An all-in-one home security and networking solution?

[Beamann]

New forum member, long time LTT YouTube viewer here. 

 

I love the LTT YouTube vids about some of the great raspberry pi projects you can do at home to create things like your network-wide ad blocker and home surveillance system. I know of projects for creating your own raspberry pi based VPN as well.

 

I’d like to know:  is it possible to build a system that integrates all of those features into one? I understand that a raspberry pi lacks powerful enough hardware to run all those things simultaneously, but if a raspberry pi can do it, can’t it be done on, say, a small custom PC built for that purpose? I don’t see any such guides or answers to the question in my googling, so I’ve come here hoping to find guidance. 

 

If possible, would someone brief me on the basics of what such a project might entail? For example, could it be a Windows based machine, or would I have to dive into Linux or Ubuntu? What other software might be required? What kind of hardware would such a system need? Are there any existing how-to guides that might help?

 

For context, I’m a former Mac user turned custom PC builder, but I’ve never done any raspberry pi projects, computer coding, server use, or special software configuring. The most complicated software related things I’ve done is to configure my home network with tweaks to the DNS, etc. but I’m a beginner when it comes to software issues. 

 

Thanks for looking. 

[Pixel5]

yea thats possible, the answer is a Synology NAS, there you can run anything in a docker container and you have built in surveillance support

 

[Master Disaster]

I suppose it's technically possible on a Pi using Raspbian but I'm not sure a Pi would be powerful enough to run everything simultaneously.

 

It wouldn't take a powerful PC though, something around HTPC power would be more than enough.

 

As for OS, you could probably get away with either Windows or Linux tbh. Both can handle running a webserver easily enough. Linux would be the preferable choice as everything you need to run would be free.

[Jarno.]

Hi @Beamann

This can be done by using LXD/LXE or docker. If you want the learn something along the way by setting up everything from scratch I would recommend LXD/LXE. Docker are pre-build application containers where most of the configuration is already done. LXD/LXE are containers with any linux distro running in it.

 

In case you also want to run non-linux applications the same can be done with KVM but this has more overhead then LXD as this is full-virtualization and LXD/LXE are just containers.

 

TL;DR: Get some hardware install your favour distro on it (Raspbian should work too)

and install either KVM or LXD/LXE. The raspberry will actually have enough resources when using LXD/LXE as 1 container will only use 50-100MB ram each when under some load.