theholtsite

My latest geeky project is setting up a Raspberry Pi (an entire computer about the size of a credit card) as both a router AND a web server!

It is SO tiny, and so cute, and so amazing. The mini SD card it uses for a hard drive is 32GB and about the size of my thumbnail. I don’t know how that works, and it’s still mind-boggling to me.

I didn’t have a mini-HDMI adapter (forgot to order one) so I set it up initially “headless”, that is, without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse. I don’t even have a router 🙂 So that was kind of difficult, but I prevailed. I set up VNC just in case SSH didn’t work for something.

I spent a large part of today getting the new Pi set up as a router, following some excellent tutorials and tweaking just a bit. I’m using a tiny USB wifi adapter, attached to the tiny Pi, as my router! It’s so cool. The range isn’t too far, but our apartment is small. As long as the signal reaches to the bathroom, we’re good.

Now I’m getting the web server setup, which is no small task. I host several websites for folks at a low cost. To move them all over and make everything work I need a bit more than just the typical LAMP stack – I need FTP and email services as well. I settled on Webmin for a control panel for all that. It’s open-source and manages a lot. I also love how adding the .deb repository and installing with apt-get configured everything automatically and installed all dependencies!

Anyway I’m hoping my relatively slow cable connection (3MB down, 1MB up) is fast enough to host multiple low-traffic sites! I doubt most sysadmins would recommend it, but I think it’ll work fine 🙂

The total cost so far is about $80 with all accessories. If it works out it’ll more than pay for itself in a year – I’ll be free of my hosting company! That’s assuming my ISP doesn’t decide to block the server, and the Pi keeps chugging along.