularly so I can either tunnel into my home network
into the Raspberry Pi and send all traffic through there or I can tell Shuttle to split the
traffic.
So all the traffic that is for the remote land, it stays at the remote land and everything
that has the same IP address then my home network stays goes through the SSH tunnel.
So kind of a split VPN tunnel, really handy.
And then the third thing that you can do is either forward DNS requests or not.
So this is really handy when you are at a coffee shop or at a hostile network and you
want to tunnel your traffic to your home network with that a lot of hassle and that's
why I use SSH Shuttle and my Raspberry Pi is my SSH endpoint.
I also just set up a terminal session into my Raspberry Pi and I run BYOBU which is a variant
of screen to open different terminals and have them running when I disconnect my session
so I continue to have these applications running and that's really handy because sometimes
I connect remotely, sometimes I connect from home, sometimes I connect from a different
computer but I don't have to start up all the apps that I run on my Raspberry Pi again
when I'm using BYOBU when I'm using screen and it allows me also to split my terminal
screen into two or four different frames, you know, by vertical split, horizontal split,
all the juicy things that screen does in your terminal, that's the, BYOBU basically
does the same.
I use BYOBU, I don't know why, found the app, found the application some time ago and
yeah, I know I can use screen or something else but I know my way around this so I just
use it.
So as I've said, it's running applications and there are a couple of those applications
running.
One of them is IRSSI, my RRC client which basically is my, you know, my geek hangout
of choice, it's always on and always in a couple of chat rooms, I'm an augcast planet,
I'm in Ubuntu.uk, I am in Reddit, I am in hashnightwise.com, all one word and there's
not a lot of people are there but I'm there and stuff like that.
So those are kind of my geek hangout chat rooms that I have open most of the time and
whenever I connect to my Raspberry Pi, I just go into, flip into IRSSI and chat.
So you know, when I'm at a client and it's not really busy or I'm on my lunch break
or I'm at home, I have these channels kind of open to ask stuff and chat and hang out.
Second application I'm using on there is CenterIn, CenterIM, which is a IM client that supports
the Jabber Protocol.
Book that up to my Google Apps account.
I don't do a lot with it, I don't have a lot of people on my Google Apps hangout account.
Because it doesn't work with a classic Gmail hangout account anymore because something
with encryption not working.
So I use to use it a lot but it's a command line instant messaging client, not very exciting.
I kind of have that around just to you know, be online on that channel and check any messages
that might come in.
The third app I'm using is RVT, which is a command line Reddit application.
It's really, really nice to use.
It allows you to browse through subreddits, do posts, make comments.
You can do this by logging in, sorry for the audio quality, the road's really noisy here.
So you can log in, you can make comments, you can post new posts and stuff like that.
And you can open several subreddits at the same time, browsing through whatever tickles your fancy.
I really like RVV, it's small, it's light, it's fast, and it gives me, you know, just the text that I want to read.
Then I have my RSS client for some of the feeds that I really like to take my time to read.
And that client is Newsboyter.
Newsboyter is a command line RSS reader.
You can enter your feeds, browse, that you want to subscribe to, browse through all the entries,
open them up, read them, save them.
There are no pop-ups, no graphics stuff, just, you know, what you want to read, that's it.
I like using Newsboyter, not for all of my feeds, especially not for the feeds that have, you know, pictures and videos and stuff,
but some of the blogs that I really want to read, I love reading them on Newsboyter.
Let's see, what else, oh yeah, when I feel the urge to write a blog post or something, I use Word Grinder,
which is a pretty cool command line application.
It reminds me kind of of WordPerfect, you know, the command, the DOS versions of WordPerfect.
And you can make new documents, and it's kind of like a glorified text editor.
It helps me write my blog posts and save them, and I'm done with it.
Then I have one app that I really like, and that one is MPSYT, or MPS YouTube.
It's a YouTube player slash downowner that allows you to browse YouTube for several topics, like, for example,
you could just search for anything.
You can play the videos, you know, either in video or in audio only, or you can download them,
either the video files or the audio only files.
And this has been a great, great, great source of joy for me, because I love looking through mixes on YouTube,
you know, mix tapes on YouTube about some people have great mixed tapes out there,
about progressive trans or ambient or concentration music and stuff like that.
And when you use MPSYT or MPS YouTube to download it, you don't get the ads.
It just downloads the video, and you can choose either to download the video and select the format and the resolution,
or you can say, oh, I just need the audio.
Or you can say, I just need the video and I don't need the audio.
And MPS YouTube kind of strips it out all for you and puts it, you know, on your Raspberry Pi or on your system.
I like doing this because MPSYT has saved my bacon on so many times, you know,
sometimes you really urgently need a video off of YouTube, I just use that app,
I click in the URL that I want, or I look for the video and I just press download and I'm done.
And I like the simplicity of it and the reliability of it.
And the other thing that MPS YouTube also does is play them.
So at home, I've got my Raspberry Pi hooked up to my TV.
I kind of put the TV on, I get this nice command line text on the TV,
I sometimes even, you know, fire up H top to show me all those kind of system stats.
And I just remotely choose a video that I want MPS YouTube to play over the SSH.
And then it starts playing on my TV.
So I kind of have this command line YouTube two box, which is nice.
I like it.
Let's see what else is there.
I also have, and I forgot the name, a command line media player, but I forgot the name.
Sorry about that.
A great file browser, Ranger, which is so much better than Midnight Commander,
and lets me browse through files and quickly find stuff.
That's cool.
And finally, I've got Enmont.
An Enmont is a monitoring application that allows you to graphically
in the command line monitor, CPU usage, memory, disks, networks, stuff like that.
It's also very, very handy.
When I use Enmont, that's mostly when I have my Raspberry Pi do stuff,
because I like to see all the graphs go crazy.
It's a little bit more graphical than using just plain H top.
I really like just having Enmont on a display, checking out what my Pi is doing.
And I also have a download client, which is Transmission Dash CLI.
Kind of like it, very easy.
You just have the command Transmission Dash CLI, Space Dash.
I think it's W-slash, the download directory, Space, the torrent or magnet file that you want to download.
And boom, it just begins, boom, there, there it is, and it works.
So yeah, really simple.
So those are just a few commands that I use along with my, you know,
other Linux commands that I use on a daily basis like W-get and what have you.
But the philosophy behind using my Raspberry Pi is that I like the command line interface.
And this is not because I'm one of these nerds that says, you know,
you have to use the command line interface because it's much cooler than the graphical user interface.
Yeah, and it's the only way to go and stuff like that.
I don't believe in that crap.
I do what I want to do with my computer using whatever way I find that is the best or the most efficient way to do it with.
When it comes to, you know, renaming files and doing patch operations and scripting stuff,
the command line is just fine.
And when it comes down to, you know, browsing sites about modded computers with lots of pictures,
you know, I'm going to do that by the command line.
So come on.
Some things are better done by the command line.
Some things are better done by the web interface.
So I'm not on the CLI because it's the thing to do.
I'm on the CLI because of security.
You know, everything that I run inside my Pygo is over a SSH tunnel.
So there is no foreign, there is no strange company network where I'm in,
where some IT guy goes through the internet logs and starts sniffing what I do.
He just sees an opaque SSH tunnel and that's it.
All my commands run over there.
All my applications run on the other side of that tunnel.
He just sees a tunnel, period.
I also use the command line interface on my Raspberry Pi
because I can use it as a VPN endpoint.
So all the rest of my graphical traffic on the desktop is also tunneled through there.
Again, IT guy doesn't see anything, doesn't matter, it doesn't, I don't care.
You know, nice and secure.
And especially when I'm in a coffee shopper and stuff, I swear by using a VPN client.
And it's my endpoint at my house.
Not some weird VPN somewhere in the United States or God knows where.
I know there are a lot of third party services, but as Doryd said, there's no place like home.
So my VPN tunnels go whole.
I also have Tor on my Raspberry Pi, by the way, so I can Torify any application that I want to run.
So you can Torify W3M or Torify IRSSI,
which basically sends everything through the Tor network by just adding that command to start.
But the final reason why I love the command line is because it is clutter free.
I am very, very sensitive to clutter and impulses and flashing ads and stuff like that.
The command line to me is very simple.
It's just letters on a background.
All I have to do is read.
And I like that.
I really do.
It's kind of like the EPUB version of my computer.
I call it sometimes.
And I love that.
When I want to focus on an article, I don't want to see ads on the side or God knows what.
I just want to focus on the article.
When I want to write, I just want to write.
And there are a lot of apps on the desktop that allow you to do that.
But one of my Raspberry Pi is also kind of geeky.
And because it's light, it doesn't require a lot of CPU power.
My Raspberry Pi is basically twiddling its thumbs for 95% of the day.
But it's always active.
It's always on.
It's light.
It has the command line.
It doesn't use any power or partly.
I can leave it on 24-7 without having to worry about the power bill.
And that is basically why I use my Raspberry Pi.
As sometimes my main computer.
Well, not main computer, but my go-to computer.
My little terminal server that always has the apps running, whether I connect or disconnect.
My VPN endpoint, my Zen home for reading articles and writing articles.
My bar to hang out in different IRC channels.
My place to quickly download a torrent.
Even when I'm not around, I just, you know, paste whatever magnet link or torrent file I have into there and come back when it's done.
So yeah, I really like it.
So those are my five cents on how I use my Raspberry Pi.
And I want to know yours.
What are your ways of using your Raspberry Pi as a actual computer?
Which apps do you run on it that really work for you?
And how does it work?
Well, I hope you enjoyed my little episode of HPR.
And Ken is going to be very, very happy once again that I submitted a show.
Be it from the car and then noisy on a noisy freeway.
And that's the balloon part of the country people.
They have bad freeways which are very noisy.
But that being said, another show is in the can.
See you guys on the flip side until then, as we say, let the technology work for you instead of the other way around.
You've been listening to Nightwise.
You can find more articles and the Nightwise.com podcast at www.nightwise.com.
That's kniGHTWISC.com.
The podcast with hacks, tips and tweaks for cross-platform geeks.
Nightwise.com
Tired of choosing between NAS, Linux and OSX?
Listen to the Nightwise.com podcast and learn how to decide from operating systems to operating systems using our hack, tips and tweaks for cross-platform geeks.
To detect into your way of life and let technology work for you instead of the other way around.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.
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Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
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Unless otherwise stasis, today's show is released under a creative commons, attribution, share a life, lead us our license.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday and Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the economical computer club and is part of the binary revolution at binref.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stasis, today's show is released under a creative commons, attribution, share a life, lead us our license.
