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cantagi | 3 years ago

I have 3 rpi4s running my entire home network.

One is a vpn router and a wifi AP, it also has Uptime Kuma. I need this to be reliable and rarely touch it except to improve its reliability. - Openvpn - HostAPD - Uptime Kuma (in docker) - A microservice invoked from Uptime Kuma that monitors connectivity to my ISPs router (in docker) - nginx, not in docker, reverse proxies to Uptime Kuma

The second acts as a NAS and has a RAID array, consisting of disks plugged into a powered USB hub. It runs OpenMediaVault and as many network sharing services as I can set up. I also want maximum reliability/availability from this pi, so rarely touch it. All the storage for all my services is hosted here, or backed up to here in the case of databases that need to be faster.

The third rpi runs all the rest of my services. All the web apps are dockerized. Those that need a DB also have their DB hosted. Those that need file storage are using kerberized NFS from my NAS. This rpi is also another wifi AP. This rpi keeps running out of RAM and crashing and I plan to scale it when rpis become cheaper or I can repair some old laptops.: - Postgres - HostAPD - nginx - Nextcloud - Keycloak - Heimdall - Jellyfin - N8N - Firefly-iii - Grist - A persistent reverse SSH tunnel to a small VM in the cloud to make some services public - A microservice needed for one of my hobbies - A monitoring service for my backups

All of these pis are provisioned via Ansible.

discuss

order

gureddio|3 years ago

Sounds neat. Are you doing anything to mitigate the possibility of SD card corruption with the Raspberry Pis?

I used to use a single RP to run as a media server, and it was great, but stopped using it after suffering from SD card corruption.

cantagi|3 years ago

TBH I haven't ever had a problem with SD card corruption so far. If I did, it wouldn't really matter, since all the important data is on the RAID array, and the OS can be reprovisioned if needed.

Performance proved to be an issue for SD cards though, when attempting to host nextcloud and postgres. I do what teh_klev is talking about and selected the fastest USB stick I could find, which was a Samsung FIT Plus 128 GB Type-A 300 MB/s USB 3.1 Flash Drive (MUF-128AB), and this gave me a huge speedup.

Unfortunately Jellyfin is not really fast enough on an rpi and I have no solution.

public_defender|3 years ago

I have been thinking of setting up a pi4 as a wifi AP. Can you comment on the hardware performance? I am worried that the range or throughput might be poor, and thinking I might need to use an Intel ax200 or similar.

mbreese|3 years ago

I've done this before and it works in a pinch, but I didn't think it was reliable enough to use on a permanent basis. I added a USB WiFi interface, and that helped with the signal quite a bit. Setting up the AP and networking isn't trivial (but is certainly do-able if you're familiar with linux networking).

My use case was using it to connect my family's devices to an AirBNB network. I used the Rpi as a bridge to the host WiFi. This way I could keep a common SSID/password and didn't have to reconfigure all of my kid's devices. It kinda worked.

However, it wasn't very reliable and had poor range and performance. The Rpi was meh with one client attached, but it was bleh with more than one. I ended up replacing it quickly with a cheap dedicated AP that I flashed with openwrt. Much easier, and device-wise was cheaper too.

cantagi|3 years ago

The range is indeed poor, and it depends a lot on your house/flat. Would definitely recommend using another machine with something like this.

In terms of throughput, right next to an AP, I just got 65Mb/s.