i ran Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi 4 more than a year. Although Booted from Pi NVMe SSDAs I built the ESPHome devices, it became difficult to ignore the Pi’s 4GB memory limit. I recently moved Home Assistant for Mini PC and almost shelved Pi as he sat in the corner doing nothing.
I built it from scratch and gave it the network monitoring job. Along with the Mini PC, the Pi 4 is an essential part of my home lab, monitoring my network whether I’m home or not. To be honest, it turned out to be more suitable than running it as a smart home hub.
Pi-hole handles DNS for my entire home network
Elimination of upward dependence
with a A headless operating system on the Piinstallation Pi-hole felt like an obvious move keeping trackers and malicious sites away from the entire network. This one change made the browsing experience noticeably faster on phones, tablets, smart TVs and computers. Installation took less than 15 minutes, but I spent a lot of time pruning Adlists to keep only what I needed.
Instead of trusting Cloudflare and Google’s public DNS servicesI paired the Pi-hole with a native recursive DNS resolver — Unbound. This stopped my DNS queries from reaching any third party providers. Unbound resolves all DNS queries directly from its root servers. And that took third-party DNS providers out of the picture entirely.
Offloading DNS to a dedicated, always-on machine keeps the router and mini PC focused on workloads without sharing resources. After configuration, Pi-hole and Unbound just run without any maintenance burden.
Pi 4 tells me what is happening on my network
The router only displays the device list
My router only shows which devices are connected to my home network. I can’t see what these devices do, how much bandwidth they consume, or whether they call home. So I am NetAlertX and ntopng are installed to bridge this gap.
On the Pi, ntopng works passively to detect bandwidth-hungry devices, active protocols, and anything that looks unusual. I can now identify sources of bandwidth spikes that were previously overlooked. This helped me solve the mystery of midnight traffic spikes – device backups.
Ntopng also detected all the background chatter that devices generate even when no one is using them, such as ad targeting requests, software update checks, and telemetry reports.
NetAlertX monitors devices connected to the network and sends alerts when something it doesn’t recognize appears. It records devices that the router’s interface doesn’t show, especially those that connect and exit at odd hours.
Finally, Work time Kuma monitors All standalone services including Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Immich and mini PC. I get an alert if any of the services or VMs on the Mini PC suddenly go silent.
Tailscale makes the entire stack remotely accessible
Installation is easy and clean
Monitoring the network and self-hosted services stack is useful at home, but I also wanted access to this stack when I was away. Thus I installed Tailscale on a Pi 4, not a mini PC. This is not a typical “remote access” setup for my home network. Using Tailscale, I access the network monitoring dashboards directly.
I have a two-node setup with one node running a Pi 4, which gives me access to NetAlertX, ntopng, Pi-hole and Uptime Kuma dashboards to check the status of my home network from anywhere. Also, I get a notification when the mini PC turns off.
The mini PC runs another Tailscale node to access me remotely VMs running on Proxmox. If my mini PC goes down, I can still access my network monitoring stack, especially when away from home.
The entire setup took 15 minutes without port forwarding, changing firewall rules, or tracking IP address changes. Tailscale turned out to be the right tool for reliably accessing the Pi and providing minimal maintenance.
Assigning a new role to the Pi 4
There was no need to replace the Pi 4; he just needed a better job. It’s not the most powerful machine in the home lab, but it still draws between 3 and 5 watts of power to run the stack. That’s a small price to pay for around-the-clock services.
The Pi 4 just needs to be powered up and running something reliably so that the mini PC can work without distraction. A clean separation between the two machines makes things easier. When something breaks, it’s immediately obvious which box I need to check first.
Best of all, it now monitors my entire network at all times. It notifies me when something breaks and I can even log in remotely. By handling everything a mini PC doesn’t, the Pi 4 earns its place in my home lab by doing less, but better.
- Storage
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MicroSD card slot
- CPU
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Arm Cortex-a72 (quad-core, 1.8 GHz)
- Memory
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1GB, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4
- Operating system
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Raspberry Pi (Official)
