The plan is to build a collection of raspberry-pi’s held in a Pi-Cluster case, all of which run a dedicated service. The reason I choose this method is for two key reasons:
- I already have a couple of raspberry pi’s lying around my house, and could no longer justify “saving up for a server”. If you are familiar with the concept of bikeshedding, this is definitely what I have been doing - I needed to just start at MVP, and then build up to an ideal, and then waste building that ideal.
- When I do eventually get a server, the pi’s can be turned into a bare-metal K3S cluster.
In its first form, the pis will be powered by an extension lead, however, I will change it later on. I plan to install a PoE hat onto all of the pi’s and purchase a separate PoE switch to power them all from. The main reason I want to do this is to cut down on the amount of plugs into my extension lead, but I am sure there are other benefits of doing this that I have missed.
The pi’s themself generally will all hold an ubuntu image, because I am a strong believer in that distro stability and reliability. However, for special cases, I am planning on running other operating systems. The Wireguard server I am planning on bringing in I want to run on BSD, the reasons for this will be discussed in its own section.