I’ve recently started playing around with the latest Raspberry Pi 3 B+ along with a PoE HAT, which is an amazing little piece of kit. I’ve been trying to offload a bunch of workloads that are currently being served by an aging Windows 10 PC whose primary role is a media PC. This very same PC used to run Windows Media Center on Windows XP, before I turned to XBMC/Kodi and then Plex. It’s well over a decade old, but still going strong. Although, now that I think of it, the only thing that’s probably still original is the case, since I’ve replaced the motherboard, videocard, disk drives, and power supply over the years.
Since I’ve worked with Docker in the past (most recently with a failed attempt to move the Skype Optimizer to a Docker container), I thought I’d try running Docker on the Raspberry Pi.
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| My home networking setup in the basement furnace room. My Raspberry Pi is circled in red. |
I’ve been pretty successful in getting things working efficiently on Docker. At the time of writing this post, I’ve got the following Docker containers running on my little Pi:
- Traefik – an easy-to-use reverse proxy solution so that I can access the different container UIs by using https://containername.ucdialplans.com, instead of http://192.168.1.x:somerandomport. It also simplifies certificate management, since I only have to do it once in Traefik with a wildcard cert, rather than on every container.
- Portainer – a GUI for container management, so I don’t have to remember specific commands
- Pihole – a DNS blackhole for ads. Blocks ads for all devices on my internal network. Tidbit: its currently blocking almost 50% of my total DNS queries!
- Radarr/Sonarr/Jackett – *cough cough* media management
- Unifi Controller – manages my amazing-how-did-I-live-before-this wifi infrastructure
- NOIP – publishes my ever-changing public IP address to Noip.com.
- PowerShellPi – Runs PowerShell scripts
My next move is to get a few more Raspberry Pis to create a Docker Swarm to automatically load-balance my containers, just like a wee little datacenter!
This is for you, Pat!
