Look at restic and/or borg first. Iff you have specific needs that they don’t address, then look at other things (including reviewing your requirements: chances are you are doing something wrong in that case).

If it’s for backup, zfs and btrfs can send incremental diffs quite efficiently (but of course you’ll have to use those on both ends).

Otherwise, both NFS and SMB are certainly viable.

I tried both but TBH I ended up just using SSHFS because I don’t care about becoming and NFS/SMB admin.

NFS and SMB are easy enough to setup, but then when you try to do user-level authentication… they aren’t as easy anymore.

Since I’m already managing SSH keys all over my machines, I feel like SSHFS makes much more sense for me.

AFAIU bluehost does not support the acme protocol, so you’ll either have to manage your certificate manually or (recommended!) move to a different dns registrar.

If you are wondering which provider you should switch to, basically all the serious ones will work… IDK if this is relevant for nginx, but here’s a list of the supported ones for the client I use https://go-acme.github.io/lego/dns/

If you are unsure and want to experiment before touching your current setup, you could register a new cheap domain (less than 1$, see https://tld-list.com/), use it for your tests, and then not renew it.

Not sure if others already said this (I seem to see mostly comments explaining how to do it, but didn’t read them all), but, while it’s certainly feasible, you may not want to do that.

A router is the cornerstone of your network (if it goes down, so does the network) and if you are a self-hoster you’ll probably fiddle endlessly with your home server, and of course break it from time to time… the two things just don’t go well together.

Personally, I’d recommend getting some second-hand router appliance that can run openwrt and use that (make sure to check the flashing procedure before deciding what to buy - some are easier than others). Or you could get a dedicated x86 machine… probably overkill though.

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For those kind of issues I’d recommend snapshots instead of backups

I’d say a good middle ground could be making that stuff only visible from your mom’s user (or even setting up a completely separate server)?

It depends on what YOU want to do, really… personally, I would be ok hosting religious nonsense if asked, as long as it’s not generally available in kids’ accounts and stuff (also, porn), but I would come clean and outright refuse if it was neonazi,racist and/or conspiracy stuff. It depends on where you decide to draw the line.

BTW: there’s also the passive/aggressive, cowardly option of sayng “I’ll rip them when I have time” and then sequester all the DVDs and only ever find the time to rip the ones you don’t mind

man this is getting real popular (kinda like “why not both?” a while ago)

IMHO Ansible isn’t much different than a bash script… it has the advantage of being “declarative” (in quotes because it’s not actually declarative at all: it just has higher-level abstractions that aggregate common sysadmin CLI operations/patterns in “declarative-sounding” tasks), but it also has the disadvantage of becoming extremely convoluted the moment you need any custom logic whatsoever (yes, you can write a python extension, but you can do the same starting with a bash script too).

Also, you basically can’t use ansible unless your target system has python (technically you can, but in practice all the useful stuff needs python), meaning that if you use a distro that doesn’t come with python per default (eg. alpine) you’ll have to manually install it or write some sort of pythonless prelude to your ansible script that does that for you, and that if your target can’t run python (eg. openwrt on your very much resource-constrained wifi APs) ansible is out of the question (technically you can use it, but it’s much more complex than not using it).

My two cents about configuration management for the homelab:

• whatever you use, make sure it’s something you re-read often: it will become complex and you will forget everything about it
• keep in mind that you’ll have to re-test/update your scripts at least everytime your distro version changes (eg. if you upgrade from ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04) and ideally every time one of your configured services changes (because the format of their config files may in theory change too)
• if you can cope with a rolling-style distro, take a look at nix instead of “traditional” configuration management: nixos configuration is declarative and (in theory) guarantees that you won’t ever need to recheck or update your config when updating (in reality, you’ll occasionally have to edit your config, but the OS will tell you so it’s not like you can unknowingly break stuff).

BTW, nixos is also not beginner-friendly in the least and all in all badly documented (documentation is extensive but unfriendly and somewhat disorganized)… good luck with that :)

With the very limited number of drives one may use at home, just get the cheapest ones (*), use RAID and assume some drive may fail.

(*) whose performances meet your needs and from reputable enough sources

You can look at the backblaze stats if you like stats, but if you have ten drives 3% failure rate is exactly the same as 1% or .5% (they all just mean “use RAID and assume some drive may fail”).

Also, IDK how good a reliabiliy predictor the manufacturer would be (as in every sector, reliabiliy varies from model to model), plus you would basically go by price even if you need a quantity of drives so great that stats make sense on them (wouldn’t backblaze use 100% one manufacturer otherwise?)

One thing you can try doing before throwing away the router (which is probably the exact same one your neighbor use) is checking the channel situation in your condo with an app like WiFiAnalyzer and also try moving the router around (some spots are better than others - and hi up is usually better)

That said, ISP routers are often terrible.

In your shoes, I’d put the money in a proper case (eg. fractal node 304/804) rather than an USB enclosure (no, you don’t need hot-swap for a home server): besides the performance issues of USB (which may or may not be an actual issue depending on what you plan to do with the NAS), having a single box makes everything simpler.

For components to fill up the case, you can look at second-hand computers on ebay.

As for the OS, if you are not familiar with linux you may want to look at truenas scale (which is linux).

If you never built a PC, you’ll have to do a lot of research not to buy incompatible components… otherwise you could rely on a friend/shop or stick to sinology and similar.

Well… if one must believe their own logo, (see https://sata-io.org/) “SATA” shoud actually be expanded to “Serial ATA” :)

Acronyms of acronyms may not be super-common, but they do exist: eg. Cisco has a network protocol they call “PVST”, which means “Per-VLAN Spanning Tree”, where “VLAN” is “Virtual Local Area Network” (or “Virtual LAN”; LAN is another of those acronyms that is mostly regarded as being its own word).

In open source, there’s a long tradition of recursive acronyms: eg. “Linux” means “Linux is not Unix”, which you can’t be expanded (in finite time) according to your rule :)

I love you bot, but… PCIe is just “PCI express”, NAS nowadays means more “home server” than network-attached storage, and no one even ever knew what SATA is supposed to expand to.

There are acronyms that are shortened versions of meaningful names and then there are acronyms that are actual meaningful names for which some meaningless (and quickly forgotten) expansion happens to exist.

I use mailbox.org - they recently changed the pricing and now you’ll have to pay a minimum of €3/month to have your custom domain.

IIUC apple has an email offer at $1/month that allows a (or many? idk) custom domain and wildcard mailbox.

Honestly, I am considering doing the opposite and starting to self host my email… I loathe comparing the differences between various plans/tiers of the various providers and with commercial email one is bound to do that once in a while (plus €3/month is kinda steep… I mean… not that it’s a very high price per se, but I pay some €6/year for a certified email mailbox and it’s kinda strange to pay much more for a “normal” one)

I got an eaton 5e…

Same here and no complains, except I shouldn’t have bought the big one with the fan: when it turns on it’s really noisy and for some reason it needs to blow air for a long time after the tiniest irregularity in the grid.