It is now 10 months ago since I got my Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and I am still fascinated by the power of that small device. I only made minor changes to the configuration since I got it.
First, I am using a new case for the Raspberry Pi as with the old one I was unable to use the GPIO pins. And I reconfigured the Raspberry to use an 64 GB USB stick as storage device instead of the SD card. The SD card is now only used for booting the device. I did that for security reasons as SD cards suddenly seem to die after heavy usage.
And I upgraded the Debian version from “Wheezy” to “Jessie” which was also quite easy. As part of that I also uninstalled unnecessary packages from the Raspberry. Especially all packages related to XWindows as I am using the device only via the command line and no graphical .
Here is a list of things my Raspberry is currently doing:
- Providing VPN access to my internal network from outside via OpenVPN. I already described what you need to do to automatically connect via VPN if a ressource from the home network is accessed on iOS devices in that article.
- Monitoring all my network devices and services via Icinga (a Nagios fork). Currently it is monitoring 20 hosts and 58 services in my network. Besides monitoring and sending mails if something is wrong, it is able to send me SMS messages if sending mails is no longer working. I am using an Huawei UMTS stick (similar to that one) for that. A description how to set up SMS can be found here. If Icinga recognizes that the Internet connections is down and it seems to be a problem with my Unitymedia Fritzbox 6490, it is able to automatically switch off the box and switch it on again. If it is not an issue with Unitymedia itself, the Internet connection normally will be available again after the Fritzbox has been restartet. I am using a Wemo Switch for that. Here is a description how to control a Wemo device from the Raspberry Pi.
- The Raspberry also serves a list of my eBooks which are stored on my Netgear NAS device. I am using BicBucStriim and calibre2opds as software for that.
- I also configured the Apache HTTP server on my Raspberry as a HTTP reverse proxy. So I am able to provide several HTTP services in my network to the Internet
- The Raspberry Pi is working as a TOR relay node. A guide how to set that up can be found here.
- Last but not least: Since a few weeks I have installed the house automation software FHEM on the Raspberry Pi. Although I already have played a lot with FHEM in the meantime, it is still more playing than serious work. Maybe I will write down a bit more about that in a seperate article sometime later.
You still do not see that this small device has something to. Most of the time it is quite idle …