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Michael Lee 🍕
Michael Lee 🍕

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I just got a Raspberry Pi 3. What can I do with it?

Just got a Raspberry Pi 3 setup and it's my first one. If you own a Raspberry Pi, what do you use it for? Don't think I'll dive into hardware stuff right now but definitely software related things.

Latest comments (91)

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lopis profile image
João L.

Setup a Mycroft assistant.

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Vincent Milum Jr

I currently have a Pi3B+ running FreeBSD 12, 3x USB thumbdrives in a RAID-Z1 configuration, running several jails, also running ZeroTier for personal VPN access. This little toy is awesome, I use it when I need remote access to something while I'm off-site, since I can just SSH into it via ZeroTier, and then SSH from there into other machines in my network.

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Klagio

< and then SSH from there into other machines in my network.

How you do this? I can access my network with Zerotier, but only those clients that have zerotier installed, not the rest

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Vincent Milum Jr

1) Install ZeroTier on a laptop.
2) Then install ZeroTier on a Pi.
3) Have the Pi sitting at home. Take the laptop out of the house (I travel frequently, so this is normal for me).
4) Use the Pi's ZT address to SSH into it from the laptop.
5) While inside of the Pi's SSH session, use THAT to SSH into other nodes on the Pi's LAN.

I also use a Yubikey with PuTTY for SSH authentication. PuTTY supports agent forwarding, so my Yubikey will also allow authentication to other nodes within the network.

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Michael Lee 🍕

ZeroTier looks really interesting!

What benefits does the USB thumbdrives in RAID-Z1 have?

Thanks for sharing your setup Vincent!

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Vincent Milum Jr

RAID-Z1 is similar to a normal RAID-5 setup for redundancy, but with the added benefit of it being ZFS based. This means things like instant snapshotting, creating virtual block devices (for VMs or iSCSI), and all the neatness of SEND/RECV to transfer entire file systems between machines. ZFS also is one of the few file systems that not only hashes every single block on the storage device, it also VERIFIES the block against the hash tree on EVERY read operation, ensuring data integrity (instead of waiting for total failure or SMART faults)

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Rémi Lavedrine • Edited

If you have a RaspberryPi, the very first thing you should install on it is Syncthing.
It will then allow you to have a personnal Dropbox installed.
I connected a 3To HDD on it and boom I have a 3To of cloud.

When you have this, the possibilities are endless.
Let's consider that you have Syncthing installed and configured on all your devices:

  • You can export your photos in a specific folder on your computer and boom they're saved automatically on your HDD.
  • I have Boosnote installed on my machines. With Synchting and Boostnote, I have a Evernote, Google Keep, etc, that is synchronized but not shared with any company. Everything is my property. :-)
  • I have a Plex server on my Shield that is connected over the air to my RaspberryPi. So it serves the content, videos, photos (synchronized automatically from earlier). So as soon as you finished working on your photos, you export them on a folder on your computer and after a few minutes (Syncthing is soo fast), you can enjoy them on your TV and even your relatives from the other side of the world can enjoy. You have nothing to do.

As you can see, I am very enthusiastic about that piece of software. :-)

But Syncthing is absolutely fantastic, open source, free and I could definitely not get rid of it and my RaspberryPi.
It cost the price of a one year Dropbox subscription for three times the volume and it works from 4 years now, like clockwork. :-)

You should definitely give it a try.

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Alexander Mandera

I use my Raspberry Pi 2 to play music from a USB stick with mpd & icecast2 to my internet radio or analyse my internet traffic with ntopng and a script to use the FritzBox capture feature, so I can watch in near realtime which servers my devices are connecting to.

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Michael Minshew

This reminds me of this awesome article. raspberrypi.org/blog/is-the-toilet...

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Dan Benge

When I first acquired mine, I used it to learn Linux and Python. Think of it as "Immersion" learning. :)

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Sergio Corrales

I don't own a Pi. However I do have an Odroid-C1 (very similar).
It's served me as a Kodi TV box (Linux), and an Android device (Mostly to run Android games). I've also used it as a gaming console with Lakka.

It's currently being used as a Lyrics/Chord display for musicians at church on a floor monitor.

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Alberto Cavalin

I written a post on my blog covering all the software I tried on my raspi3 <3 I hope you will find it useful :-)

Some keywords: nas, webdav, dlna, torrent, rdp/vnc, print/scan, firewall, dns, monitoring, vpn.

Here is the link: acavalin.com/p/raspberrypi_server

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Alexander Kluth

Currently as a "home server", serving media files across my home network and as a file server.
I plan to buy another one and build a "retro console" with it.
And a magic mirror with a RPi Zero.

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Brunno dos Santos

RetroPi!! To play SNES, Genesis and a lot of retro games :)