David Bunting

The Rabbit Hole of Home Networking

Hosting at home is the great temptation for every tech enthusiast, and for those of us with a career in STEM? It's the great inevitability.

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Whilst I am a networking newbie, I do have one or two friends who are network engineers. They recommended that I first attempt hosting a few services locally (without exposing any ports to the internet) using a hosting OS like CasaOS or Umbrel.

Now these 'OSs' aren't technically operating systems at all, but instead are effectively deploying Docker containers on top of Debian Linux. Their recommendation was exactly for this reason. It's only a small leap from my current experience with Linux and Docker to get started with these services, whilst deploying a Proxmox server on an old PC (my initial idea) might currently be above my pay grade.

Whilst I still have dreams of Proxmox running my VM empire, for now I'll start small.

Enter the Rasberyy Pi.

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started with CasaOS is to buy a Zimaboard with CasaOS installed as standard, but I wanted to stick with a not-so-old old faithful, so I'll be using an 8Gb Rasberry Pi 5.

First things first, you'll need to flash an OS to your Pi. Considering we're going to be using our Pi as a home server, I'm going to go with Rasberry Pi OS Lite, a headless version of the classic. You'll need the Raberry Pi Imager to flash the OS to whatever microSD card you're going to use on your Pi. Remember to allow access via SSH, you'll need that.

Once complete, we're ready to power on our Pi and SSH into our OS. After completing some home keeping

sudo apt update && upgrade

We're ready to jump in!

CasaOS has great documentation, but honestly it doesn't get easier than this.

Just pull:

curl -fsSL https://get.casaos.io | sudo bash

and once installation is finished, you'll be greeted with an IP address for your new server. Type that into your favourite browser and you're off to the races.

CasaOS

The first time you navigate to CasaOS, you'll need to create an account. Set a username and password and you're off.

One of the first things you'll want to do is explore some of the apps available by default on the app store, and a lot of them are awesome right off the bat! I personally went with:

  • Jellyfin (for media hosting)
  • Portainer (because Docker)
  • Calibre web (e-book management)
  • N8N (self-hosted automation)
  • SyncThing (File syncing and Backup)
  • Duplicati (Machine Backups)

But just the basic file sharing capacity of having a local wireless cloud makes this project worthwhile! By just adding a drive I had lying around, I immediately had a (although very basic) NAS with a 4Tb capacity that'll have plenty of space for anything I need to keep safe here at home.

Next steps involve getting Tailscale rigged on the Pi and enabling secure tunnel access, however utilising a VPN to access my network is potentially unsafe. Ideally, I would set up a remote access server that file syncs with a more secure NAS on a separate network on file change...

You see! Rabbit Hole!!!

In all seriousness, this was actually a great start in the hobby and, although I plan to upgrade my server at home, a Pi 5 with what is effectively a Docker dashboard is an incredibly useful portable tool and will definitely be taking a spot in my backpack moving forward.