i really wanted to have a laptop be running as a server, the only drawback i faced was most of the laptops didn’t have the option of turning itself on on AC power recovery. It would have been a breeze if this thing solely could have been solved. Proxmox for instance running on it, having containers and Virtual Machines, i know i would be wasting my GPU here (since it’s a gaming laptop and there’s no way to passthrough a gpu in laptop), but even then it would have been awesome. Now there are ways to do so on the internet, like having relays and arduino work over internet (IoT) which can solve this purpose but that too would require tinkering the power button of the laptop. Maybe a simple circuit could have solved it but i had no time to work on this since am moving abroad soon, and i was plenty busy.
I ended up going raspberry pi route and omg, i learned alot. endless services, self hosted vpn, plex media library, and torrenting, all over the seas from abroad to here in india and accessing back via reverse proxy over a domain. It all seemed like a dream yesterday, and i can’t believe am living it right now. It was a wonderful experience and kinda proud too that i gained some knowledge during all of this before moving. And i have been nothing but happy, hence i felt sharing it over TE, at this amazing new UI.
If your laptop has an ethernet port, check the bios settings for Wake-On-LAN and enable it. Pair that with your raspberry pi to send a WoL packet on boot and you have a hack-ish solution for this problem.
yeah that works, but i dont na keep a raspberry pi just to dosend wake on lan signal? but that’s actually brilliant maybe i can make use of both somehow then it would be nice
a pi 4 4gb but am running alot of things in it. I’ll provide a screenshot of a dashboard app accessible via a domain i bought, which has everything i have hosted, also has a latest uploads section from my preferred youtubers, some rss feeds (will work on Techenclave’s RSS), weather forecast, to do and favorite twitch streamers, when they go live and favorite sub-reddits along with my self hosted DNS stats.
if you just wanna do pihole solely, it’s really easy. you would want to download raspberry pi imager on windows, and flash one of their OS’s to desired storage.
about the storage, in my case i really wanted to use this pi for long long time without anything breaking as i would be miles away from it, overseas. i placed that OS on an 128gb SSD with an enclosure. Because SDCARDs cant handle too much reads and writes, neither can USB sticks. hence i went for a full proof faster SSD.
in the advanced configuration of Raspberry pi imager, configure SSH with a proper hostname. after everything connect the storage to RPI and boot. from your computer you should be able to SSH at the {hostname}.local
from there, use ‘sudo raspi-config’ and enable VNC from advanced section. go to your windows machine and download VNC viewer and then connect to {hostname}.local again. This time you would have your remote desktop of the pi.
Install Pi-hole as per their guides. and keep a note of ports it’s using. port 53 would be for dns (that’s fixed) but look for webUI port it’s assigning. am not sure of pihole but it might just be port 80 normally.
after that you can just access the pi hole web ui via {ip of your RPI}:{port} (if it’s not on port 80). Or else just by the {ip}
configure your router or devices to use pi-hole by setting the preferred DNS. point it to your {RPI IP}
it would be better if you allot a static IP to your RPI from your router. rather than a dynamic one, because it would then just be messing things up.
dang i cant find the app on my android phone - might have not gotten reinstalled when i switched… just search on the app/play store and pick one and try it out?
