Home Server with Raspberry Pi & FreeBSD

Raspberry Pi + FreeBSD Series

This series of guides about creating a home server with Raspberry Pi and FreeBSD is written by a novice for novices. If you’re pretty experienced with FreeBSD and are just looking for a specific answer to a question, unfortunately you might find these to be a bit verbose. For that reason, each article comes with a toggle switch to transform it into a succinct article. I wrote the guides in this style because, as I have learned *nix systems throughout the years, I have always found documentation frustrating. The well-intentioned authors of most *nix tech guides aim for efficiency and succinctness, which is good except they frequently assume the reader knows things they don’t. Then you have to start Googling that one piece that wasn’t clearly explained, or you have to experiment and figure out if some command contained variables that need to be replaced or not.

In verbose mode, these articles over-explain and provide tangential information that many who have any experience with *nix will find elementary. Basically, it’s what I always wanted when learning this stuff.

1. Home Server with Raspberry Pi & FreeBSD
2. Home NAS Using a Raspberry Pi
3. Bastille Jail Management on Raspberry Pi
4. Pi-Hole with FreeBSD using AdGuard Home

I started this series explaining how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a NAS, skipping this initial step because I didn’t think a guide was necessary. I provided a link just in case. Then I started having regret concerning my chosen setup and started tinkering with other options. After blowing things up several times, I’ve now returned to my original plan, which includes FreeBSD installed on the SD card with UFS as the filesystem and a ZFS mirror consisting of two external SSDs.

What Are Your Home Server Needs?

To avoid the hassle I experienced, I suggest you consider your options. There are some key factors you should probably evaluate:

1. Cost. One of the main reasons to use a Pi is to do things cheaply. If cost is not an issue, then there are much better solutions. TrueNAS is pretty much FreeBSD with a GUI just for an in-home server. You can buy their snazzy hardware and your configuration will be kept to a minimum.
2. Efficiency. A Pi will draw a lot less power than a TrueNAS or an old repurposed x86 computer. Using ARM will allow you to keep the Pi running 24/7 without consuming a lot of power. This reason may overlap with cost, but you might want to keep power consumption down for environmental reasons.
3. Speed. The Pi—even the Pi 4 used in this tutorial—is pretty slow. It should have plenty of power to do the things in this guide, although I may need to upgrade to a Pi with more RAM since ZFS likes a lot of it. I’m writing this as I go so if I run into any speed issues I’ll come back and edit this, but I will say that I have used a Pi for many of these tasks and speed has not been an issue.
4. Availability. Unfortunately, finding a Pi is difficult right now (try RPI Locator). If you can’t find a Pi and want to set up a home server using FreeBSD and the tasks detailed in these guides, you can also use another micro PC or just an old computer laying around. Just keep in mind the PI-specific parts of the guide won’t apply and you might have to do a bit of research to make sure FreeBSD plays nice with your hardware.

Alternative FreeBSD Home Server Options

This list probably isn’t exhaustive but these are some ideas I tinkered around with before settling on my current setup:

1. ZFS on the SD card. Use an SD card adapter to plug a SD card into the Pi through USB, run the installer from either an SD card directly in the Pi or a USB drive (if the latter, you have to do some futzing around to get the Pi to boot from USB). You can then use the installer to use ZFS directly on the flash card. The reason for the adapter is that I couldn’t get the FreeBSD to recognize the SD card unless it booted from it. Perhaps there’s some additional software that can solve this problem, but I didn’t find it.
2. Use a single SSD as your zpool and don’t use mirroring. This actually isn’t a bad option if you have another backup solution set up. In a future guide I’m going to set up rsync to backup my drives to another device on the network. I also might use rsync to back up some of my more crucial data to a remote server. Combining those solutions with my ZFS mirror is kind of a “belt and suspenders” type of solution. The advantage of going with a single drive is that the u-boot bug won’t prevent you from booting into the external drive over USB, you’ll be be able to forego the SD card entirely, and things will be slightly easier to configure.
3. Get the Pi Compute Module 4, the Computer Module 4 IO Board, a PCI board that will connect a bunch for SATA drives, and 4+ SSDs to make a RAID. I almost went this route, and I might do so in the future as a fun project, but keep in mind this is not economical.
4. Buy a used Mac Mini for dirt cheap and a used HDD enclosure. This option is a bit overkill for my needs, but probably won’t cost you much more than the Pi setup. A ten year old Mac Mini is more power than you’ll need to do these tasks. If you get a used HDD enclosure just make sure it’s not a “hardware RAID,” as it may be difficult (or impossible) to get it to run on anything other than Windows or macOS, and you want ZFS to manage your RAID/mirrors.