I don’t expect much but I found an old pi I bought probably 2016(may of been 2017). It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem. It still works but wanted to somehow convert it to a regular distro(it’s based on a micro-SD and I don’t have any more microsd readers). I wanted to set it up as a basic system I could ssh into a terminal. Not expecting anything fancy or even graphic based. A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice “work” on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible? Am I under estimating what’s possible with it?
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I have an entire home server running on my pi; it’s just going to depend on what model you have and what you want to do with it. Personally, I run my pi from an SSD kept in a USB drive enclosure because microSD cards suck and I want my system to be responsive. I host websites and ssh into it all the time for a great number of random tasks. I have a custom Fedora install, but Raspberry Pi OS or whatever they switched the name to after Raspbian is probably fine for most people. It’s based on Debian, or at least is was many years ago when I last saw anything about it.
Depending on the Pi, you are limited to USB 2 speeds for the external drive. That’s enough for many things, like streaming video, but doesn’t cut it for regular transfer of large files.
I’ve got a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB, and I’ve never had a problem with speed, really. The only issues I have with speed are when I do things from outside my home network, which is a limitation from my ISP, not my hardware.
EDIT: Just checked with a quick
ddand it seems my drive’s sequential write speed is about 250MB/s, far exceeding USB 2.0. It’s not a great SSD, so that’s a pretty expected value, tbh.
Pretty sure it’s rasp2b but maybe a rasp3… Its in a case so I have to open it and look at the markings
Someone more knowledgeable about the older gen Pis could probably help you a lot more than I could. I have a Pi 4b 8GB for my server, so that’s gonna be a bit more capable than what you’ve got, but I imagine you can probably still find lots to do with it! Setting up a basic headless server should be no problem at all.
Raspberry Pi’s are full of possibilities, even old ones. Here is what I’d do.
It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem.
Not sure what you mean here but there is no reason that any modem or WAN box ever really needs to involved with a pi-hole. You can set the IP to use for DNS lookups on each host by hand… OR you can turn off DHCP services on the modem run that off of the PI, which then sends the IP of the PI/PiHole for DNS as part of the DHCP lease to each client.
At any rate, ideas for it:
- PiHole with encrypted DNS service out to the internet and past your ISP’s snooping modem.
- a Wireguard VPN server. This would allow for things like your phone to tunnel home use your fancy pi-hole to block all ads on your phone, privately. You’d also then have access to anything else hosted on your home network like Music/Movies/etc. Setup a samba share for that stuff somewhere. This raspberry pi can also pass your VPN client traffic back out to the internet if you setup (ip forwarding)[https://rob-ferguson.me/how-to-use-your-rpi-as-a-router/]. It’s an old pi, so it won’t be faster than 100Mbps, but for a phone/tablet that is likely fine.
- as a motion-activated camera or some other temperature monitoring box. You can setup a cronjob to archive the videos or send the collected temp readings to some database backend and use Grafana for a visualization front-end.
- setup a netflow collector/forwarder for your LAN using fprobe. If you network is flat and I guessing that it is, as long as you have a single network switch for both your wired and wireless clients (and a single subnet aka 192.168.0.x for all) then you can monitor the whole broadcast domain with one box. You can send/forward the captured netflow to something like Security Onion and really start to understand what’s happening on your network. : )
There are so many more ideas like weather stations, news feeds, little web services for whatever.
I use an older pi as a homepage server.
out to the internet and past your ISP’s snooping modem.
Directly and with your address to the encrypted DNS providers’ modem. Same issue as with VPN providers.
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If you want to tinker with a terminal it should do it just fine.
The Pi Hole part is still possible, though. If it is a crappy ISP router then it into a gateway and grab a cheap router on marketplace to do the real work.
Actually, if you are just planning to figure out the basics and not do heavy lifting with it, it would do both just fine. You could learn a bit by getting it configured and keeping it up.
You need an sd card adapter that lets you read and write the sd card from your pc to put an image the pi can boot onto the sd card.
You will need this anyway when you eventually run into the sd card having a bunch of of bad blocks or unreadable sectors.
It will work ”fine” for what you’re describing but consider getting one of those sata/m2 adapter boards so your root filesystem isn’t based on the media explicitly designed for temporarily holding information until the user can get back to a computer.
If you already have a computer, just set up a vm.
As desktop? Barely. But you can overclock. Terminal stuff is fine.
If you need to reimage it, it sounds like you’re looking for “Headless Rasbian”. As others have said, it is based on Debian.
A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice “work” on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible?
Absolutely. And it’s fun.
Am I under estimating what’s possible with it?
Haha. Yeah. I read somewhere that the Pi3 is the most capable budget PC ever produced, and I have no reason to doubt that claim.
But you can always do more with it later. May as well start with trying what you’re interested in now.
Yeah the problem is I don’t have a card reader on my main desktop and I tried a bunch of my old passwords and none worked so I was just going to reimage it.
XMPP server, do some decentralised communication under your control. It will federate to other servers, allowing you to speak to other people and join public chats. An old Raspberry Pi should easily be able to server 100 or 200 users. Try Prosody for that or Snikket if you prefer containers and everything working out of the box.
You could also use it as a NAS, if you don’t need a fast NAS. It will probably be enough to stream HD media using VLC on a cheap Android TV device/dongle.
