I have been constantly asking myself why there isn’t something like this, and just wondering if maybe I was missing something about the seeming immense complexity of doing this on a small scale.

Now there is something like this.

I don’t love PHP, but I also don’t love having dozens of separate passwords, keys, certificates and other nonsense to keep track of like I’m doing now. I don’t mind using PHP to get around that if I can.

Nextcloud file sync is a convenient centralized solution but it’s not designed for performance. Nothing about Nextcloud is designed for performance. It’s an “everything and the kitchen sink” multi-user cloud solution. That is nice for a lot of reasons. Nextcloud Sync is essentially a drop-in replacement for Google Drive or OneDrive or Dropbox that multiple people can use and that’s awesome. It works the same way as those tools, which is a blessing and a curse.

Nextcloud is for the same role you SAY you want, “All I want is a simple file sync setup like onedrive but without the microsoft.” That’s what it is. But I don’t think it’s what you’re actually asking for, and it’s not supposed to be. It has its role, and it’s good at that role. But I don’t think you actually want what you say you want, because in the details you’re describing something totally different.

If you want performance sync for just files, SyncThing is made for this. It has better conflict resolution. It has better decentralized connectivity, it doesn’t need the public IP server. It uses a very different approach to configuration. Its configuration is front-loaded, it takes a fair bit of work to get things talking to each other. It’s not suitable for the same things Nextcloud Sync is. But once you have it set up it’s rock solid reliable and blazing fast.

Personally I use both SyncThing and NextCloud Sync. I use them for different purposes, in different situations. NextCloud Sync takes care of my Windows documents and pictures, I use it to share photos with my family. I use it to sync one of the factors for my password vault. It works fine for this.

I also use SyncThing for large data sets that require higher performance. I have almost 400 GB of shared program data, (and game data/saved games), some of which I sync with SyncThing to multiple workstations in different parts of the country. It can deal with complex simultaneous usage that sometimes causes conflicts. It supports fine tuning sync strategies and files to ignore using configuration dotfiles. It’s a great tool. I couldn’t live without it. But I use both. They both have their place.

Nextcloud Notes or Joplin (nevermind all the other features Nextcloud provides) tick most of your boxes. They’re more productivity focused than privacy focused, it doesn’t do “zero knowledge” encryption the way you’re describing, but I don’t really understand the point of that when you’re self-hosting and the server host belongs to you anyway. The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be “real time” enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.

fail2ban is mandatory equipment for any ssh server accessible to the public especially on its default port. It’s highly configurable, but the default settings will do fine at making it statistically impossible for any user or password to be brute forced.

Back in the old days, a lot of people went through the “Linux From Scratch” process to literally build up the OS from absolute scratch. No distro, no packages, no precompiled kernel, nothing but the raw ingredients. It is a good way to really understand the fundamentals not just of Linux but of the whole computing paradigm our systems are built on. It is not as hard as it probably sounds, but it’s an investment. It takes some time and you need to put your brain in gear to actually learn.

Yeah, that’s all it is. Calibre Portable. In a folder on Nextcloud.

Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.

All the choices for “ebook stores” and ereader ecosystems are proprietary vendor-locked services with no self-hosting options. While Calibre is primarily a “local” tool it is a true alternative to all these proprietary services and I think it’s at least in the spirit of self hosting, if not strictly the letter.

For what it’s worth, I self-host a Calibre Portable library on Nextcloud, which enables me to access all my ebooks anywhere, and to upload new ones to my ereader from anywhere, as long as I have access to my Nextcloud. And I also share the same library through Calibre Web for when I don’t. I retain control of all my books, I remove all the DRM and convert them to epub. Calibre isn’t a hosted service on its own, but it fits nicely into the self-hosting ecosystem, and for that I am grateful.

Nextcloud AIO via docker is super simple and has clear instructions.

Install docker through whatever tools Fedora has to install packages/rpms/whatever. Then follow steps 2, 3 and 4 at least. 5 if you need it.

Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.

Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.

Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.

I don’t use arch (shocking I know), so I can’t help you directly, but I will recommend instead that you invest some effort in learning about the Linux networking stack. It’s very powerful and can be very complicated, but usually the only thing you need to do to get it working is something very simple. Basically all distributions use the Linux kernel networking stack under the hood, usually with only a few user-interface sprinkles on top. Sometimes that can get in your way, but usually it doesn’t. All the basic tools you need should be accessible through the terminal.

The most basic things you can check are ip a which should show a bunch of interfaces, the one you’re particularly interested in is obviously the wired interface. This will tell you if it’s considered <UP> and whether it has an “inet” address (among other things). If it doesn’t, you need to get the interface configured and brought up somehow, usually by a DHCP broadcast. Network Manager is usually responsible for this in most distributions. Arch seems to have some information here.

If those things look good, next step is to look at ip r which will tell you the routes available. The most important one is the default route, this will tell your system where to send traffic when it isn’t local, and usually sends traffic to an internet gateway, which should’ve been provided by DHCP and is usually your router, but could also be a firewall, the internet modem itself, or something else. The route will tell it what IP the gateway has, and what interface it can be found on.

Assuming that looks good, see if you can ping the gateway IP. If your packets aren’t getting through (and back) that suggests something is wrong on a lower level, the kernel firewall might be dropping the packets (configuring the kernel firewall is a whole topic in itself) or one of the IPs is not valid and is not registered properly on the network, or the physical (wiring) or the hardware on either end is not functioning or misconfigured.

If you can ping the gateway successfully, the next step is to see if you can ping the internet itself by IP. ping 8.8.8.8 will reach out to one of Google’s DNS servers which is what I usually use as a quick test. If you get no response then it’s either not forwarding your traffic out to the internet, or the internet is not able to get responses back to it, and ultimately back to you. Or Google is down, but that’s not very likely.

If you’ve gotten this far and 8.8.8.8 is responding to you, then congratulations, you HAVE internet access! What you might NOT have is DNS service, which is what translates names into IP addresses. A quick test for DNS is simply to ping google.com and like before, if that fails either your DNS is broken or Google is down, which is still not very likely.

Hopefully this will help you at least start to find out where things are going wrong. From there, hopefully you can at least steer your investigation in the right direction. Good luck!

That means Bedrock unless you use the Geyser tool someone else mentioned to allow Bedrock to connect to Java but I have no experience with that and am not sure how reliably it would actually work as they are quite different versions of the game. I have no idea how it would handle mods that are not supported by the Bedrock clients for example.

First you need to understand the difference between Bedrock edition and Java edition. Bedrock is for consoles, phones and Windows, it’s the default version that Microsoft pushes now. It’s not compatible with Java clients or Java servers. So if you’re planning to have the kid play on Switch or something like that, it’s not going to work.

Assuming you’re clear on all that, you have a few options for Java servers, you can run a plain jane vanilla server (the one that Microsoft provides) fairly easily but it has some limitations, and it’s not the most manageable solution. Modded servers are much more capable and flexible but also can be a little more complex in some cases. Overall, I’ve found Purpur the easiest and most sustainable choice at least a few years ago when I was looking for the right choice it seemed like most people agreed this was the best option. Fabric is another great option, especially if you want to use mods! Fabric has a huge modding ecosystem, second only to Forge.

However I also need to mention that I’ve got a heavily modded Forge-based server running right now and I really didn’t find that any more difficult to set up than any of the others. Even though people usually complain about forge being “difficult” somehow. So take that for what it’s worth. I think it doesn’t really matter THAT much which server software you use unless you have specific requirements around things like mods, spawn protection, and other kinds of configuration that are probably most useful for large, public servers.

If you do want to run a bedrock server, it gets a little more complicated as you might have to break some things out of the walled garden. I haven’t had a lot of success with that but I understand it is possible.

While it sounds a bit hacky, I think this is an underrated solution. It’s actually quite a clever way to bypass the whole problem. Physics is your enemy here, not economics.

This is kind of like trying to find an electric motor with the highest efficiency and torque at 1 RPM. While it’s not theoretically impossible, it’s not just a matter of price or design, it’s a matter of asking the equipment to do something it’s simply not good at, while you want to do it really well. It can’t, certainly not affordably or without significant compromises in other areas. In the case of a motor, you’d be better off letting the motor spin at its much higher optimal RPM and gear it down, even though there will be a little loss in the geartrain it’s still a much better solution overall and that’s why essentially every low speed motor is designed this way.

In the case of an ammeter, it seems totally reasonable to bring it up to a more ideal operating range by adding a constant artificial load. In fact the high precision/low range multimeters and oscilloscopes are usually internally doing almost exactly the same thing with their probes, just in a somewhat more complex way behind the scenes.

I still use Nextcloud for syncing documents and other basic stuff that is relatively simple. But I started getting glacial sync times consuming large amounts of CPU and running into lots of conflicts as more and more got added. For higher performance, more demanding sync tasks involving huge numbers of files, large file sizes, and rapid changes, I’ve started using Syncthing and am much, much happier with it. Nextcloud sync seems to be sort of a jack of all trades, master of none, kind of thing. Whereas Syncthing is a one trick pony that does that trick very, very well.

I feel like you are the one who is confusing a “NAS device” or “NAS appliance” as in a device that is specifically designed and primarily intended to provide NAS services (ie, its main attribute is large disks, with little design weight given to processing, RAM or other components except to the extent needed to provide NAS service), and a NAS service itself, which can be provided by any generic device simultaneously capable of both storage and networking, although often quite poorly.

You are asserting the term “NAS” in this thread refers exclusively to the former device/appliance, everyone else is assuming the latter. In fact, both are correct and context suggests the latter, although I’m sure given your behavior in this thread you will promptly reply that only your interpretation is correct and everyone else is wrong. If you want to assert that, go right ahead and make yourself look foolish.

You can also automate this with autossh which is designed for exactly this kind of persistent tunnel. Although a simple “while” loop might seem like the intuitive way to keep it running, autossh is very reliable and takes care of all the corner cases for you.

That’s what LCARS means, it’s the name of the computer console in Star Trek. In the show, it stands for “Library Computer Access and Retrieval System” although it’s often used for stuff other than the library computer too.

Never had a single functional problem with Nextcloud, other than the fact that it’s oppressively slow with the amount of files I’ve shoved into it. Mind you I also don’t use MySQL/MariaDB which I consider a garbage-tier DB. Despite Postgres not being the “Recommended DB” for Nextcloud it works perfectly for me. Maybe that’s the difference.

Nah, I wanted to love NixOS, and granted it seems like a perfect fit for my recommendation, but a bunch of things about it rub me the wrong way. It’s just not for me. I’ve always been most comfortable with Debian and that’s what my setup script is designed for. Lots of apt.