skybox

joined 1 year ago
 

I'm working on starting up my first home server which I'm trying to make relatively foolproof and easily recoverable. What is some common maintenance people do to avoid dire problems, including those that accumulate over time, and what are ways to recover a server when issues pop up?

At first, I figured I'd just use debian with some kind of snapshot system and monitor changelogs to update manually when needed, but then I started hearing that immutable distros like microOS and coreOS have some benefits in terms of long term "os drift", security, and recovering from botched updates or conflicts? I don't even know if I'm going to install any native packages, I'm pretty certain every service I want to run has a docker image already, so does it matter? I should also mention, I'm going to use this as a file server with snapraid, so I'm trying to figure out if there will be conflicts to look out for there or with hardware acceleration for video transcoding.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Became? ๐Ÿค”

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago

After getting burnt on the unRAID license change and the restriction on security updates, I figured there had to be a simple os that I can essentially set, forget, and easily update when I need, which also uses SnapRAID. I might just try this out.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 6 points 4 months ago

Okay yeah that's very true the proctoring systems suck entire ass.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 6 points 4 months ago

I do love open source, but hearing "Moodle" aged me like a decade lmao. Also nextcloud for everything? I guess having every tool you need centralized makes sense but I do wonder how well it scales across tens of thousands of people.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I really don't get the Chromebook complaint. It just needs to browse the internet, and a Chromebook is damn solid at that at a super reasonable price and are rugged as hell. Yeah I wish schools didn't hook into the g suite but like what, you want em on a windows machine to do the same things as on chrome os?

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago

This and grapheneos were the two big reasons I got a pixel 8 after I broke my 5 on a small drop. The third was I got it for basically perfect condition for $350 on ebay which is so baller.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago

Oh my god finally found exactly the kinda thing I wanted with even more than I bargained for.

Yeah UI could use a tiny bit of polishing but it's still very fluid, damn.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

HAHA I wonder how many people do this. Does sound kind of useful.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah this honestly makes me hesitant to download idk why there are so many data sharing permissions. Maybe they're default?

 

I'm in the middle of sending out applications and considering all the things I should refresh on. Does anyone have some good resources or practices they run through to get refreshed or otherwise prepared for technical and skill/personal interviews?

Ex. Sites, blogs, yt videos to refresh on data structures and algorithms. Checklist of things to look for when researching companies. Questions to ask recruiters during an interview. etc.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I haven't looked very hard so there could be backup services I'm missing. So far I've found restic/autorestic and duplicati, but I'm not sure what their differences in purposes are or pros/cons between them.

Also I've heard Unraid has a flexible storage solution which would be nice as I would like to just upgrade as I go instead of planning substantial disk upgrades, but are there also solutions for that on custom built systems instead of SHR?

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My parents won't necessarily be using the NAS, I'd just be using some kind of system (maybe even just a raspi) as a remote backup solution with a wireguard tunnel to my local NAS, but if a drive fails, I'd be about 700 miles away to manage it.

If it was a perfect world, I'd like to just ship a new drive to my parents and tell them to unplug the failing one and plug in the new one, then manage the rest automatically/myself remotely, but I assume that's a pipe dream.

[โ€“] skybox@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The thing that attracted me most to Synology is that they have pretty braindead simple software, I assume their systems have decent power management given the low hardware specs, and Hybrid Backup, Snapshot Replication, and Active Backup for Business seem to be a solid set of remote backup options which I couldn't find simple, non-proprietary alternatives for. Plus, it would be nice to have a NUC or Optiplex separate since I don't know if running a NAS off them would be the best idea but they're also cheap and have great power management (I think I saw a 200W 80+ platinum PSU in an optiplex with a i5-7500, which seems like a great value alone). Ultimately I'm just not sure if there's a way to combine the pros of each of those solutions together to avoid the annoyances of maintaining two systems and trusting Synology's hardware and software to keep my system running smooth long-term.

Also honestly I just picked RAID 6 cause I heard most people prefer to rely on RAID levels that tolerate more than one disk failure. Is SHR any good even though it's proprietary?

 

Hey all, I've been doing a bunch of research on selfhosting the last few weeks as I'd love to lean on more open source projects for my daily productivity & entertainment. My main goal is to backup all my personal documents, photos, and videos (around 1tb so far over ~5 years, so not too demanding) and host a few services to access files on local storage (Immich, Jellyfin) and personal (paperless-ngx, homeassistant, morss). Although I'm not afraid to mess around learning Docker, I'd like to prioritize low maintenance in balance with relatively low long-term cost so that I don't run into an issue that takes more than a day to restore access to my files/backups. I'd rather save that time for the fun stuff, like endlessly configuring HA automations.

All that said, I figure a decent solution would be to run a local NAS in RAID 6 with a cold storage HDD to swap whenever I transfer a bunch of files from my camera for local backup, and a remote backup at either my parents' home or maybe eventually on another friend's NAS. The main thing I'm wondering right now is if a prebuilt NAS (Synology, Asustor, etc.) is worth it in comparison to a custom built system for simple maintenance, reliable and low-bandwidth remote backup and recovery, and solid file sharing options for friends and family? I've heard SFTPGo is a great project for file transfers if going custom built, so I'm not completely worried about the last point, but it'd still be a nice bonus to not have to worry about another service.

My greatest fear is having to explain to my parents what a terminal is, so I'd like something reliable with a good price which I can hopefully maintain without crossing that bridge. I know most prebuilt NAS systems aren't as cost effective or flexible for hosting a bunch of services also, so if I did go with a prebuilt, I would probably pick up a micro PC like a NUC or an old Dell Optiplex to network with the NAS for Immich, and maybe use some internal storage to keep some movies to stream with Jellyfin (unless there's a limitation I'm not considering). Any advice?

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