As Wordpress grows and as my comfort with Hugo increases I question whether to move my blog from Infomaniak to being self-hosted on a Pi. I know that the Pi is not powerful but my site doesn’t get much traffic so I don’t think that it will be overwhelmed with traffic.
I have slightly less than three weeks to decide whether to make the leap or not. The Hugo part of my blog is easy to migrate because it’s a static site.
For months I have been hosting Immich, Photoprism and AudioBookShelf and the experiment has been a success. It has been stable and reliable so far and I did not detect anyone accessing my server without permission.
I had these services as Exposed Host via the Swisscom router DMZ setting. it was easy to setup and run with no issues for the duration of the experiment. I closed the DMZ because no one but me was accessing these services after five to six months but me.
Yesterday I started moving from a Pi5 8gb to a Pi5 4gb to self-host Audiobookshelf, Photoprism and Immich. I want to move from Ubuntu Desktop to ubuntu server to lower the head room required. When I checked I was using 3.9gb out of 8gb of ram. On the Pi5 4gb running the various services I was using 1gb of ram, but that’s without photos, videos and various audio files.
Learning Outcome The desired learning outcome from this experiment is to migrate the services from one machine to another.
There are two types of computer users in the world. Those that use them for what they need to use them for, and those that play with computers. In the 90s an English teacher was frustrated by the grammatically incorrect “playing with computers” because for him, and others people play computer games on computers, but do not play “with computers”.
Knowing the Bare Minimum I was reminded of this by a thread on Facebook yesterday.
Last night I started to install wordpress on the Pi5 and I got it to work. I then started to install ClassicPress via the ClassicPress switchtoclassicpress plugin and got blocked. I was blocked because in order for WordPress to update plugins, themes and wordpress it needs to have access to itself via FTP. That’s when I stopped for the night.
VSFTPD This morning I installed vsftpd and the first part went well.
Yesterday I experimented with NixOS and Debian. I managed to install NixOS on the Pi4 and I managed to implement several changes to the configuration.nix file before the Pi started to overheat and become much slower. At this point I tried to run Debian and that worked.
At first Debian was running in command line mode so I took the time to install the KDE desktop and that’s when I ran into the same limitation of the Pi4.
During the weekend it was warm and beautiful. It was so warm and beautiful that my bag got to 40+ degrees centigrade, with an average of over 30°c. Today as I drove to the shops for food I noticed that the snow line was even lower.
Yesterday it was on the top of the Jura, around La Dole, and today it’s down two thirds of the mountain. It’s cold enough to feel cold when walking.
For a few weeks I have tried to install NixOS on a raspberry Pi without much success. I have finally managed to get NixOS to work with a GUI/Desktop environment. I kept getting stuck at the command prompt but in the end I found a blog post that helped me.
What I Struggled With The first thing I struggled with was finding a version of NixOS that played nicely with Pi’s processor.
Recently I have been listening to plenty of Late Night Linux podcasts. I like them because they’re half an hour long, the adverts are half way through the show, and in general I don’t feel that they’re filling time to fill one and a half hours of podcast time.
Plenty of other podcasts last for an hour and a half or more, which if you listen to one episode a week is okay, but I don’t do that.
There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.