Having a server at home that provides you with smb and other stuff : Great but when moving to another location, not having that facility hurts and makes a major requirement to be fulfilled.

Got a raspberry pi 4 from from a person as a second hand device, as it was 2022 and getting a new one was quite hard to find so found one in another city.

Started looking for arm options that can provide me with nas like features on the network.

Requirements :

  • Media server : Jellyfin
  • SMB
  • Docker
  • Gallery : Photoprism

Hardware in hand :

  • Raspberry pi 4 - 2gb ram
  • 5tb HDD - Seagate

Major one was media server and personal data on the go but on the network, not in a hard drive

Started with the diet-pi system. It had all the ease options for beginner to setup : Got docker, jellyfin, smb and photoprism setup.

My paranoid moment is always when the hard drive is suddenly get power loss. That’s because I have lost of alot of drives in past because of the same lasting just around 1-2 year. But that’s not the issue, not having data backed up and having that lost hm.

At this time didn’t have the ups so was just letting it be, now didn’t have any access point so was wiring it up directly with my laptop, but that also started bugging as when picking laptop away from desk it would go off so started with RASP AP

These were the times when I didn’t know what dhcp , static thing is so had to lookup manually where my things are being at, go to the webui acc., change my smb share url alongside. Then later on discovered that I could have set up the whole thing as static ip.

Diet-pi gives so ease so , just had to dietpi-config > software and this would have all the things :

Their community is great too , still remember the time it showed merry christmas on the welcome screen.