Raspberry Pi Home Server

I recently soft-bricked my Raspberry Pi docker installation (i.e. I can’t be bothered to keep googling the cryptic error messages), and it was still on Raspbian Stretch which no longer receives support…

So time to reinstall everything on my Raspberry Pi! Might as well document this in case I need to perform disaster recovery.

The audience of this blog is myself in the future.

Hardware

1. A Raspberry Pi.
   • I have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
2. SD card
3. A way to write to SD cards (an SD card slot or adapter)
4. (optional) External hard drive with a separate power supply

Burning Image to SD Card

Use imager: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ to install the latest Raspberry Pi OS for your Raspberry Pi.

Configure password in settings, and enable SSH via username and password, OR go ahead and add an ssh key at this step.

Network Config

Now connect the ethernet (if you haven’t already)

Go to your Router and look for something like “DHCP Reservation”. Assign an IP like 192.168.1.201

Enabling Safe(r) SSH

Do this if you didn’t already set up an ssh key while configuring the image.

First, add a ssh client public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

ssh <username>@192.168.1.201
cd ~/
mkdir .ssh
vi .ssh/authorized_keys

Then, disable password auth

sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Set

PasswordAuthentication no

Install Docker

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh
rm get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -a -G docker <username>
sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo apt-get install -y uidmap
dockerd-rootless-setuptool.sh install
systemctl --user enable --now dbus

Then relogin in. Confirm success with a docker ps and docker run hello-world

If that fails due to connect: network is unreachable…

Detour: Fix resolvconf

sudo apt install resolvconf
sudo vi /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/original

Remove this line:

nameserver 192.168.1.1

sudo vi /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/base

Add these lines:

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Run

sudo resolvconf -u

Detour of Detour: Fix personal router DNS

Servers allocated with DHCP requests:
DHCP DNS Type: Default Servers Custom Servers
Primary DNS:
Secondary DNS:

Then sudo reboot now

Install Docker Compose

sudo apt install docker-compose

This installs it for the root user as well. Commands need to be run like sudo docker ps and sudo docker-compose

External Hard Drive

Assuming external hard drive is located at /dev/sda2

sudo mkdir -p /path/to/hard/drive
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /path/to/hard/drive -o uid=<username>,gid=<username>

To mount on startup, first find the uuid of the hard drive

lsblk -f

Then edit the file system table, /etc/fstab, and add:

UUID=<UUID> /path/to/hard/drive ntfs defaults,noatime,nofail 0 2

Try it out by restarting with sudo reboot now

Docker Containers

Remember to use image for the right architecture for your Raspberry Pi model. For my model, it’s arm64v8¹.

linuxserver.io has a lot of community maintained images for popular server software.

I keep all my docker-compose files on the hard drive, which makes the docker images below even easier to recover when the SD card corrupts (which it does often!)

Set PUID and GUID to your non-root user, probably 1000, but you can check using

id -u <username>

restart: unless-stopped allows these containers to be restarted on host startup

ddclient

---
version: "2"
services:
  ddclient:
    image: linuxserver/ddclient:arm64v8-latest
    container_name: ddclient
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/London
    volumes:
      - /path/to/hard/drive/ddclient/config:/config
    restart: unless-stopped

Transmission

---
version: "2"
services:
  transmission:
    image: linuxserver/transmission:arm64v8-2.94-r1-ls14
    container_name: transmission
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles
    volumes:
      - /path/to/hard/drive/transmission/config:/config
      - /path/to/hard/drive/transmission/downloads:/downloads
      - /path/to/hard/drive/transmission/watch:/watch
    ports:
      - 9091:9091
      - 51413:51413
      - 51413:51413/udp
    restart: unless-stopped

Plex

---
version: "2"
services:
  plex:
    image: linuxserver/plex:arm64v8-1.32.2
    container_name: plex
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - GUID=1000
      - TZ=America/Chicago
    volumes:
      - /path/to/hard/drive/media:/mnt/media
    restart: unless-stopped