I ditched my Raspberry Pi for this

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About this video

The creator speed-builds a travel NAS and travel router the night before taking his wife and six kids to Japan, after deciding his previous Raspberry Pi OpenWRT router and OpenMediaVault NAS would not handle Plex streaming for the family and backing up vlog footage to his studio for his editors. He switches to a ZimaBoard 832 he says a company sent him free: x86 Intel Celeron quad-core, 8GB RAM, 32GB onboard storage, two SATA connections, two Ethernet ports, PCIe, and potential WiFi 6, with nested virtualization. He installs Proxmox (after enabling IOMMU/VT-d for PCI passthrough in BIOS and reinstalling), but virtualized OpenWRT driver problems and an unstable RaspAP attempt with a USB antenna fail. He solves routing with a purpose-built GL.iNet gigabit travel router running OpenWRT. For the NAS he tries TrueNAS, gets storage and Plex working only after broadly opening permissions, then finds Plex will not boot at home because its Kubernetes deployment tries to pull the newest image from GitHub. He falls back to the stock CasaOS, a Debian 11 wrapper, with two SSDs on a SATA Y-connector kept separate (one for Plex, one for NAS), Syncthing as a Docker container to send-only sync footage to his studio NAS over the internet with no VPN, Plex for movies, TV and Bluey, Pi-hole for DNS, and Uptime Kuma/Smokeping for connection health. He says the setup worked on the plane, trains, hotels and Airbnbs in Japan.

Key takeaways

ZimaBoard’s x86 CPU, SATA, dual Ethernet and PCIe allow Proxmox and more than a Raspberry Pi, if BIOS virtualization is enabled first
Virtualized OpenWRT and RaspAP proved too unreliable on his deadline; a dedicated GL.iNet travel router handled connecting once and rebroadcasting family WiFi
TrueNAS Plex failed offline because its Kubernetes deploy tried to pull the latest image from GitHub
CasaOS plus Syncthing gave simple file access and send-only sync from the travel NAS to the studio NAS without a VPN
Travel router plus NAS let all family devices auto-connect, stream Plex locally, and back up footage overnight

Episode details: published February 16, 2024 · 18:45 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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