Does anyone here use a Pi as a small home server...

Does anyone here use a Pi as a small home server? Instead of one of those VPS things I'd like to use one at home for some programming / school fun. I was thinking of trying Gentoo or a BSD for this one (I have an Arch, have used all the normie distros in school/work).

Some other questions:

-How's compiling on it?

-In how little time could I configure it to run screenless with only SSH to meddle into it, if I'm used to installing Arch (ie. my install got fucked up multiple times by the Windows image also living on this computer).

well for starters im not even sure that gentoo runs on it
second it takes literally seconds to get it running headless

go for raspbian or void, nigger.

Yup, there's an entry on the Gentoo wiki of Gentoo running on it, they advise compiling on PC and chrooting into the SD installation, but I'd like to use it for some idiotic remote compilation service I wanna try doing.

>debian
I'll look up void, thanks

bad idea, pis are slow compared to PCs and if you compile on them you're gonna end up with arm binaries unless you set up a cross compiler, which is a gigantic pain in the ass. i would know, i have to deal with these fucking toolchains to build embedded crap for avr and stm32.

A Pi is fine for compiling small projects. Stop trying to sound smarter than you are, no one is going to realistically try and compile large libraries or large embedded tools.

yes
>-How's compiling on it?
fast

>-In how little time could I configure it to run screenless with only SSH to meddle into it,
Download rapsbian lite
dd it to your m. sd card
ssh into it with default creds, change the password with passwd

is it fine for compiling whatever you need on the pi? absolutely, will it suck for op's intended use: a remote compiling service? yep
dealing with cross compiling is so much worse than the speed, though. hope OP wants remotely compiled arm binaries.
PS no one "builds large embedded tools," they download them.

I run rasbian on mine with a 2TB external usb hdd

Its really amazing for how cheap it is and how easy to setup.

Its the entry point to ssh into my home network. And I run an rtorrent server, and apache server on it and have backup scripts for my laptop and pc for it. I highly recommend you get one.

In the newest version of Rasbian you have to put a file called "ssh" in /boot, as its disabled by default. Took me a while to figure out

>they disable ssh by default
literally why

So retards dont get hacked because they dont change the default password

this, pretty much

Minibian is a nice base for server-like stuff

It's also amazingly slow. I hope you like your 6MB/s transfer speeds compared to like 100MB/s if you plug it in directly.

you'd have to go an extra mile to ssh in to the pi from outside your network, no?

Some people just set up DMZ... Yeah, really.

Mine hits 11MB/s on a good day, hovers around 10,5 mostly. Networkcontroller is the bottleneck but its good enough for my files.


Imagine setting up the raspi in an office or workspace. The moment it your co-worker or peer boots it up for the first time you ssh into it and fuck it up. The poor guy only wanted to do some Python learing, never even heard of ssh

It is a great idea but I will suggest you to spend a few bucks more. I bought an Odroid XU4 and I couldn't be happier. I feel it just fast, I mean, I'm not expert, I just think it could do everything even heavy tasks. Runniing some custom Debian from their own forum.

Pis are great to tinker and learn new shit on, but when your needs exceed it, you can just spin up an actual server. I've still got an old Pi 2 running a PBX system and other PHP5.6 shit apart from my main server (with PHP7).

because little kids get this and they all are too retarded to change the standard password

I have one set up as a seedbox and media server. It works fine for streaming media, but dragging and dropping files is a nightmare thanks to USB 2.0 and the 100MB/s port.

yes

Mb, not MB.

I hear it is a really bad idea to run a raspberry pi server for some reason that I forget. Something about the raspbians packages being old or being easy to hack for some reason. I don't remember but just mentioning this incase any Sup Forumsuys are gonna use this for public facing things.