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Home server upgrade December 2022

Background

I used to have a Pi-hole set up for our home network, but to be honest, the setup was kind of dumb. It was located in our project room, relatively far away from the router, and there was no wired Ethernet to this room. So I used a second router with DD-WRT, set up to be a WiFi bridge to provide Ethernet to this room through WiFi.

Hardware

Needless to say, routing all DNS requests on our network through a WiFi-bridge to a Raspberry Pi 3 was not the most ideal or performant setup. So instead, I ran a CAT-7 Ethernet cable to this room and bought this G30B Intel Celeron N5105 Soft Router/Fanless Mini PC to replace the Raspberry Pi.

G30B Intel Celeron N5105

This turned out to be quite a nice system, it performed a lot better than expected and definitely blows the Raspberry Pi away when it comes to performance. Also nice is the fact that it has 4 Ethernet ports, which means it can be used as a switch to provide network access on the other ports that aren't used for uplink.

Arch Linux

To make my life harder, and learn a thing or two in the process of setting this up, I decided to install Arch Linux. I have the most experience with Debian/Ubuntu and their derived distros, but I wanted to try something new and minimal as a learning exercise.

I work a lot with embedded systems, and for better or worse, more and more of them are moving from the tiny microcontrollers I prefer to work with to small Linux based systems. So the more I know about configuring minimal Linux systems, the better I can be of help to my customers.

Arch Linux seemed perfect for that. Instead of having everything already included and configured, you start out with a minimal system and build up from that.

Services

I want this home server to (eventually) provide the following services:

  • Pi-hole to filter ads on our local network
  • OctoPrint to run our 3D-printer
  • HomeAssistant because I want to learn more about what it can do and many of my wESP32 customers seem to like and use it, so it would probably be good for me to know something about it :)
  • Homebridge because my wife is into the Apple ecosystem and would like to learn more about it

Other things may be added to this list as we see fit of course.