Today it’s almost precisely two years since I bought myself a Raspberry Pi thinking I was going to change the world and make something really cool. Nothing really came of it. Apparently I didn’t have the imagination to build anything out of the ordinary, so I ended up making it into an EmulationStation using RetroPie. It worked fine with my Logitech controller and I did have fun playing one old NES game, for around 3 minutes. After that, my poor Raspberry Pi ended up in the box, you know the one with all the old wires and now useless gadgets.

There the hardware dwelled until today, but it was still in the back of my mind. I was sure I could use the hardware for something interesting that actually added value for me. Then it struck me that I really wanted a NAS, but after scouring the market for a really long time I had to conclude that I can’t afford buying one of the quality I’d like. A very quick Google search lead me to an instructable called the Ultimate Pi Home Server and I found it very interesting that the Pi might be able to fill my needs until I can go on to something more professional like a QNAP or Synology NAS.

Reading the comments on the instructable however showed that there were issues since it seems to be outdated a bit. This meant that I had to go back and do some Google-Fu and in the end it led me to this guide by Mel Grubb that seemed to fit my needs a lot more. Reading through the different steps I could even see that he kept updating it. I had to dig out the Raspberry Pi from the depot and get back to it!

Currently I’m just sitting around listening to some music and waiting patiently while OpenVPN works on security stuff in the setup. At least it looks nice:

I really hope that this will be a great temporary solution and will most definitely update with a status as soon as I’ve gotten everything up and running.