I have an old Pi hanging around doing nothing. When I originally got it it had the latest Pi OS with desktop loaded and ran like garbage, not surprisingly. So I messed with it headless for a bit, then found RISCOS as an option in Pi imager utility and that is just a neat OS. Fun to play around with for sure. But now I’m wondering what else I could use the old thing for. I see folks run Pihole on it, but I’ve already got 2 instances of Adguard Home running.

Could this handle Syncthing? Or would the data transfer be so bad it’s not worth it? Wouldn’t mind having an off-site backup device at my parents house if it would work.

Anyone else got one in their homelab?

  • thirdBreakfast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    9 months ago

    I was wishing I had one just recently. I’m not smart enough to get my ancient APC UPS to interface to Debian with the USB cable, so I need a device I can ping that’s plugged into the mains (ie not through the UPC) so I can run a script that shuts the server down when the Pi stops responding to the pings.

    So that’s all it’d need to do - respond to pings when it’s powered on. I’ve ordered a B+ for exactly this job.

    • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      That’s a clever idea. My UPS does already have the smart pants features like that, but I love the simplicity of that as a concept.

      • thirdBreakfast@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        ESP8266

        Thanks - I sort of had that Idea and looked at the ESP32 with an Ethernet port, but it was looking complex to flash because of no UART etc. Looks like the ESP8266 would need an add on for Ethernet? Plus I might still be out of my depth figuring out how to flash it?

        I also considered an Ethernet hat for the Uno since I have a couple of them floating around somewhere, but in the end the B+ was cheaper. Those little boards would probably be better for power consumption as well though

        • pipe01@lemmy.pipe01.netEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          All you’d need to program that ESP32 is an USB to UART adapter, you can get those for pennies on the dollar. I’ve never used Ethernet on the ESP32 so I can’t attest to how easy it would be, however I do know that doing it over WiFi is super simple.