The hosting for my blog is up for renewal in a month or so. It occurred to me to look into the viability of using the raspberry pi as the web server, making it a truly self-hosted blog.
From what I’ve read it should be ok for a site that doesn’t have much traffic – that’s definitely mine! I will try setting up a dummy site before making it live, probably using a ‘flat file’ type cms.
More fiddling around with the Raspberry pi over the break. Managed to add an SSL certificate to the Nextcloud server using Certbot which has very easy to use instructions on the website. Next on the list is to learn about and implement some Bash scripts and cron jobs so that I can have to pi doing regular back-ups and such.
I’ve done some further twiddling, port forwarding on the router and such like and my Raspberry pi Nextcloud server is now accessible remotely.
On Sunday I set up a self-hosted Nextcloud server on the Raspberry Pi, using a spare USB flash drive for storage. This tutorial made it a relatively easy process to do, for a non-tech person, although I did make an error along the way that required going through and checking everything a couple of times.
I can now access the files stored on the server from my home network. Next stop, set up remote access.
At this stage it’s a case of see how it works out. The exercise is all an experiment at the moment anyway, to see what’s possible. I may try setting up a P2P system to see if that works better for me.
Booted up the Raspberry Pi this afternoon for the first time. Used a redundant monitor, keyboard and mouse. It feels good to repurpose old gear that is sitting around unused. I’ve also set up VNC so I can use my iPad as a monitor.
For the time being I’ve loaded Raspbian and I’ll probably keep it this way for the time being while I get used to using it. However, I’ve no doubt that I will fairly quickly get around to wanting to try some other setups. Must order some more SD cards!
I’m not entirely sure what my plans for it are yet, but this Raspberry Pi 4 arrived yesterday. My new toy to tinker with over the long nights of winter. Mess around with Linux? Make a Minecraft server? Lots of possibilities and a few ideas in the pipeline. Goodbye boredom….
