Arch Linux’s official website describes Arch as a distribution that “tries to Keep It Simple”. It also states that Arch is not for those without the ability or time for a “do-it-yourself” system–which is true. I recently built a machine that needed a lightweight OS, so Arch Linux was a good choice. Installing Arch Linux can seem complicated, but understanding what needs to happen in each step of the install makes it feel fun and easy. Here’s what I did: ...
For the home-lab, we used the following devices: Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X Ubiquiti UniFi 24 port switch 2 VMware ESXi Hosts A Synology NAS DS420j (Diskstation) Building the home lab also required quite a few patch cables to connect devices, and I made most of them myself. This required UTP cable, plastic clips for the ends, a cable crimping tool, and a lot of patience. The arrangement of the wires, or the pinout, had to be in a specific order. ...
The final step in building my bird cam was creating a way to view the bird photos on demand. To do this I utilized Docker on a third Raspberry Pi by installing Docker and Docker Compose. sudo apt install docker sudo apt install docker-compose Compose is a useful Docker tool that, among other things, allows you to run multi-container applications configured in a YAML file. On Docker Hub a useful photo gallery image linuxserver/photoshow has already been created, so I used that image to serve up the bird photos. At this point, I had already configured an NFS server and made this Pi an NFS client via a shared folder. To create the photo gallery, I first signed into my personal Docker account. I then added two subdirectories to my home directory on the Pi: a config directory, and a thumbs directory. ...
After setting up the NFS server, but before making any NFS clients, I configured another Raspberry Pi to take the photos for my Bird Cam project. For this I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the appropriate camera attachment. Instead of using a keyboard/monitor to configure the Zero, I created a headless setup to allow the Zero to connect to wifi automatically when plugged in. First, I put the Raspbian Lite OS on a mini SD card. Once the OS was finished downloading, I removed the card from my computer and inserted it again. On my computer’s terminal I entered the SD card’s boot directory (found with df -h) and created a new file to configure the wifi information for my home network. ...
In this project I wanted to set up a camera to take pictures of pretty birds at a feeder, and then view those photos online. To do so I used three Raspberry Pis, NFS, and Docker. One Raspberry pi served as the NFS server, while the other two were NFS clients. One of the clients was a Raspberry Pi zero w outfitted with a camera to take the pictures and store them on the NFS server. The other client hosted the docker container linuxserver/photoshow that accessed the NFS server to display the photos in a gallery. ...