So I have a Synology server that I have a good deal of experience with, so this post will be through that lens.
What I’d like to do is set up a Raspberry Pi exclusively for pirating. So Qbittorrent and Proton VPN to get started, later Radarr, Lidarr, etc. I don’t think I’ll have a problem getting the Pi up and running, but I’d like to run it like my server, tucked away somewhere without a monitor or peripherals.
How do I access it? For my Synology box, I just put in a browser the local ip port 5000 and I have a whole desktop right there. But when I google about how I’d access a Pi, everything points to using SSH. I know a lot of people have Pis set up like this and surely they can’t be administering the whole thing through CLI, right? How do I get a similar setup to my Synology such that I can just get a desktop interface in a browser?
We are, indeed. I use a combination of SSH (for quick stuff), and Ansible for stuff I need to do repeatedly.
The tool you’re looking for is a ’VNC’ solution. There’s lots of them, and the best ones are free.
You can enable VNC on your Raspberry Pi through Raspi-Config. You’ll also need a VNC client on each device you want to connect from. Fin linked one above, I think.
And now some un- requested advice from me:
You mention running Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.
If you choose Ubuntu, I believe you will encounter many recipes online that will not work, because Ubuntu does not come with various Raspberry Pi specific tools pre-installed, such as
raspi-config.Raspbian and Ubuntu are extremely similar (this is intentional).
But I have found:
I think the Raspbian software can be added on top of Ubuntu, but I’ve never cared enough about the minor differences to even try.
The Ubuntu recipes I have found that don’t work on Raspbian also don’t work on Pi hardware at all, until I compile additional tools from source code. (A Raspberry Pi uses an ARM chip, which is cool, but makes it harder install some software that doesn’t support it.)
So the primary reason I’m going with Ubuntu is because my VPN is Proton and
So I’m afraid it might not run on anything else. The other stuff I want to run, Qbittorrent and eventually the *arrs, will probably run on anything. And it looks like I’ll probably need Docker anyway. So the real constraint right now driving the OS choice is Proton.
You do not need the ProtonVPN App. You can simply use OpenVPN logins provided by ProtonVPN, they should have a section telling you how you can do it.
Go it!
https://protonvpn.com/support/linux-openvpn/
This is shaping up to be a much harder project than I thought
If you use docker with portainer (for the GUI), you can set up the gluetun container with your protonvpn account and run all your other containers through that as their network. It’s as simple as adding
network_mode: service:gluetunto your stack configuration for each container.
Makes sense. I suspect it may still not work due to Proton likely being compiled for Intel, rather than ARM chips.
If you run into that, you may be able to work around it by logging into the Raspberry Pi, cloning the source code and installing: (if you’re able to get that to work, it’ll likely work equally well on Ubuntu or Raspbian). But it’s not for the faint of heart, they (Proton) don’t include many details, so it looks like there will be a lot of learning about their tool chain. https://github.com/ProtonVPN/proton-vpn-gtk-app#installation
(Edit: Since ProtonVPN is Python based, it may be fine, as long as there’s not too much C in the project. If it works immediately, my gut feeling is it will also work fine on Raspbian, if you need to switch for any other reasons.)