Single-board computers (SBC) are both inexpensive and reliable; they are also very small. As such they make excellent 24x7 home servers. This guide steps you through the process of creating such a server.
This guide was originally tested on a Raspberry Pi 400, and then later on a Raspberry Pi 4b. The main difference it that the Pi 400 board is embedded in a small keyboard.
I also have another SBC, an ODROID still running Ubuntu LTS 16.04, and I will document it as well when I update it. I am not sure yet whether I will document it here, or as another mini-document. For now I am focusing on the Raspberry Pi.
One of my goals is to promote using the command-line to do most of the work. If you are interested in expanding your horizons and understanding more about the power of the command-line, then this guide is for you. There is also a lot of detail in this guide; this is my personal preference. I grow tired of the current trend to provide internet-searched answers in a few phrases to fit on the screen of a mobile phone.
Take a look at the table of contents at the top of the document. Some users will only be interested in creating a 24x7 local file-sharing (Samba) service at home -- in that case you do not need to read beyond the section on 'Backups'.
Subsequent chapters are more complex, so an interest in the command-line is really needed. Of course, people familiar with Linux and the command-line will skip some sections of this guide.
You should look into assigning a permanent network IP address for your server in your home network so that you can easily connect to it from any of your devices. Your home network router/WiFi modem should have the option to enable you to reserve an IP address for any device. You only need to know the hardware MAC address of your future server. There will be 2 MAC addresses - one for hardwired ethernet and one for wireless. You can reserve both interfaces until you decide which way you will connect your server to your router.
// There are a few ways to find the MAC addresses of your network devices under
// contemporary Linux distributions. One quick command-line method is to look
// in the '/sys/class/net/' sub-directory for the network devices:
$ ls /sys/class/net/*/address
/sys/class/net/eth0/address /sys/class/net/wlan0/address
/sys/class/net/lo/address
// On a Pi with Ubuntu installed the wired network device is 'eth0' and the
// wireless network device is 'wlan0'
$ cat /sys/class/net/eth0/address
e4:5f:01:a7:22:54
$ cat /sys/class/net/wlan0/address
e4:5f:01:a7:22:55This guide was created in the Markdown markup language (the Pandoc flavour of Markdown). Markdown is wonderfully simple. Then, using the versatile Pandoc command set, both HTML and PDF formats of the document were generated. In fact this document was created using the home server as a remote desktop. The server served as a git, web and NFS server; as well it served as a remote desktop for contemporary documentation creation.
The appendix of this document is rather large. The idea is to push some of the command-line and technical detail into the appendix. Thus the flow of the document covers the basics, encouraging the reader to see the bigger picture and to avoid being smothered in the detail.
In this guide command-line sessions appear in a pale-yellow box, using a customized .console Markdown syntax highlighting convention which I created for command-line input and output. Two kinds of simplified command-line prompts appear. As well, explanatory comments starting with two slashes are coloured blue:
// Usually your prompt would be more complex, something like this:
// myname@ubuntu:~/.vim/syntax$
// or like this:
// [desktop /tmp]$
// But I simplify its appearance when illustrating command-line sessions.
// Normal Users' command-line prompt, coloured 'green':
$ some-command
// The root superuser's prompt, simplifed also, and coloured 'red':
# some-other-commandFrom my experience creating this guide I added another git repository containing the examples of the Markdown documentation style and support files used in this guide.
Sometimes command output is long and/or uninteresting in the context of this guide. I might show such segments with a ellipsis (...)
Sometimes a double-exclamation (!!) mark may appear somewhere -- this is only a reminder for myself to fix an issue at that point in the documentation. These reminders will eventually disappear.
I tend to use 'ssh' as a verb - it is not really correct to do this, but it really is a verb in my life. So I apologize if it annoys you.
If you discover issues with instructions in this document, or have other comments or suggestions then you can contact me on my github project page.