Doing an experiment with my RPi 4, using it as a small but powerful local server.

My current PC is a 10 year old Macbook Pro 13" 2010, which is sluggish sometimes.

So I want to offload some heavy tasks (ffmpeg time-lapse creation, long-running tasks and services) to the Raspberry Pi and connect to it either via LAN or Wi-Fi.

Below you can read my findings about performance, applications and general issues I encountered and tried to solve.

• First steps
• Connection via Wi-Fi
• Final words

I started by:

• Flashing a minimal RaspiOS Buster Lite image on a 32GB SD card (prob better for the future if I used a 128GB one)
• No setup of Wi-Fi connectivity through wpa_supplicant
• Creating an empty ssh file in the SD card to enable SSH access

Powered up the Pi and I was able to connect via LAN.

Additionally, I changed the hostname of the Raspberry Pi to serverry (through raspi-config).

Connecting the RPi to my MBP through LAN was the first thing I wanted to try.

The Pi is now available on my PC as serverry.local.

"Internet Sharing" from the PC to the Pi was super easy.

Worked first try, just had to enable the internet sharing setting on my Mac:

Set up a wpa_supplicant.conf in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf or place it in the root of the SD card.