Home Server with the Banana Pi

After some complications, he is now finally here - the Banana Pi.

The Banana Pi is like the Raspberry Pi, an open source single-board computer, but he has a lot more power under the hood. Like the Cubieboard it is equipped with the Allwinner A20 ARM Cortex-A7 Dual-core processor. He also has with 1GB twice as much memory as the Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone Black.
The exact specifications can be found in this Wikipedia entry or on the manufacturer-site.
Another commonality with the Cubieboard/-truck is the SATA interface that allows you to connect hard drives of any size to the Board.

So the banana has everything to replace my BeagleBone Black as my little home server. He has indeed done a really fantastic Job, but it reached its limit: web server for several Wordpress-Sites, cloud server, IMAP server ..

Gradually instructions are published here, how to

1. set up the operating system
2. set up a web server - even if you want to run your own Web pages, you need a web server for various services
3. set up a private cloud with CalDAV and CardDAV for appointments and contact data and WebDAV for files.
4. set up a mail server (IMAP), so that your mail isn't stored somewhere, but to keep them on your own server and to keep his various mailboxes in one place synchronously
5. set up a FTP-Server
6. protect the server in the web

So let's set up the Banana Pi
Installation and first steps

To have enough space on your server, connect a hard-disk
boot Bananian from hard-disk

Whether you want to run OwnCloud, Baikal or WordPress on the Banana Pi - you will need a web server, MySQL and PHP. So...
Install Nginx, MySQL und PHP5

For the private cloud, there are 2 options .. See this post Owncloud-Alternative with Seafile und Baikal

I personally prefer the Seafile/Baikal alternative because I have this running on my BEAGLEBONE months now and there were never any problems. In addition, both services are running very resource-efficient and stable. However, I will introduce the tested instructions for both installations here. Only just because I want to know how OwnCloud runs on the banana.

So first the instructions for OwnCloud: Setup OwnCloud with Nginx and SSL

And now the instructions for the Seafile/Baikal-Alternative:
First the setup of Baikal for syncing dates and addresses/contacts ( CalDAV, CardDAV ):
Setup Baikal with Nginx and SSL

Now the setup of Seafile
Seafile with Https, NginX and MySQL

As a next step, an IMAP server is set up so that you can sort and store your mails centrally. This is described in this article: IMAP-Server with Dovecot and Getmail

But the best server is useless if you can not find it on the internet. So to be able to access your mails and your cloud from outside the local network, you have to register with a DynDNS service. In principle, this is nothing more than a phone book in which the numbers change at least once a day - but you can then look under the appropriate name, what the new number is.
One such provider is the Securepoint AG and because they don't have their own update client, I have written one. How to set up stands in this article DynDNS update client

Anyone who wants can also set up a FTP server on your home-server. With that you cann easily access files on your server or copy files from / to the server. Instructions for that are in this article: Setup FTP-Server

As a last step enable the server to send e-mails.
install and setup Postfix

Now we need to ensure that your home server is protected in the network. A great tool for this is Fail2Ban. What this is, how to setup and configure it, written in the article Protect your Server with Fail2Ban