Serving up Pi

Make no mistake, a Raspberry Pi is cheap and awesome, but it makes for a poor multi-purpose server.

It’s pretty much a terrible computer, except for certain applications that don’t care about its lack of system resources, and its network bus — shared with USB — is severely limited. That said, for single tasks or light use, it’s great, and is the perfect candidate for a few Docker containers. As you might guess from the name, Pihole originated on the Pi, and is one of the best candidates; the Pi can certainly manage a little DNS flinging, and you can realistically get it installed, hide that Pi away, and never worry about ads again. CPU-light apps, or those that are occasionally used, are also fine. The version of Docker that’s included with Raspbian needs a quick update before it works properly, so run curl -sSL https://get.docker. com |sh to install afresh.

While Docker runs fine on a Pi (far better than any traditionally virtualised solution), images are often built for X86 platforms rather than the Pi’s ARM. Even the standard hello-world image won’t work; to test a Pi Docker installation, you need to run docker run armhf/hello-world . When searching for candidates or containerisation, be sure there’s an ARM64 version. Visiting hub.docker.com/u/arm64v8 brings up a number of options, all created internally within the Docker team. Or why not use your Raspberry Pi as a Tor relay with the brunneis/tor-relay-arm image, or install one of any number of programing environments? You could even use Deluge to set up your Pi as a hub for all your torrents, or try Pydio for a little simple online file storage.