This is a historical record of my home server setup from 2015. It served reliably for several years before I migrated to a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2026. See how it evolved: Raspberry Pi 5: Migration to NVMe and service containerization.

Some time ago I became the owner of a Banana Pi — a more powerful and better-equipped alternative to the Raspberry Pi.

What sold me:

  • CPU: 2× 1 GHz
  • RAM: 1 GB DDR3
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • SATA port (the killer feature for me)

I set it up as an always-on Debian server running Bananian — a Banana Pi-specific Debian distribution (note: Bananian was discontinued in 2016 and is superseded by Armbian) — handling:

  • Media server (minidlna — no need to boot a full PC just to play music or watch something on TV)
  • SSH (headless remote management)
  • VPN (OpenVPN — safe use of public Wi-Fi, easy access to the home network)
  • VNC (TightVNC — for when a graphical session is needed)
  • Web server (LAMP — this site ran on it, plus a few personal projects)
  • Backups (bash scripts on cron, no extra tooling)
  • Downloads (aria2 and curl for command-line; jDownloader in graphical mode when needed)

Everything ran fast, reliably, and — most importantly — stable around the clock. Power consumption was noticeably lower too: no more spinning up an old Core 2 Duo just to listen to music. An hour of that machine probably equalled a full day of Banana Pi.

Banana Pi — finished setup Banana Pi in its case with a SATA drive and an old 4 GB USB stick for backups.

Banana Pi — admin console Banana Pi from the admin console side.

If you have basic Linux admin skills and want a low-power always-on server, the Debian ecosystem gives you everything you need.

This setup eventually reached its limits. In 2026 I replaced it with a Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe storage and full Docker containerization. Read about it: Raspberry Pi 5: Migration to NVMe and service containerization.