Homelab: A New Toy
For a while now, I’ve wanted to expand my homelab’s hardware with something that has a small form factor, low power consumption, and is quiet.
For that, there’s two main choices: an SBC (Single-Board Computer), or a mini PC. Now, if you’ve read the title of this post, you already know I’ve gone for the most basic choice out of all the options.
I could’ve got better value for money when it comes to processing power if I had gone for a mini PC, however I did decide to go for the Pi 5 as the PoE hat for it has just come out, and I have a PoE switch which is sat beneath my desk without anything to power…

So, here it is. The Raspberry Pi 5, and the PoE header for it. Beneath them is the book I’m currently reading, which deserved a cameo. I’m very impressed by its small size, and the PoE was definitely the factor which got me to buy this rather than a mini PC – however maybe in the future I’ll get one of those too.

Here’s it now put together – a process which only took a few minutes. Now, I just need to put an operating system on it and plug it into my PoE switch – no other cables needed for what I have planned!

Next, I’ve got my MicroSD card and ran it through the Raspberry Pi Imager: I’ve gone for Ubuntu Server rather than Raspberry Pi OS – but I can always try that another time. Although you can’t see it in this screenshot (and I forgot to take a screenshot of me doing this), I did configure the operating system settings to enable SSH.
Enabling SSH will allow for a headless installation of the operating system, allowing me to do absolutely everything remotely from my main PC – this removes the need to plug in a monitor and mouse/keyboard.
Now, to plug my MicroSD card into my Pi, plug the Pi into my switch, and let it boot up – a process which takes a surprisingly small amount of time for a first boot.

Before I can SSH onto it and begin using it, I need the device’s IP address. For this I’ve used the Eero app which comes with my Eero router, and I’ve given it a DHCP reservation.
Next, I’ll open up (Windows) Terminal on my main PC and SSH on using the username, IP address, and password.

And I’m on! Now, the first thing I want to do is make sure the operating system is up to date:

Now, I’ve already decided on one little experiment to try with my Raspberry Pi, which I’ll now cover (but there’ll be more to come in the future).
Wireless Access Point
The Raspberry Pi 5 comes with 802.11ac, or Wi-Fi 5. However, I’m using Ethernet to connect it to my network (and power it). It’d be a shame to let those wireless capabilities go to waste, so I’m going to turn my Pi into a WAP. Firstly, we’ll need some packages installing via apt install.


I’ve also ran a couple of commands using my new tools (net-tools to run ifconfig to look at our wired connections, and wireless-tools to run iwconfig to look at our wireless connections). From here we can see that our wireless adapter is called ‘wlan0’ – this is information we can use in our next command.

Now, with a single command (courtesy of network-manager) we can turn this adapter into a WAP, and give it an SSID and a password. It’s really as simple as that, unless you want to get into configuring it – but frankly, it’s not really necessary for my testing purposes as it already has security on there, and it automatically routes traffic through it to my main router to provide internet connectivity to devices that join that particular SSID.

Here is a screenshot of my phone, showing that I am connected to the access point and its SSID.
Although there’s much more to do, both with this particular experiment and with the Pi overall, I’ll leave it there for now. Thanks for reading.
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