This is very impressive and I’m highly likely to give it a whirl. My question is, though: would it be something that my very non-tech savvy wife could use?

Eg. I’m thinking setup the app on her phone with a default location and when she asks me for a file I can just tell her that I’ve “put it in the app”, and she’ll be able to easily retrieve it. Also same thing but vice versa, though the video seems to cover that via the Android share menu…

Again, super impressive. Good job!

I used to work at a games studio that would get these delivered fairly regularly, usually paired with a particular motherboard and presumably a custom BIOS.

I think we were technically supposed to return them but the manufacturers never enforced it, so once the chip was actually released to the public - and assuming the sample was stable enough for general use - the PC would rotate into normal stock and eventually get sold for cheap to staff or end up in the spare parts bin.

While it was cool at first to get pre-production chips before anyone else, it became pretty mundane and I’m not at all surprised to see them out in the wild decades later. Interesting piece of history though!

My workplace ran off DL360s (the 1U variant of this) of various generations for 20 or 30 years. I remember getting the first G5 in and being really impressed by the way the components all slotted in so easily and pretty much everything was hot-swappable. And the no-nut rail system was a revalation.

They were great systems for their time but that power consumption is crazy by today’s standards!

As for feedback, you have a very confusing sentence about 2.5" and 3.5" drives being the same size. Took me far too long to realise you meant capacity and not physical dimensions!

Just a PSA for anybody reading the thread, though it doesn’t really help with the question at hand… On the very slim chance that your workplace uses Bitwarden Enterprise it’s worth knowing that every licensed user gets a free family plan that can be tied to an existing personal account, provided it’s hosted in the same region.

We do use it but very few of our own users are even aware of the perk so I like to spread it around when I get the chance!

It’s an 8 bay unit with six drives that are a mix of WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf, all NAS grade drives, basically. The other two slots have SSDs for hosting the aforementioned containers and VMs.

The largest drives I have are 4TB though, so maybe the larger capacity ones are louder? I also ran the fan profile in whatever the quietest setting is.

I am a tech oriented person, I work in IT, and a Syno ticks the boxes in many respects.

• Low power draw. Power efficiency is very important to me, especially for something that runs 24/7. I don’t know how efficient self-build options are these days, but 10 years ago I couldn’t get close to the efficiency of a good NAS.

• Set and forget. I maintain enough systems at work so I don’t really want to spend all of my free time maintaining my own. A Syno “just works”, it can run for months or years without a reboot (and when it does need one, it does it by itself overnight), and I can easily upgrade or swap a dead drive in a couple of minutes. When the entire NAS dies I can stick the drives in a new one and be up and running almost instantly.

• Size and noise. I don’t have a massive house, so I need something that can sit on a shelf and be unobtrusive. In our last house it was literally sat in the living room, spinning drives constantly, and nobody was bothered by it.

The Syno I have is plenty good enough to run a bunch of Docker containers and a few VMs for all of my self hosted stuff, and it just does the job efficiently, quietly, and without complaining or needing constant maintenance.

I don’t like this creep towards requiring branded drives and memory, though I’m pretty sure it’s not legal in the EU. Regardless there are ways around it.

If you own a domain, which you do, you can get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt using a DNS challenge. Most (all?) popular reverse proxies can do this either natively or via an addon/module, you just need to use a supported DNS provider.

Libraries were simple enough, sure, but have you delved into the full settings? Trying to figure out the correct settings for QuickSync hardware acceleration was a mission in and of itself and there’s very little guidance on what any of the options mean or do. I don’t have the container running right now or I’d provide examples, but In Plex it’s a single checkbox.

I’m sure Jellyfin will get there and it’s a cool project, but it’s fairly obvious that it’s written by hobbyists, for hobbyists. Meanwhile Plex excels at just working straight out of the box.

Judging by the rest of the thread I’m going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:

I’m sure I’ll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just… wasn’t great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there’s a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.

Yes, it sucks that they’re removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there’s a significant chunk of users who don’t know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren’t going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.

I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it’s honestly paid for itself many times over, and I’ve been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn’t pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It’s a shame they’ve had to do it at all, but I don’t begrudge them for it.

Good shout. I’ve just recently moved from Pihole to Adguard Home myself, complete with Hagezi lists. I consider myself very tech savvy and I work in the field but AGH suits my needs much better.

One example is wildcard DNS to route all of my hosted services via reverse proxy. In Pihole I had to make weird blocking rules to make this work, but AGH has specific settings for it. It also supports DoH out of the box, whereas Pihole needs non-standard faffery to get it working.

Very pleased with AGH in general.

HACS installs community integrations whereas addons are like external programs that hook in HA. You can do the same thing with HA in Docker by installing the addon containers separately and then hooking them in manually but HA OS makes it much simpler.

For example I’m running the Mosquitto broker, Z2M, a Visual Studio Code server, diyhue, and Music Assistant as addons.

Docco page about it is here: https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/

If you want to give Home Assistant a try like others are suggesting, save yourself some time and hassle and install Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine. While you absolutely can run it in Docker you lose out on some neat quality of life improvements like add ons (which, funnily enough, are Docker containers pre-configured to hook in HA).

Exactly this. Also it annoys me that Namecheap tries to automatically “top up funds” over a month before renewals are due. I think they’ve always done it but it wound me up enough this year to move to Cloudflare.

Yeah, everything that’s already been said, except that I specifically chose an off-the-shelf Synology NAS with Docker support to run my core setup for this exact reason. It needs a reboot maybe once or twice a year for critical updates but is otherwise rock solid.

I have since added a small N100 box for things that need a little extra grunt (Plex mainly) but I run Ubuntu Server LTS with Docker on that and do maintenance on it about as often as I reboot the NAS.

Just to add to the info so far: while you’re spending the effort doing a migration it’s worth going the extra few steps and moving to their Docker image. It’ll make any future server moves a doddle, not to mention updates etc.

Isn’t that exactly why so many of these company and app names have missing vowels? Because they can’t trademark a word but they can trademark a collection of letters that sounds like a word when spoken aloud. It’s really dumb.

Third Plex. It’s a bit baffling as to why it’s got such a bad rep recently because it performs its core function of serving media incredibly well, is super easy (barely an inconvenience) to setup, and there’s apps for every conceivable platform.

Yes there’s a few features locked behind a subscription (though they still sell lifetime passes, often at good discounts) and they’re trying to “legitimize” with their ad-backed streaming thing, but the core product of local media server is still very much there, and free, and isn’t going anywhere.

Webtop. Lightweight Linux VMs but in Docker.

That’s… A lot of storage. I’d say your options are, in no particular order:

• buy a 12 bay NAS.
• expansion unit. Do it as a separate volume and shuffle cold data onto there.
• upgrade the drives.

Failing that you could just have a bit of a purge? If not straight deleting stuff, move things onto an external drive.

You could also try deduping. There’s a script that’ll add any drive to the internal “supported” list and also enable dedupe on mechanical drives. The savings were minimal on mine but you might have more luck. https://github.com/007revad/Synology_enable_Deduplication

2. Sure but there’s no reason to openly advertise that yours has open services behind it.
3. Absolutely. There are countries that I’m never going to travel there so why would I need to allow access to my stuff from there? If you think it’s nonsense then don’t use it, but you do you and I’ll do me.
4. See point 3.

We all need to decide for ourselves what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not and then implement appropriate measures to suit. I’m not sure why you’re arguing with me over how I setup my own services for my own use.