So I have a Synology server that I have a good deal of experience with, so this post will be through that lens.
What I’d like to do is set up a Raspberry Pi exclusively for pirating. So Qbittorrent and Proton VPN to get started, later Radarr, Lidarr, etc. I don’t think I’ll have a problem getting the Pi up and running, but I’d like to run it like my server, tucked away somewhere without a monitor or peripherals.
How do I access it? For my Synology box, I just put in a browser the local ip port 5000 and I have a whole desktop right there. But when I google about how I’d access a Pi, everything points to using SSH. I know a lot of people have Pis set up like this and surely they can’t be administering the whole thing through CLI, right? How do I get a similar setup to my Synology such that I can just get a desktop interface in a browser?
Check out Yunohost for GUI and ease of setup and maintenance
I’ve been a happy user for years
I have a Raspberry Pi myself, and after the initial setup there’s not much maintenance needed. it just works as expected. the services hosted on it have their own respective Web Pages or APIs or mobile apps, depending on the service.
note that installing additional software to access your Pi will take up system resources like memory, storage, and bandwidth. So take that into consideration, and how much the other services consume.
What OS is it running?
And what about when a service stops or crashes and you can’t access through the app or front end? Or updates, either for the OS itself and for all of the services it’s running? Do you SSH in every time you need to do any of that?
I think it’s running Raspberrian. I wanted something Debian based, and thought the official image will do (it does).
Specifically on my Pi, I’ve set it up in such a way that even if it loses power or internet, I won’t need to do anything for it to be back up.
But I did have lottts of problems on my VPS. programs crashed, Out Of Memory crashed the OS… really, no shortage of errors. And I had service there I used all the time like music.
So what I did is use Termux on my phone. this way I could SSH to it from anywhere. Just click the button, run a few commands and be back on with my day. It’s the most convenient way I’ve found. being able to do it from my phone on the go. And since it’s CLI it was much easier to do. Just run the command needed and leave.
If you want I can elaborate on what Termux is and how I used it here.
- Tailscale for remote access
- Portainer for GUI docker management
- NGINX Proxy Manager running behind tailscale for accessing your services easier (can go into greater detail on this)
- SSH for anything else
IMO, trying to avoid CLI in server administration is doing yourself a long term disservice. Its not that challenging and you’ll learn a lot more about how everything works. Plus, you’re pretty much not going to be able to avoid the terminal forever.
I would love a layman’s guide to NGINX. every guide I come across is filled with unexplained jargon
https://lemmy.browntown.dev/post/1440768
Not sure if you getting mentioned in the post gives you a notification, but just wanted to drop the link here! Hope it helps, I tried to make the walkthrough pretty basic while still keeping it high level where it matters (like I assume anyone attempting this is familiar enough with selfhosting that they can install a docker container without me walking through the entire process)
Yeah, I’m not trying to avoid terminal completely, just for the day to day tasks I’m gonna use it for. But someone in another thread pointed out that most things, after they’re set up have a front end GUI, like your portainer example. I can get comfortable with such a situation.
Like others have said, running a DE with remote capabilities will be a lot of overhead.
If you set up portainer and watchtower using ssh, you can pretty much just manage everything from portainer while watchtower makes sure that portainer and the rest of your containers stay updated. It’s a very hands-off operation, especially if you set up auto updates on top of that for the pi OS. You’ll probably just have to ssh in periodically to run a system upgrade and maybe restart to update the kernel.
Tailscale?
You could use either VNC or RDP to access your computer remotely through the GUI. I’d recommend RDP because it’s more secure. You should also enable SSH just in case something goes wrong with the GUI connection or something.
