A small Raspberry Pi cluster for home server learning
Four 4B boards with 4GB of memory each were combined into a small home server cluster. The goal is to learn networking, storage, security, and by controlling several physical machines directly.
The setup uses four , four PoE+ Hats, four Cat6 s, a TP-Link 8-port PoE switch, one 1TB Samsung SSD, and a case. The switch is being used at a maximum speed of 100Mbps.
Tailscale provides a simple VPN so the cluster can be reached from outside the home. The first project is smoltorrent, a small educational BitTorrent-style system meant to become a personal distributed file server for large experiment files.
Key points
- The setup uses four 4B boards with 4GB of memory each.
- Power and networking run through PoE+ Hats, Cat6 cables, and a PoE-enabled TP-Link switch.
- A 1TB Samsung SSD is planned as the main storage drive.
- Tailscale VPN is used for from outside the home.
- The cluster is being used to build a small BitTorrent-style distributed file server.