THE PROJECT
Going Rogue was an idea that started with the desire for a “simple” network attached server solution for my personal files.
As nothing can be simple these days - specially due to the ever-growing tedious mood that came along with this never ending quarantine - the research time grew from a couple of hours to days, and then weeks.
The more I dug into the problem, the more I started finding solutions for problems that I didn’t have in the first place.
Why settle for a NAS if you can also have a cloud server and access your files from anywhere? If you have a webserver for the cloud, why don’t use it as stream server as well? And if you have a stream service, why don’t have a website for the streaming too?
For every question, one solution: Samba for network file sharing, OwnCloud for internet file synchronization and sharing, Ngnix for streaming server…
And finally I realized that going rogue and bypassing all the big tech companies - Google, Facebook, Amazon - was the most exciting thing to do in 2020.
Going Rogue means little David going against giant Goliath. And for doing that I would need open source software and an affordable hardware platform.
“And on the seventh day God made Pi.”
From the software perspective, I always knew Linux was the only way to go, but I still needed to find the right hardware. Every time I searched for a solution – for network attached server, for cloud file sharing, for streaming server – it would pop-up examples and positive feedback from people that were using the Raspberry Pi for these tasks.
And the more I learned about it, more confident I got that the Pi would be a perfect solution for this home project.
And did I mentioned that you can have a cluster of Raspberry Pi?
In the event of things going bad and performance laging, adding a few additional boards should solve the problem.
So let’s move on to the assembly of this little beast!