[TUTORIAL] How to earn 30-40$/month?

dissi (63)in #diy • last year

Hello dear Steemians,

how are you? I'm fine, finally, since everything is up and running now!

But what is up and running now?

I'm glad you ask. After two weeks of work i was able to run a NAS (Network Attached Storage), with a mediaserver and a "money-machine", all in one, on a RaspberryPi!

How did i came on this idea?

I got totally random on this idea. Two weeks ago, one day, i woke up and thought: 'I want to build a NAS out of a RaspberryPi and an external harddrive!' When searching for a tutorial i found one from the YouTube-Channel "Network Chuck".

The tutorial covers two topics:

Installing the free NAS-Software Open Media Vault (OMV) on a RaspberryPi
Installing the free (but also with abo-modell/lifetime abo) mediaserver-software Plex inside a docker-container inside the OMV installation

I was so fascinated of this software that i instandly paid the 120$ for the lifetime "Plex-Pass" (it's worth since after 2 years it cheaper than in compare of the monthly/yearly abo). But you can also use the software for free. I recommend to buy the lifetime abo on the website (instead of in the app) since in the app it costs about 60$ more! (Please don't ask me why)

What did you fascinate about Plex?

It's like Netflix - but better! It offers a ton of movies, series and live tv, only in English (as far as i saw), but you can connect your NAS with it to watch your own movies etc. So at the moment i'm busy ripping my old DVDs to put them on the external harddrive to have them on Plex. You can also put your music up there, a side of your pictures and other videos. And it offers a userfriendly interface.

Fine, but what about the "moeny-machine"?

This was the hardest part, but let's start from the beginning... After my NAS worked for about a week, a thought came my mind: 'I'm not really using it 24/7 but it runs 24/7 - why shouldn't i make more out of it, in the time i'm not using it?' So i tried to install Honeygain on it, since i used it two years ago and saw also a tutorial on how to install it on a RaspberryPi (since a RaspberryPi has an ARM-Architecture but Honeygain only uses an AMD64-Architecture). While i searched for a tutorial for this, i stumbled across a GitHub-Project from OlivierGaland called "CashFactory". It combines several bandwithsharing services like Honeygain and installs them easily in a single script inside docker-compose.
But it wasn't that easy since this project was designed for AMD64 and, as said previously, the Pi uses an ARM-Architecture. So i tried to modify the script a bit that it runs on a Pi. But nothing worked...

...until today!

While searching for various solutions on how this could work i stumbled across several solutions, but they all didn't worked... At least when using them single, but using them toghether was the key!

So this is what i did:

After following the previously linked tutorial for setting up OMV (to get the current version of OMV you have to install Raspbian Buster Lite 64 as OS) with "Plex" i started to follow the tutorial on GitHub for "CashFactory"
Follow the tutorial until the point to update the .env -file
Enter your credentials for the single services there as it's written in the .env-file
Open the docker-compose.yml file
Since it still downloads the old version and files open the docker-compose.yml file on GitHub and copy it's content inside your downloaded docker-compose.yml
Change the port of the webserver in the beginning of the .yml-file to something other than 80 since it won't work with port 80 because this port is just used for OMV (change it to something like 123:80)
Add following lines somewehere in the file (i've put them after the comment-line that says #End of Portainer + Webserver section for example):

Emulator:
    image: tonistiigi/binfmt
    privileged: true
    command: -install amd64

This will download the emulator for amd64

Comment the services you don't want to use with a # in the beginning of the lines for the service
Save and exit from your docker-compose.yml
Now run following command:

export DOCKER_DEFAULT_PLATFORM=linux/amd64

Go ahead with the tutorial
I also used this line of code i got from the discussion on the GitHub project after finish the tutorial:

wget -qO- https://brightdata.com/static/earnapp/install.sh > /tmp/earnapp.sh && sudo bash /tmp/earnapp.sh

And clicked on the generated link.

And that's it! Now the whole thing is up and running, creating me a passive income while i don't use it.

Some last words about the hardware

Currently i use a RaspberryPi 4B with 4gb RAM which is enough to run everything. But i still ordered a Pi 4B with 8gb RAM since it just uses half of the RAM. It arrived yesterday, so this weekend i will upgrade my hardware
Also a new HDD arrived since i have a lot of films and not enough space on the one i use currently
If you want to connect more HDDs i recommend to also buy an USB-Hub with external charger since when putting a second HDD to the USB-Ports on the Pi it hasn't enough power for both so they will both disconnect.
For the HDDs i just buyed one from SeaGate, since i just have one of WD and i also took one out of my old laptop since i never use it. But choose what ever you want/preffer. I would recommend a large one withany TB if you can afford. Else you can also buy cheapier HDDs eith less TB and when you have again some money buy a second HDD and connect it to it. You can also connect a SSD to it (which i wouldn't recommend since it can break after time).
I also buyed a new case with two fans from GeekPi on Amazon in the hope of better cooling (at the moment runs at about 50-60°C)

Register to the single services*

To register on the single services you can use either the refferal links from the GitHub project to support the creator of "CashFactory" or use my refferal links below which would make me happy: