So I have a Synology server that I have a good deal of experience with, so this post will be through that lens.

What I’d like to do is set up a Raspberry Pi exclusively for pirating. So Qbittorrent and Proton VPN to get started, later Radarr, Lidarr, etc. I don’t think I’ll have a problem getting the Pi up and running, but I’d like to run it like my server, tucked away somewhere without a monitor or peripherals.

How do I access it? For my Synology box, I just put in a browser the local ip port 5000 and I have a whole desktop right there. But when I google about how I’d access a Pi, everything points to using SSH. I know a lot of people have Pis set up like this and surely they can’t be administering the whole thing through CLI, right? How do I get a similar setup to my Synology such that I can just get a desktop interface in a browser?

  • jivandabeastA
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    2 months ago
    • Tailscale for remote access
    • Portainer for GUI docker management
    • NGINX Proxy Manager running behind tailscale for accessing your services easier (can go into greater detail on this)
    • SSH for anything else

    IMO, trying to avoid CLI in server administration is doing yourself a long term disservice. Its not that challenging and you’ll learn a lot more about how everything works. Plus, you’re pretty much not going to be able to avoid the terminal forever.

    • akilou@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      2 months ago

      Yeah, I’m not trying to avoid terminal completely, just for the day to day tasks I’m gonna use it for. But someone in another thread pointed out that most things, after they’re set up have a front end GUI, like your portainer example. I can get comfortable with such a situation.

      • ccdfa@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Like others have said, running a DE with remote capabilities will be a lot of overhead.

        If you set up portainer and watchtower using ssh, you can pretty much just manage everything from portainer while watchtower makes sure that portainer and the rest of your containers stay updated. It’s a very hands-off operation, especially if you set up auto updates on top of that for the pi OS. You’ll probably just have to ssh in periodically to run a system upgrade and maybe restart to update the kernel.

      • jivandabeastA
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        2 months ago

        Sounds good! I’ll write something up & post on selfhosted

        Just give me a couple days :)

      • jivandabeastA
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        2 months ago

        https://lemmy.browntown.dev/post/1440768

        Not sure if you getting mentioned in the post gives you a notification, but just wanted to drop the link here! Hope it helps, I tried to make the walkthrough pretty basic while still keeping it high level where it matters (like I assume anyone attempting this is familiar enough with selfhosting that they can install a docker container without me walking through the entire process)