I’ve gained another raspberry pi for the home network. I’ve been thinking what I can do with it.

I tried running a squid proxy, and to be honest, it’s just not worth the effort. Most websites now use HTTPS, and a result of which will not be cached or scanned by the proxy. And the overall speedup of the network was non existent or very close to minimal benefit.

So, I settled on running a OpenVPN server, so I can access the whole network when away from the house. This makes things more secure as I no longer have to have the CCTV system open to the internet, and I can use it to route around other networks I don’t trust. Which is pretty much all networks not under my control. I’ve also used the box in the backup scheme. It now takes the archive from its primary location, and copies it to a NAS, and once a month runs a scrip to compress it to a tar.gz and copy it to another NAS on the system. This gives me 3 copies of the data, plus my copies on Amazon S3. So all that data should be pretty safe.

The NAS boxes are connected only when data is being copied, and disconnected when done to avoid any nasties corrupting the backups between updates. I’ll update the scripts I use and publish or update my previous post on the back up later.

Now, I just need to get each of them mounted via NFS to my main desktop so I can work on the scripts without having to SSH to them.