Writing / Article
The Missing Piece: Adding a Raspberry Pi 4 to the Homelab
A dedicated low-power machine for always-on DNS and services.
I had wanted a Raspberry Pi for a long time. When I finally bought one, it had a clear job: low-power, always-on services, separate from the main Proxmox server.
The hardware
A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with a 64 GB SD card, a dedicated cooling fan and a solid case. (The current inventory on the homelab page lists a 4 GB board with a 500 GB SSD, which is the one to trust. This article describes the first setup.)
Moving the network services
Two changes made the difference:
- Pi-hole moved from a Proxmox LXC container to run natively on the Pi.
- Unbound went on the Pi as a recursive DNS resolver.
The practical result is that internet access no longer drops when I reboot or work on the Proxmox host. DNS used to go down with it. Now it doesn’t.
A 24/7 service hub
The Pi also runs the lightweight things I want available all the time: dashboards, monitoring tools and media streaming apps. In total that’s 12 or more apps, running as Docker containers. The Pi has been stable and quick for Docker workloads, which I didn’t take for granted from a board this small.
Why “the missing piece”
The lab had plenty of compute and no small, independent, always-on host. Adding one let me keep the essential network services apart from the machine I experiment on. The project write-up covers the design decisions and what this does and doesn’t protect against.