It might be a dumb question, but how does it have it’s own OS like a NAS, or is it basically a box attached to the host and everything is done via software? I encountered some confusion between enclosures, DAS, USB array and some of the other terms I was seeing.

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.

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.

I’m no expert. I want to include that disclaimer up front.

Nextcloud with block storage on btrfs with snapshots seems like it could work for you. No idea about VFS though. I’ll leave that question for someone more knowledgeable. The “drive” portion of Nextcloud is quite decent. I regularly use it to pass large files between my phone (Android), laptop (Linux) and gaming desktop (Windows).

This appears to be what I’ve been looking for. I can’t wait to try it. Thanks for sharing.

You mean after the price hike they also hiked the number of ads? I canceled when they hiked the price and managed to get it down to the old price a few months later, so I renewed for the personal heatmap. Looks like I’m definitely canceling again. I doubt they’ll give me the price break twice anyway.

Baking ads into a timeline like Strava and some other apps do has to be the worst app trend ever.

I’ve never been able to fully transition away from the proprietary TickTick tasks. Nothing seems to have the features I’m accustomed too. Then again, I’m on a dysfunctional task non-management spree right now, so maybe when I get my shit together I’ll try again. For context, I use a modified version of the GTD strategy to keep track of my todos.

Before TickTick I used Astrid. When Astrid tasks was bought and killed by Yahoo, I thought they were over, although it seems there is a fork https://github.com/tasks/tasks (GPL 3.0) that also syncs with tasks.org. I haven’t done thorough testing yet to see what kind of issues I would have using this new Astrid and Nextcloud, but this is the best open solution I’ve been able to come up with and its been on my project shelf for over a year waiting to be tested.

For calendar, nextcloud synced with Thunderbird and a proprietary phone app (I know… I know) seems to work well for me. My partner uses icloud and it generally interoperates fine. I even have a raspberry pi in the living room that pulls in everyone’s calendar and overlays them as a “family calendar”

I chose Nextcloud as my first project because I had an interest in the project for a while. I did an old fashioned install which I later rebuilt with docker. I learned a lot doing it manually twice first. I echo the others. Find a project you like, preferably with its own community so you can ask for help when you inevitably mess something up.

That was fascinating. Thank you for sharing. I’m still early on my self-hosting journey, but a year or two ago I would have understood next to nothing of that. :D

That was a perfect one sentence summary of the article!

Its amazing some of the things people come up with like gathering intel on what a computer is doing via power draw changes, monitoring an air-gapped computers electromagnetic fields, or in this case “cryogenically” freezing ram with compressed air.