The cables seem to increase exponentially don’t they? First, you have a few computers and a half dozen cables powering things and linking everything together, then you add a couple servers, maybe a second nic on your NAS, and another switch or two since things are now further from the router. Suddenly your office looks like a giant bowl of spaghetti covered in prop 65 stickers.

I run a beelink mini, not the weakest one, not the most powerful one, and it handles docker containers and VMs fine. I don’t have a tkn of integrated storage, but rather this machine handles apps while a separate NAS does all the file storage. Most I ever had running was 2 VMs and a handful of negligible docker containers but I still had plenty of ram and CPU to spare. I also think the minisforum stuff looks good. Their n5 pro nas just came out and would have made a good server with room to grow. I decided against it because I have parts and I want to use them :-) so the beelink is holding down the fort while I Frankenstein together a rig from my old gaming PC in a huge case that will host all my apps and less critical media. Home assistant which will stay on the beelink because it needs high availability. I’ve been curious how the lowest priced minisforum models would fare.

Interesting username. Are you a fellow student of Internet Comment Etiquette?

I know at least some of my containers use Postgres. Glad to know I inadvertently might have made it easier on myself. I’ll have to look into the users for the db and db containers. I’m a bit lost on that. I know my db has a username and pass I set in the docker compose file and that the process is running with a particular GID UID or whatever. Is that what your talking about?

I miss this from cloud hosting. It’s helpful to be able to save, clone, or do whatever with the current machine state and easily just flash back to where you were if you mess something up. Might be too much to set up for my current homelab though. My server does have btrfs snapshots of everything directly in grub which has let me roll back a few big screwups here and there.

That was my first thought. How do you keep it cold enough to run in a place like Arizona, Spain, or Mexico? It also reminded me of my Windows Mobile days before I had a smartphone when someone on a Windows Mobile forum took a Dell Axim x51v and built a dock for it that exposed all the ports so he could use it with an external display as an infotainment/nav system. He called it the Aximizer. An old android phone with a micro-hdmi port might be the modern equivilant.

https://youtu.be/ELANGsiaq5M

Went through and verified that a number of things were backing up and updating correctly. I feel a little less weight on my shoulders knowing things are working as they should.

Has friend 2 set his name servers to something custom, or is he using your network’s default? My partner uses an iPhone and it has some sort of built in DNS so she doesn’t benefit from me installing DNS based adblock on the network. You could see if a similar thing is at play.

You can sync Obsidian with your own storage location. There are plugins to do a lot of what you’re asking for. Downside is that it’s not open source, though your content is all stored in plaintext so you won’t lose it due to lock-in. It also might be more than your asking for and a simpler, more tailored, solution may be out there. Paired with a self hosted Nextcloud server, you may solve a bunch of your PIM needs at once.

I’m running Nextcloud and PaperlessNXG on my servers. Over the last few months I tested out my remote management. Now that I’m back home, I’ve been making a few adjustments based on my learnings. Firstly, Wireguard is slower than a turtle, while Tailscale has been a little bit faster. I’m guessing this is due to my upload speed and switching to fiber may fix this.

I’d also like to add TubeArchivist back in since there’s some great videos that I don’t trust Google to preserve given the direction things are going.

The folks on the “privacy” Lemmy gave me some good tips on app replacements and after making a big spreadsheet with all my apps, their licenses, etc., I cut down my remaining proprietary apps by at least 50% and I only have a few proprietary essentials that still depend on Google Play. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time and I almost have a path towards completely removing all Google, Amazon, and Microsoft products from my life.

Next, I’d like to set up Wander to eventually get rid of Garmin/Strava but I haven’t been able to figure it out and I’m still locked in to some degree because of my hardware (Garmin watch). The Ring doorbell has to be the next thing to go, but I’m exhausted and haven’t had the motivation to start a new project until the dust settles from the last one.

I’m a fan of Wander, and have followed these posts with great interest, but haven’t been able to successfully install it get myself. I’ll give it another try in late Feb early Mar.

Give Nextcloud AIO a shot. I installed bare metal the first time, but AIO has decreased my maintenance burden to next to nothing. Before that, it felt like every update would break my system. I’m a year or two into my transition from Linux nerd to self-hoster. I still fail at things on occasion, but I have learned a lot. I hope it goes as well or even better for you.

I’m not sure. I ended up with the eeros because of the mesh and the fact that the upstairs office always had weak signal. I don’t like them and I’ve been generally de-googling and de-amazoning my life. The self-built route appeals to me too. Ultimately, I’ll settle somewhere between off-the-shelf and DIY, but there’s no better way to learn that to do it the hard way from the ground up. In regards to actual hardware, is there a Lemmy community for honest reviews by real people?

I managed to get a workable solution for now, but if I get fiber in the Spring, I’ll be rebuilding everything with the things I’m learning now and I’ll probably want to use a nicer router.

Thanks this put me on a track to fixing my issues and learning something new. I cleaned up my DHCP, checked my incoming and outgoing ports in the firewall, and everything seems to be working as it is supposed to. The eeros don’t have a “true AP mode” from what I read online, but bridging them and turning off the wireless on the modem worked.

I saw this the last time you posted an update and am finally going to have some time to try it. I also gained some docker knowledge since then. Right now, it looks like a nice AllTrails replacement, and below the surface, I see a Strava killer developing!

Also, consider sharing to #bikenight on Mastadon. Lots of nerdy cyclists on there.

Thanks for giving me the push to try some more third party apps. I’ve been playing with docker for a few days now and am feeling far more comfortable than before. I still worry about mounting shares in the right places with the right permissions and the right way of handling that, but overall, this community’s encouragement helped me take my self hosting to the next level. Maybe I’m begintermediate now :-)

Thank you for the incredibly detailed and patient reply. I will try some additional applications like Jellyfin and Immich instead of the built in synology stuff. It was always my intention to have docker images running on a separate server but stress went up and free time went down and I settled for using the built in applications. Luckily, I havent significantly invested in video center as I just used it to preview files while sorting in DSM.

I had some issues with copying files over SMB. I can write fine, I can delete, but copying seems to fail. My guess is because the local user on my laptop is different than the user on the SMB share. In any case, I was using the file explorer in DSM in Firefox to sort through old media by hand. I’ll have to use NFS and continue to sort via Dolphin.

I’m glad to hear the situation isn’t as dire as I had initially imagined. Perhaps I’m a bit shell shocked from all the enshittification that I jumped to worst case scenarios.

This answers my question. I wasn’t sure if the server would have to download the whole file from the NAS prior to serving it.

I run my Nextcloud on Debian, ran Debian based distros for a few years, and I’ve done nfs on my synology with my laptop. I might be able to do it!

Wish me luck, and thanks for responding.

I’m ashamed to admit I totally forgot about ddwrt/openwrt. It’s been a decade or so since I messed with that. Good call.

Nextcloud was somewhat difficult for me the first time I installed it, though I did have a usable system in the end. Then I discovered Nextcloud AIO and haven’t had an issue since.