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?
Yes, most people do it over ssh.
I have a Raspberry Pi myself, and after the initial setup there’s not much maintenance needed. it just works as expected. the services hosted on it have their own respective Web Pages or APIs or mobile apps, depending on the service.
note that installing additional software to access your Pi will take up system resources like memory, storage, and bandwidth. So take that into consideration, and how much the other services consume.
What OS is it running?
And what about when a service stops or crashes and you can’t access through the app or front end? Or updates, either for the OS itself and for all of the services it’s running? Do you SSH in every time you need to do any of that?
I think it’s running Raspberrian. I wanted something Debian based, and thought the official image will do (it does).
Specifically on my Pi, I’ve set it up in such a way that even if it loses power or internet, I won’t need to do anything for it to be back up.
But I did have lottts of problems on my VPS. programs crashed, Out Of Memory crashed the OS… really, no shortage of errors. And I had service there I used all the time like music.
So what I did is use Termux on my phone. this way I could SSH to it from anywhere. Just click the button, run a few commands and be back on with my day. It’s the most convenient way I’ve found. being able to do it from my phone on the go. And since it’s CLI it was much easier to do. Just run the command needed and leave.
If you want I can elaborate on what Termux is and how I used it here.
novnc?
noVNC follows the standard VNC protocol, but unlike other VNC clients it does require WebSockets support. Many servers include support (e.g. x11vnc/libvncserver, QEMU, and MobileVNC), but for the others you need to use a WebSockets to TCP socket proxy.
This is gibberish to me. Is this something I can set up in Ubuntu which is what I’m planning to run on the Pi?
Check out Yunohost for GUI and ease of setup and maintenance
I’ve been a happy user for years
If you’re gonna run docker, dockge might be what you’re looking for.
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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?
We are, indeed. I use a combination of SSH (for quick stuff), and Ansible for stuff I need to do repeatedly.
How do I get a similar setup to my Synology such that I can just get a desktop interface in a browser?
The tool you’re looking for is a ’VNC’ solution. There’s lots of them, and the best ones are free.
You can enable VNC on your Raspberry Pi through Raspi-Config. You’ll also need a VNC client on each device you want to connect from. Fin linked one above, I think.
And now some un- requested advice from me:
You mention running Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.
If you choose Ubuntu, I believe you will encounter many recipes online that will not work, because Ubuntu does not come with various Raspberry Pi specific tools pre-installed, such as
raspi-config.Raspbian and Ubuntu are extremely similar (this is intentional).
But I have found:
- Many Raspberry Pi recipes will not work on Ubuntu, because Ubuntu does not include Pi specific software that is included in Raspbian.
- Most Ubuntu recipes work perfectly on Raspbian.
I think the Raspbian software can be added on top of Ubuntu, but I’ve never cared enough about the minor differences to even try.
The Ubuntu recipes I have found that don’t work on Raspbian also don’t work on Pi hardware at all, until I compile additional tools from source code. (A Raspberry Pi uses an ARM chip, which is cool, but makes it harder install some software that doesn’t support it.)
So the primary reason I’m going with Ubuntu is because my VPN is Proton and
So I’m afraid it might not run on anything else. The other stuff I want to run, Qbittorrent and eventually the *arrs, will probably run on anything. And it looks like I’ll probably need Docker anyway. So the real constraint right now driving the OS choice is Proton.
Makes sense. I suspect it may still not work due to Proton likely being compiled for Intel, rather than ARM chips.
If you run into that, you may be able to work around it by logging into the Raspberry Pi, cloning the source code and installing: (if you’re able to get that to work, it’ll likely work equally well on Ubuntu or Raspbian). But it’s not for the faint of heart, they (Proton) don’t include many details, so it looks like there will be a lot of learning about their tool chain. https://github.com/ProtonVPN/proton-vpn-gtk-app#installation
(Edit: Since ProtonVPN is Python based, it may be fine, as long as there’s not too much C in the project. If it works immediately, my gut feeling is it will also work fine on Raspbian, if you need to switch for any other reasons.)
