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My Raspberry Pi Setup: Home Server, Hotspot, and Automations

April 27, 2026 (1mo ago) — by Lefteris#raspberrypi#linux#automation#home-server#tech
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The Raspberry Pi is one of those purchases that seems frivolous until it's running 24/7 and you can't imagine your setup without it.

Mine started as a curiosity project. It's now the backbone of a few things I use every day.

The Hotspot Server

The main project is a Linux RPi hotspot server. The idea is simple: the Pi acts as a wireless access point, routing traffic through a VPN, serving local DNS filtering (bye bye ads and tracking), and logging connections. It sits between my devices and the router.

Getting this working took longer than it should have. Configuring hostapd and dnsmasq together without them fighting each other is an exercise in patience. The routing rules need to be exactly right or you get weird NAT issues. I documented everything because I knew I'd have to rebuild it eventually — and I was right. The SD card died. The documentation saved me.

The end result: every device on my network goes through the Pi. DNS queries go to my local Pi-hole instance first. I can see exactly what every device is phoning home to. The answer, always, is: a lot.

Automations

This is where it gets fun. The Pi runs a few small scripts on cron that handle things I don't want to think about:

  • Backup sync: pushes important files from my main machine to a mounted external drive and logs the result
  • Wake-on-LAN trigger: I can ping the Pi from my phone and it wakes my desktop
  • Health checks: monitors a few services and sends me a notification if something is down
  • Git auto-pull: a couple of repositories stay updated automatically

None of these are complicated. That's the point. Simple scripts that run reliably are more useful than clever solutions that occasionally break.

The Setup

  • Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB RAM
  • 64GB SD card (boot) + external SSD for storage
  • Running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (headless, no GUI)
  • tmux for persistent sessions, htop for monitoring, ufw for firewall

Power draw is negligible. It runs all day. I basically don't think about it unless I'm adding something new.

What I'd Tell Someone Starting Out

Don't start with the hotspot. Start simpler — a Pi-hole, a media server, a file share. Get comfortable with the Linux side of things first. The network stuff bites if you don't have the fundamentals.

And document everything. The SD card will die. Your future self will thank you.

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