Tech Friday: Raspberry Pi 3 webservers and a USB Power Brick
Posted By RichC on December 4, 2020
Although I only have one address accessible IP at the house, I can split it up via “Port Forwarding” on the cheap Cincinnati Bell router, rather than the home “mesh” network. After a little tweaking (ok, A LOT), I do have a work-around solution using a variety of ports to access different devices. For the most part, I really don’t use these small one-board Raspberry Pi computers for anything more than tinkering, but for me its the continuing education that come from tinkering around.
In the past, I used Python for a few small relay switching projects, 
but with the advent 
of the Amazon Echo gadgets (and price drops), it really doesn’t make much sense to program my own “Smart Home.” Same for running Pianobar for Pandora (since 2006) as a way to get commercial free without a subscription and pump the music through my home stereo … but again, small Bluetooth connected amps and an Echo (and my SiriusXM subscription)… music to my taste is now covered.
As for webservers, I manage several for my business so really I have access to plenty of connected hardware so self-serving content on a Raspberry Pi is really just fun-and-games. I keep thinking 
eventually I’ll find a real purpose? But for now, I’ve temporarily stacked three of them in the basement near the Cincinnati Bell router and use one as the primary webserver running Apache (port 80) and as a network monitor (tweets me updates), the other as a static “image server” and the third for some experimenting … currently playing with Hugo the Static Site Generator SSG.
So far, the cheap 4-port USB plug sized power brick is running all three. I still have a Raspberry Pi Zero and old Raspberry Pi 2 (which I might have over-clocked and cooked?) If I’m going to do much more with these little single board computers, it will be time to build a little rack fort them.
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