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I have an old Pi 3 installed at my mother-in-law's house running Tailscale (which uses WireGuard as its actual VPN layer). It is connected to my Tailnet along w

by Sanzig 2y ago

I have an old Pi 3 installed at my mother-in-law's house running Tailscale (which uses WireGuard as its actual VPN layer). It is connected to my Tailnet along with my Jellyfin server, and I have nginx set up as a reverse proxy to expose the Jellyfin server on the LAN IP of the Pi. This way, she and her sons can access my Jellyfin server as if it were on their LAN - great option for non technical relatives. This setup has been in place about a year now and just works. The Pi can handle about 50 Mbit bidirectional over WireGuard, which is suffient even for a couple of 4K media streams. I am planning to duplicate this setup at some other relatives' homes.

yamrzou 2y ago
Is it a Pi 3 B+?
sweeter 2y ago
any advice setting something like this up? Also, wouldn't that get expensive?
- NavinF 2y ago
  Why would it be expensive?
  - telgareith 2y ago
    Because an 8gb rpi4 costs close to $160. You can buy a m920q i3 with more compute- and with a similar amount of RAM (Conversion losses, Storage, and then Cooling or RAM(a few watts per 8gb) are the largest power consumers) and it can do a lot more than 50mbit. It might actually use less power than the rpi4. And, it could replace whatever is powering the TV display. Of course, choose your power supply badly and both those sub 10W machines will be 50W at the wall.
    - sweeter 2y ago
      I also thought that Tailscale would probably incur some type of charges after using it that much, though Im not super familiar with their free tier policies and how sustainable they are in the long-term.
      - NavinF 2y ago
        They're not proxying your data. That's why there are no usage limits
        allset_ 2y ago
        They do proxy your traffic if it can't set up direct connections, and it's still free. https://tailscale.com/kb/1232/derp-servers https://tailscale.com/kb/1232/derp-servers
      - Sanzig 2y ago
        Tailscale sets up point-to-point WireGuard VPNs and only proxies through their relay servers when they can't establish a direct connection. In my experience that's pretty rare, Tailscale tries a whole bunch of NAT traversal tricks before falling back to relay mode. Their free tier is pretty generous because it's basically a way for Tailscale to get homelabbers hooked on the product so they'll recommend a corporate plan at work. They even state as much: https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan The Pi 3 was essentially free to me because I already had it on a shelf. When I duplicate this setup at some other relatives' homes, I'm planning on using an Orange Pi Zero 3 ($30 CAD, quad core A53, gig of RAM, gigabit Ethernet).
    - NavinF 2y ago
      Wat. - You're replying to a thread about someone using a 1GB Pi 3 to stream multiple 4K movies. It's $44 on Amazon including fast shipping. Cheaper on eBay if you can wait 3 days. - The 8GB Pi 4 is $75 on canakit, not $160. Anyway if you want more compute (on an edge device? why?), why not grab a AM4 board and CPU for like $80 each? That's 25W at the wall and gives you a ton of flexibility if you later wanna repurpose the machine adding GPUs, NVMe, SAS enclosures, etc
      - gruez 2y ago
        >The 8GB Pi 4 is $75 on canakit, not $160. To be fair once you add in shipping, a sd card card, power supply, case/heatsink, and you'll get to around 160.
        NavinF 2y ago
        Bizarre. MicroSD cards are $5 on Amazon. I figured everyone has a bunch of spare 5V 2.5A PSUs in the box of wall warts in their garage, but maybe that's a bad assumption. $5 for a brand new PSU and $15 canakit shipping. So it's $100 total if you didn't care at all about cost and bought the most expensive Pi for use as an edge device for no technical reason. Why would you need a heatsink unless you use a case? Why would you use a case? That price tag is entirely self inflicted
selfmodruntime 2y ago
> This setup has been in place about a year now and just works For some reason, even with ram-only fs and all common tricks, my Sandisk SD cards keep failing. Do you have any tips?
- vinni2 2y ago
  I had this problem with pi 4 after frying several SD cards I found out you can setup read only file system and since then no problems for 3 years now. https://core-electronics.com.au/guides/read-only-raspberry-pi/ https://core-electronics.com.au/guides/read-only-raspberry-p...
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Boot from a USB SSD instead. I get literally 100x the IOPS over the reasonably fast SD cards I used. Things like apt-get upgrade take seconds instead of many minutes. It’s an entirely different experience.
- NavinF 2y ago
  Is it possible your SD cards are fake? I did full disk writes till destruction and got 1000 cycles with a Sandisk Ultra (their cheapest line of microSD cards) That should be enough for 10 years under a typical Pi workload like writing and compacting logs.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Get as big of an SD card as you can from a known good company ( I think I have a 256GB card in mine). Turn off as many logging services as you can. You should be able to find several guides on the internet on how to limit writes to the SD card and that combined with a big card with decent wear leveling should last for years, mine has.

by Sanzig 2y ago

yamrzou 2y ago

Is it a Pi 3 B+?

sweeter 2y ago

any advice setting something like this up? Also, wouldn't that get expensive?

NavinF 2y ago
Why would it be expensive?
- telgareith 2y ago
  Because an 8gb rpi4 costs close to $160. You can buy a m920q i3 with more compute- and with a similar amount of RAM (Conversion losses, Storage, and then Cooling or RAM(a few watts per 8gb) are the largest power consumers) and it can do a lot more than 50mbit. It might actually use less power than the rpi4. And, it could replace whatever is powering the TV display. Of course, choose your power supply badly and both those sub 10W machines will be 50W at the wall.
  - sweeter 2y ago
    I also thought that Tailscale would probably incur some type of charges after using it that much, though Im not super familiar with their free tier policies and how sustainable they are in the long-term.
    - NavinF 2y ago
      They're not proxying your data. That's why there are no usage limits
      - allset_ 2y ago
        They do proxy your traffic if it can't set up direct connections, and it's still free. https://tailscale.com/kb/1232/derp-servers https://tailscale.com/kb/1232/derp-servers
    - Sanzig 2y ago
      Tailscale sets up point-to-point WireGuard VPNs and only proxies through their relay servers when they can't establish a direct connection. In my experience that's pretty rare, Tailscale tries a whole bunch of NAT traversal tricks before falling back to relay mode. Their free tier is pretty generous because it's basically a way for Tailscale to get homelabbers hooked on the product so they'll recommend a corporate plan at work. They even state as much: https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan The Pi 3 was essentially free to me because I already had it on a shelf. When I duplicate this setup at some other relatives' homes, I'm planning on using an Orange Pi Zero 3 ($30 CAD, quad core A53, gig of RAM, gigabit Ethernet).
  - NavinF 2y ago
    Wat. - You're replying to a thread about someone using a 1GB Pi 3 to stream multiple 4K movies. It's $44 on Amazon including fast shipping. Cheaper on eBay if you can wait 3 days. - The 8GB Pi 4 is $75 on canakit, not $160. Anyway if you want more compute (on an edge device? why?), why not grab a AM4 board and CPU for like $80 each? That's 25W at the wall and gives you a ton of flexibility if you later wanna repurpose the machine adding GPUs, NVMe, SAS enclosures, etc
    - gruez 2y ago
      >The 8GB Pi 4 is $75 on canakit, not $160. To be fair once you add in shipping, a sd card card, power supply, case/heatsink, and you'll get to around 160.
      - NavinF 2y ago
        Bizarre. MicroSD cards are $5 on Amazon. I figured everyone has a bunch of spare 5V 2.5A PSUs in the box of wall warts in their garage, but maybe that's a bad assumption. $5 for a brand new PSU and $15 canakit shipping. So it's $100 total if you didn't care at all about cost and bought the most expensive Pi for use as an edge device for no technical reason. Why would you need a heatsink unless you use a case? Why would you use a case? That price tag is entirely self inflicted

selfmodruntime 2y ago

> This setup has been in place about a year now and just works For some reason, even with ram-only fs and all common tricks, my Sandisk SD cards keep failing. Do you have any tips?

vinni2 2y ago
I had this problem with pi 4 after frying several SD cards I found out you can setup read only file system and since then no problems for 3 years now. https://core-electronics.com.au/guides/read-only-raspberry-pi/ https://core-electronics.com.au/guides/read-only-raspberry-p...
kstrauser 2y ago
Boot from a USB SSD instead. I get literally 100x the IOPS over the reasonably fast SD cards I used. Things like apt-get upgrade take seconds instead of many minutes. It’s an entirely different experience.
NavinF 2y ago
Is it possible your SD cards are fake? I did full disk writes till destruction and got 1000 cycles with a Sandisk Ultra (their cheapest line of microSD cards) That should be enough for 10 years under a typical Pi workload like writing and compacting logs.
EasyMark 2y ago
Get as big of an SD card as you can from a known good company ( I think I have a 256GB card in mine). Turn off as many logging services as you can. You should be able to find several guides on the internet on how to limit writes to the SD card and that combined with a big card with decent wear leveling should last for years, mine has.