ssh baltas@raspberrypi.local

home network / build log

I turned a Raspberry Pi and a spare SSD into my own cloud.

No subscriptions, no one else's server. Just a Pi, a drive, and a router port — sitting in the hallway, doing the one job every laptop and phone in the house now trusts it with.

Board

Raspberry Pi 4

Storage

256GB SSD (254GB usable)

Software

OpenMediaVault

Uplink

Cosmote router, LAN

01 — the build

Five steps from parts on a table to a device on the network

Nothing here is exotic. It's the same sequence anyone building a small home server ends up walking through — the only real decision points are the OS and where the box physically lives.

Pick the parts

A Raspberry Pi 4 and a 256GB SSD (Linux formats it down to 254GB usable — the drive isn't lying, filesystems just take their cut). An SSD over a USB hard drive or SD card, for the read/write speed and because it won't wear out the way an SD card would under constant use.

Raspberry Pi 4 256GB SSD USB 3.0 enclosure

Flash the OS and boot

Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS, first boot straight into OpenMediaVault's setup — a free, open-source NAS operating system that hands you a web dashboard instead of a config file to hand-edit. First login is over SSH before anything graphical exists; the console prints its own web address the moment it's ready.

First boot terminal showing the OpenMediaVault welcome message with login prompt and web console address

First boot — OMV prints its web console URL before you've touched a browser.

Configure headless, over SSH

No monitor and keyboard permanently attached to a box that's about to live behind a router — raspi-config over SSH handles the boring but essential part: enabling SSH itself, expanding the filesystem to the full drive, setting the hostname, locale, and boot behaviour.

Laptop terminal with SSH session output next to a small screen showing the raspi-config menu

Headless setup — raspi-config on the small display, SSH session on the laptop.

Wire it into the router

Ethernet straight into a free LAN port on the Cosmote router, SSD into a powered USB 3.0 port, and a small always-on display propped in front of it running Glances — CPU temp, load, disk I/O, network throughput, at a glance, no SSH session required to check it's still alive.

Cosmote router with a small Glances monitoring display propped up in front of it, cables running to the Raspberry Pi

Live in the closet — Glances on a spare display, cabled into the router.

Make it a personal cloud

With OMV reachable at https://192.168.1.9:9090 on the local network, the SSD gets mounted as a shared folder and exposed over SMB — so every device in the house sees it as a normal network drive, no different from any other folder on the network, just one that happens to live on a Pi in a closet.

02 — status

What the little screen is actually showing

The always-on display in the closet is running Glances, so a quick glance (no pun intended) is enough to know the Pi is healthy without opening a terminal.

uptime 17 days, 17h 04m

cpu temp 51–59 °C

load average (1 / 5 / 15 min) 3.62 / 3.72 / 3.20

disk 4.25GB used / 14.0GB free — 254GB volume

network eth0 receiving ~240b/s, sending ~320b/s idle

web console https://192.168.1.9:9090

03 — evidence

The closet, mid-build

Four photos from the actual build — not staged, cable management included.

Cosmote router with Pi and Glances monitor stacked on a cardboard box — The whole rig — router, Pi, SSD, and the Glances display sharing one box.

Close-up of the router's LAN ports and cabling, with the Glances screen visible — LAN port up close — one cable is all it takes.

OpenMediaVault first-boot terminal message — OMV's first-boot message, reflected off the desk.

Laptop SSH terminal beside the raspi-config screen on the small display — Headless config — laptop and Pi screen side by side.

04 — lessons

What actually tripped me up

ERR

apt couldn't find a package

OMV's user-management extension pulls in accountservice from a package that isn't always resolvable straight off a fresh image — an apt update first would have saved a step.

ERR

ownership after moving the home dir

chown -R on the account's home directory needed to run before installing UI mods, or the new admin panel couldn't write its own config back to disk.

TIP

keep a screen on it

A five-dollar always-on display running Glances turned out to be worth more than expected — CPU temp and disk I/O at a glance beats SSH-ing in every time something feels slow.

TIP

label the SSD's real capacity

256GB on the box, 254GB after formatting — worth knowing up front rather than being surprised when the drive reports "less" than advertised.