What More to Do With a Raspberry Pi?

I am so loving the Pi. As you may recall, I have Pi-Hole running on it, and also SoftEther VPN server. I noticed my co-worker attached earlier today.

A few evenings ago, I was chatting with my wife’s younger cousin about installing Linux on an old (PowerPC) Power Mac.¹ I asked him why he was interested in doing this to himself, and he said he wanted to use this dumpster diving find as a Plex server. Solid idea. I upgraded my suggestion from a PowerPC version of Puppy Linux to a PowerPC version of Debian and warned him about the whole Big Endian/Little Endian mess that he was bound to face. As the conversation went on, he eventually told me that he was thinking about building a microATX system, so I told him that I was so jazzed about my Pi and mentioned the Pi-Hole and VPN server solutions. A minute or so later, he got back to me and said that those were the best two ideas for a Raspberry Pi that he had never heard of before. As such, this post is dedicated to him.

My knee has been officially given a week off of work by my doctor, so I have to stay home with it. I’ve been puttering around looking for things to mess with. Verizon gave me a good excuse for taking a good, long look at my FiOS router, the dreaded G1100, by killing our service for over 14 hours. Service has finally been restored, but today it was so slow at points that I was having a hard time with the VPN connection to my desktop at work. I wanted to get a better look at what the issue was, and that is when I discovered that the router provides a way to offload logging to a remote syslog server. Hmmm…

This was so trivial to set up on the Raspberry Pi, following the few commands found in this guy’s horrible video.

Buddy, come on. You are obviously very bright, but, please, remember to put on a shirt.

A few minutes later, I had a log file building up for the G1100 on the Raspberry Pi! It works! Thank you, shirtless YouTube English guy! I then set my old WRT54GL ², running DD-WRT, to do the same remote logging. BAM! A second file was slowly building up on the Pi. Then I realized that I was out of syslog-enabled devices! How have I been reduced to this?!?!?! Hmmm…I do have a Nest. I wonder if I can do something with that.

While looking at the DD-WRT router, I noticed three little letters that I like to mess around with from time to time: NTP. Pardon the pun. Sure, sure, sure. Who cares about having the time synced up in a home LAN? Well, I kind of do. Like, see above about the Nest. I mean nothing I am doing is so time sensitive that every millisecond matters, but it is still nice to look at a clock on a computer and know that it is part of a standard, even if that standard exists only inside the confines of this LAN.

Anyway, looking around, I decided that this guy’s blog posts on NTP on the Pi, from 2013, looked pretty good. Maybe, just maybe, I will one day buy that Adafruit GPS/RTC hat and upgrade from a stratum 1 server to stratum 0. Not worth the $45 at this point, though. Maybe at some point, though, when someone else is footing the bill for my health insurance. (psst! I am for hire!) Actually, looking around his site, there seem to be some great ideas for the Pi. RADIUS Pi, anyone?

So, while I am laid up at home with my knee, it is fun to revisit some of these handy things that I have previously done but never had the time or inclination to recreate. This time, however, I can do it without a room full of beige boxes, like back in the good old days of $0.14 a month electric bills due to broken mechanical meters. I should probably get back to reading my Security+ book, however. Never stop learning.