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submitted 6 days ago by vrek@programming.dev to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I don't expect much but I found an old pi I bought probably 2016(may of been 2017). It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem. It still works but wanted to somehow convert it to a regular distro(it's based on a micro-SD and I don't have any more microsd readers). I wanted to set it up as a basic system I could ssh into a terminal. Not expecting anything fancy or even graphic based. A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice "work" on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible? Am I under estimating what's possible with it?

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[-] user28282912@piefed.social 13 points 6 days ago

Raspberry Pi's are full of possibilities, even old ones. Here is what I'd do.

It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem.

Not sure what you mean here but there is no reason that any modem or WAN box ever really needs to involved with a pi-hole. You can set the IP to use for DNS lookups on each host by hand... OR you can turn off DHCP services on the modem run that off of the PI, which then sends the IP of the PI/PiHole for DNS as part of the DHCP lease to each client.

At any rate, ideas for it:

  • PiHole with encrypted DNS service out to the internet and past your ISP's snooping modem.
  • a Wireguard VPN server. This would allow for things like your phone to tunnel home use your fancy pi-hole to block all ads on your phone, privately. You'd also then have access to anything else hosted on your home network like Music/Movies/etc. Setup a samba share for that stuff somewhere. This raspberry pi can also pass your VPN client traffic back out to the internet if you setup (ip forwarding)[https://rob-ferguson.me/how-to-use-your-rpi-as-a-router/]. It's an old pi, so it won't be faster than 100Mbps, but for a phone/tablet that is likely fine.
  • as a motion-activated camera or some other temperature monitoring box. You can setup a cronjob to archive the videos or send the collected temp readings to some database backend and use Grafana for a visualization front-end.
  • setup a netflow collector/forwarder for your LAN using fprobe. If you network is flat and I guessing that it is, as long as you have a single network switch for both your wired and wireless clients (and a single subnet aka 192.168.0.x for all) then you can monitor the whole broadcast domain with one box. You can send/forward the captured netflow to something like Security Onion and really start to understand what's happening on your network. : )

There are so many more ideas like weather stations, news feeds, little web services for whatever.

[-] 51dusty@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

I use an older pi as a homepage server.

https://gethomepage.dev/

[-] Teppichbrand@feddit.org 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I reccomend using DietPi as the OS for all this. It comes with lots of optimized software you can install by selecting from a list. Easy and fun.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

out to the internet and past your ISP's snooping modem.

Directly and with your address to the encrypted DNS providers' modem. Same issue as with VPN providers.

this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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