K3CAN

There are some tools to help, but things are sort of specific to particular aspects. Lynis for general systems, ntopng for networks, and such.

For 90% of stuff, though, you can just stick to stable repos and upgrade on a schedule and you’ll be alright.

The slightly lower power draw pi5 vs a Tiny will eventually make up for the higher initial cost, but you can save more by turning off lights when you leave a room or skipping a round at the bar.

In my opinion, the wider software compatibility, better processing power, and expansible RAM and storage options far outweigh the eventual theoretical savings.

That said, if you need the super small SBC form factor or GPIO pins, definitely go for a pi. They absolutely have their use cases. I have 4 or 5 of the 3B and 3B+, and have used them on-and-off for a variety of tasks over the years.

It’s been a long time since Pi’s were competitive on price.

You can get a used Lenovo Thinkcentre for $50 on eBay. A modern pi is going to cost you that much for just the board, then you still need to buy a case, power supply, SD card, and then figure out some solution for storage…

No reason to bother with a Pi unless you need the GPIO for something. You can do more with a Lenovo Tiny or SFF Dell.

I know I’m a bit late to the conversation, so I don’t know if this is still helpful… But I have a camera with “AI Detection” built into it and it appears to send alerts via its ONVIF connection. I’ve disabled motion and other detectors on my NVR (AgentNVR) and instead configured it to just wait for an alert from the camera itself to start recording. It’s been working quite well.

My initial plan was to use a coral TPU and frigate, but the Coral/Gasket drivers appear to be pretty old and I couldn’t get them to work properly, myself.

I’ve also been running nginx in an unprivileged LXC container. I haven’t used fail2ban, specifically, but crowdsec has been working without issue.

You can mostly just treat an LXC like a normal VM.

I mostly learn from mistakes, and since homelabs are all about learning, there are bound to be mistakes.

I’ve borked my network multiple times, broken VMs, and redesigned things from the ground up, again.

Big lesson is to have backups. Lol

On a pi, specifically?

Mine is currently running Mailrise and serving as a qdevice for Proxmox. It used to run nginx as a reverse proxy, but I moved that to a different machine. I had a second pi specifically for sharing USB devices over the network, but I wasn’t using it very much so it’s currently not in use.

If you’re looking for general ideas, I think a pi would make a good appliance for ddclient, Homepage/Dashy, an SSH/VPN jumpbox, UPS monitoring, or a notification platform. Basically, any set-and-forgot service that you want to keep running 24/7.