Pihole, homeassistant, a music server using moodeaudio
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Another vote for Pi-hole here. I don’t know how I lived without it before!
I use an adblocker on both my PC and my phone. Does a Pi-hole have many advantages over that?
PiHole is DNS based ad blocking and local DNS for everything on your network. So, even things that can’t run their own adblocker.
So it can block ads in Google Chrome on my moms phone? Then I'll have to figure out how to set it up!
Do you often run into issues when blocking traffic like this? I can imagine some software (i.e. Samsung's or Google's bloatware) kicking up a fuss.
Sometimes it can. Google and Samsung never had an issue though. The more ad lists you setup the more false-positives you get.
But 99% of the time it's fine. The other 1% you open the dashboard and look at the last few blocks and whitelist whatever it causing issues.
Sometimes I’ve found a site that gets partially blocked and causes a fuss. There’s an option to allowlist domain(s).
Also, some sites try to use ad domains to serve legit traffic, and some use legit domains to serve ads, so it’s not perfect, but it works pretty darn well overall.
Depends on the level of block lists you add. The defaults are pretty sane and it doesn't need any configuration, you configure your router to use it
Ive been using the OISD list for myself and family members for the past couple of years without issues. It’s specifically made to to be unnoticeable, by whitelisting hosts that would cause issues.
One thing to note is that it’s not a full replacement for adblockers, as DNS blockers can only block full hosts and not all ads and tracking are served from dedicated hostnames. Things like YouTube ads will be unaffected by DNS based blocking. It does really make a difference, though, including for apps with banners.
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One major advantage is that on the domestic TV channels here in the UK which have ad breaks (essentially all of them except the BBC) it removes the ads altogether and the programmes run seamlessly from the part before the ad break into the part after. I still smile every time it happens!
That sounds cool as heck! But I am very confused about how television broadcasting works in the UK. This only works with some sort of over-the-internet TV, right?
Yes, that’s right. It would only work with TV over the internet and not with a digital signal transmitted direct to the TV via aerial.
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Does PiHole ever break a family member’s browsing, and then they don’t know to fix the issue because it would involve understanding opening up the PiHole web interface?
Yes, that does sometimes happen but the frequency depends on the blocking list used, or if multiple lists are used. When a family member encounters something like this, I can usually quite quickly identify the relevant blocked item and whitelist it.
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Another vote for PiHole. It keeps your home network cleaner by ignoring the ads.
On my Rpi4B I run syncthing 24/7. It acts as my sync hub. All other machines are connected to it.
SANE scan server? Paperless ngx also comes to my mind, find it pretty useful.
I was trying to set up a scan server last week. No luck yet. 😅
Paperless ngx looks looks amazing. I was actually thinking of finding a solution for this type of thing as pdfgrep was getting kinda slow.
Paperless ngx
Some great light lightweight apps for a 4GB Pi:
- Homeassistant
- Fresh RSS
- Paperless NGX
- Syncthing
- PiHole or Adguard home
- Syncthing
PiHole is a pretty light load, as are Home Assistant and Music Assistant. Frigate starts to make some heat, so don't expect to get a full blown video classification / recording system.
Get yourself and adsb antenna and feed flightaware, flightradar24, and adsbexchange. Help track the skies!
Maybe Nextcloud? Jellyfin?
I'll add Jellyfin to the list! Do you need a specific client to receive a stream or can say VLC or mpv do it?
Typically a web browser or dedicated app, but it's open source so there are options. You might be able to stream directly with VLC, not sure.
You can use VLC if you get the stream url via a web browser, first. MPV can do the same.
The problem is VLC/MPV don't have a built-in way to browse and pick what you want to play.
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You could pihole
You could also setup a git repo for your config files. That way you could revert changes, if you break something.
If you don't want do open your pi up to the internet you could take a look at tailscale. I use this script on my laptop and home pc to share files with sshfs while having any other traffic go through mullvad. Set this up on your pi with it as an exit node and you basically have access from anywhere.
PiHole, PiVPN, maybe a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager to make connecting to your various web management portals you have an easy way to map it to a human readable url
let it run dwarf fortress from within the terminal, then ssh into it from wherever you are so you can play df from anywhere in the world. i did this at work.
Nextcloud seems a be an alternative to the G-Suite, did I get that right? That move to the cloud kinda missed me. I'm happy with LibreOffice and having everything stored locally.
Do you have experience with running a single-user Lemmy instance? I remember trying out some smaller instances, and they weren't as federated (i.e. I could see less content) than on the bigger ones.
qbittorrent (docker) 😁😎
Another vote for a music server. Gonic/Navidrome is pretty low power and super useful!
Home assistant is another option, but I'll say that if you're serious about home automation you'll quickly outgrow a Pi. It'll run if you only have a handful of devices though.
I like the music server idea! Where do you get your music? Many artists don't even sell CDs nowadays.
Home assistant is probably not for me. The house I live in is still very analogue. I enjoy not having to debug software when investigating why there's no hot water.
Plenty of artists still do sell CDs though. I often buy them at the merch stand at shows. Many also sell DRM free digital files on sites like Bandcamp. I also buy a lot of music at the thrift stores and rip them. If all else fails, there's always the high seas.
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For CDs, Amazon, ebay, or discogs. Digital music I usually get from the artist's webstore if possible, otherwise I'll buy it from Amazon or BandCamp.
One heads up, Buying and downloading digital music from Amazon is a pain in the butt if you have an Amazon Music subscription. Easy and straightforward though without.
Apple music is also possible but you have to burn the tracks to CD using itunes to move it out of Apple's ecosystem.
I also hear good things about Tidal but I've never used them.
I did not know that Amazon sold digital music. But it kills me that Amazon and Apple are the two big choices. Out of the frying pan into the fire...
I thought that Tidal was a streaming service, and that you can rip music from there like you can from Youtube or Spotify.
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AdGuard Home (I prefer it to PiHole)
OtterWiki
Wireguard
Forgejo
Tandoor
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I run AdGuard Home, WireGuard and a couple of other things on my 4B, all in Docker.
I used to run HomeAssistant on our for a while, but they stopped supporting that architecture (armhf?). Also used to run Unbound on it.
HomeAssistant is still supported on Pi4b
It's support for the rpi3 that is getting fased out.
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Jellyfin music server. It needs about 1.2 GB of RAM for itself, plus the system.
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Another idea: dokuwiki, to document your process setting up various service for future reference
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I've got Jellyfin running on an odroid, and it's pretty solid.
Not sure if you're the type to need access to your home network while away, but I also use a pi zero as my "login gateway"--I forward just port 22 to it from the WAN, and I have ssh set up to only allow logins with a key. I can set up dynamic port forwarding and tunnel through to my home network, and that pi zero has no other function (so even if I screw something else up on another server, I can still access my network).
I use my Pi 4B as a DVR for movies and OTA television (MythTV).
There are other tools that handle playback better (OSMC/Kodi, etc) but Myth's configuration and handling of recording schedules is incredibly powerful. Conflict management works well and it can record multiple streams off the same tuner so conflicts are reduced in the first place.
So I have a smart plug set up on my printer and print server (old HP 4P with separate network print server.
I have NodeRed watching my CUPS queues via HTTP scraping, and if it sees a job in the queue for that printer, it turns on the print server and printer via the smartplug over wifi. I have seen someone link a project that does something similiar.
Check out BOINC: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Raspberry Pi I'm not sure if it's worth it. But in short you can advance some science with spare CPU hours. Should be possible to limit it so it doesn't heat up and use just a bit of the cycles depending on other load...
Kavita, Komga, or calibre-web? I love having a book and comics server.
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