An update to my previous post concerning my Pi-Rack: As mentioned in my recent previous post I have been expanding my Pi-Rack capabilities. The following picture is my current configuration. PI-Rack The Pi-Rack is basically my home server rack using Raspberry PIs as my servers. You can see from the picture that I have four PIs, one 3B and the rest 4Bs. From left to right: Pi #1 is my VPN Pi #2 is my web server which host this site Pi #3 is Pi-hole, a DNS / Ad block Pi #4 is my NAS (Network Attached Storage) or File Server The NAS PI has, next to it, two 1TB USB WD Passports drives in a Raid-1 configuration.

My PI-rack is almost complete. The final major PIece is my Network Attached Storage (NAS) powered by the mighty Raspberry PI 4B running Open-Media-Vault (OMV) configured as RAID-1. It took a long time to get here mainly because of the lack of availability of the Raspberry PIs due to the shipPIng problems throughout the country. I frequently check to see if anyone has them in stock and to my surprise the 4GB version was available so I snagged one.

The PI Rack has a new Raspberry PI running PI-hole, a DNS Server that strips out advertizing and acts as a tracker-blocker. Wikipedia explains it better. Not much to say except is was real easy to install and set up. I did configure it to boot off of a USB flash drive, which any PI owner knows, was not possible in the recent past having to boot off of a Micro SD card.

Project “PI Rack” has finished it’s first phase of development. The whole idea was to take my two Raspberry PIs, one being a VPN server and the other this very website, and mount them on a DIN Rail with all the hardware to power and communicate with them. Referring to the above PIcture, from left to right, the 120VAC receptacle that supplies main power, a 10A circuit breaker, a 2A fused terminal block, a pass-through terminal block for the neutral, and a ground terminal block.

My first post has to be the installation of this website. A blog website without any specific toPIc. It will include PIctures I’ve taken, tech notes of my projcts, or anything else I want to blather about. I really wanted to host this myself with my own hardware. Since this was going to be a very small website with very little traffic, I decided to set it up at home using a Raspberry PI.