Yeah, I might end up getting one for that. My current TV doesn’t have ads, but does have enough smart features to have a Jellyfin app, so I’m good for now. But my SO wants a bigger TV, so that may end up being sooner than later.

Why would it? The PiHole would be on your local network, so it would never need to go past your router. So the request itself would be private, what matters is what you do with the response. Theoretically, the PiHole would only give responses for things it’ll block (usually directing it to localhost or something), and have no response for everything else (check your configs).

So if you get a response from the PiHole, you route the request locally, which does nothing. If you don’t get one, you’ll check the secondary DNS, which is provided by the VPN service.

You should certainly confirm this before completely trusting it, but it should work fine.

Exactly. Just like any other kind of proselytizing, it’s better to just live by example and answer questions as they come. For example:

• personal finance - manage finances properly, and people will notice that you’re not stressed about money
• religion/philosophy - live a worthwhile life and demonstrate the value it brings to your life
• products - use them and mention them when relevant (e.g. my coworker loves their Remarkable and shills it at every opportunity)

People aren’t going to change their behavior because you’re pushing something on them, they’ll change their behavior if they see something they want more than what they have. I think more people should self-host, but I don’t get anything from others switching, nor do I have much control over them deciding to switch.

Eh, I haven’t convinced anyone, but I have gotten questions from my brothers about it. They don’t come over often, but I’ve done a lot of work on my self-hosted setup, so I’ll probably show it off at our next reunion (next summer).

My brothers both want to host video, and they’ve asked about ripping DVDs/Blurays. I’ve now finished ripping my entire collection (took a few weeks), so now I’m more well-equipped to answer questions.

Yeah, I’d need to run cable if I moved my machines to a closet, and I’m putting that off. I do plan to do that though, so maybe someday. :)

I’m more interested in multi-bay enclosures, but as you said, the chipsets tend to be kinda crappy. And that’s what makes me hesitate to use these mini PCs, my use-case is for a NAS, but these enclosures are kind of expensive and seem to have pretty poor components.

So for now, I’m using larger cases to hold the drives. But it takes up a lot of desk space, so these mini PCs are very attractive, if I can get a compact external enclosure to work.

TerraMaster, Orico

I honestly have never used either of these, yet they show up at a lot of retailers.

ASUS is a bit sketchy these days IMO, so I try to avoid them.

I’ve heard good things about Proxmox, but I have no direct experience with it. That would be a separate box that manages the VMs and everything, and it has a remote GUI option (webpage I think?).

If you want something on an existing box, just use KVM directly, or a simple frontend like GNOME boxes. I don’t know about remote configuration, but once it’s set up, do you really need to check in on things remotely? KVM will do hardware acceleration (definitely CPU acceleration, GPU if you configure it properly), and it has no GUI by default.

You could set up a PiHole on your local network, and have the VPN’s DNS be secondary.

The thing is, I don’t know what “well known brands” are in that space. It’s not something I buy frequently.

Next time, check out Level1Techs on YouTube. Wendell reviews a lot of these devices, and he’ll give pretty good feedback on what’s legit and what’s not. Ho has reviewed MinisForum for years and has consistently recommended them. Just be careful, because he also reviews the more sketchy devices and sometimes recommends them (but with caveats), so don’t assume that because it is covered, that it’s legit.

Anyone have experience with external HDD enclosures? I currently have two 3.5" HDDs, and I’d like room for two or three more. Reliability is pretty important to me, so something that’ll cut out periodically isn’t going to work.

Which is really weird IMO.

If you want to run everything over a VPN, you’re going to have issues when the internet goes out. Use VPN as a fallback or to get around CGNAT, not as a primary way of routing everything.

Here’s my setup:

1. VPS runs WireGuard VPN and HAProxy forwards services through VPN to the relevant internal device
2. router runs DNS server and routes my domains to local addresses
3. TLS is handled on the device that serves the content for whatever service it is

So when I connect on my LAN, my router just points the domain to the machine running Jellyfin and I get all the goodness of TLS. When I connect outside my LAN, my VPS tunnels TLS through the WireGuard VPN to get around CGNAT and I get all the goodness of TLS. So it doesn’t matter where I connect, I use the same URL and get TLS.

My setup is pretty simple. I use static DNS on my router, which points my jellfin domain to the local address when on my LAN, and I set up DHCP to point my devices to use my router for DNS. It’s incredibly simple, so all I do is type in my jellyfin domain and it works optimally wherever I am.

I actually had my internet go out for a couple hours and we were able to watch our content just fine.

Yup, there’s a chance. If you get another or if anyone else is interested, please do your research first.

Mine worked completely fine, but I also did a fair amount of research before picking one up.

For DVDs, I used Handbrake initially, then switched to MakeMKV. For Bluray, I used MakeMKV and flashed my Bluray drive w/ Libredrive so it can rip UHD disks.

I have only done this on Linux, so I don’t know what this looks like for Windows, but it’s really quite smooth IMO.

price-per-unit-compute is really high

Well yeah, they’re optimized for storage. And if you’re starting from nothing, you’re going to need storage.

Synology is your budget home cloud, and it’s just good enough to handle basic cloud tasks and small-scale service hosting. If you grow out of it, you leave the Synology NAS for purely data storage, and add another box for heavier compute.

TrueNAS, on the other hand, is usually overkill for a home NAS setup because it’s designed for small-ish business use-cases, so it has a lot more CPU and RAM than you’d need when you only have a handful of users in a home setting. So it can probably handle any CPU workload you throw at it, within reason. It probably wouldn’t make a great compiling cluster, but it would do really well hosting things like NextCloud. If you’re looking for transcoding, you need to check the hardware and drivers on FreeBSD (maybe it’s not an issue, but it’s good to check first).

Do they have some kind of VPN or TURN system?

How would the router help with that? If you’re behind CGNAT, you’ll need something external regardless. If you’re not behind CGNAT, pretty much any router on the planet can do port fowarding, and many can handle a network-wide VPN if that’s what you’re after.

I’m behind CGNAT and I have a VPS that hosts my VPN and routes all traffic using HAProxy over the VPN to my internal devices, and my internal devices maintain a persistent connection to the VPN. It sounds complicated, but it’s really just two config files that I’d be happy to share if anyone is stuck. I do have a Mikrotik router, but it’s not needed for any of this, I only use it for static DNS routes so I don’t hit the WAN when accessing my services by their domain names (and VLAN for ZeroTrust shenanigans, but again, not needed at all). If I didn’t have that option, I could always just host a DNS server right on my NAS and do the same thing (any router can set the DNS server over DHCP).

How beefy? Multiple CPU?

No, I’m not that productive. I just want it to run builds of my Rust projects, and those can take some time. So 6-8 recent-ish cores is plenty. Right now I’m using a Ryzen 1700, and once I upgrade my PC, I’ll move my Ryzen 5600 to it. I want my builds to finish somewhat quickly without interfering with other services on the machine (e.g. if I’m running a build while we’re watching a movie, I don’t want the movie to stutter).

If my project grows (i.e. I get outside contributors), I’ll need higher specs.

And yeah, my preference for a single box is storage space. My NAS sits on my desk, and I’d really rather not get a rack setup. More machines means higher power and more space. I do have a couple of Raspberry Pis around for specific use-cases (e.g. one on my TV for RetroPie), but I’d really rather not have a handful of PCs running 24/7. Electricity is pretty cheap where I live, but even then, I’d rather not waste power just because I can get a good deal on servers. My single box uses something like 40-50W, and once I upgrade to my 5600, idle draw will drop another 10-20W (I have a 20-30W floor due to the drives).

Isn’t that basically just a commercial NAS? Go buy a Synology NAS, or get fancy w/ TrueNAS. You don’t need an entry-level enterprise-grade router at all, you can just plug the NAS in anywhere and you’re golden. You can usually install a few services like Plex/Jellyfin or HomeAssistant alongside the data storage if you like.

If that’s not going to work for you, you probably have a good idea of what will work for you. For me, a tiny x86 server isn’t going to cut it, because I want a beefier CPU to run CI/CD for my programming projects, so a beefier, modern CPU is quite valuable. That’s totally overkill if all you want is a simple streaming setup with 1-2 transcoded streams.

So I think there are two main markets here:

1. just give me something that works - these will flock to pre-configured solutions, like Synology or TrueNAS
2. I want something specific - they’ll DIY components together to build their own custom solution

The only other group I can think of is the group that can’t afford 1 and doesn’t know enough to do 2, but I really don’t think that’s a particularly big group, and they’d be better off reusing something they already have instead of getting some off-the-shelf solution.

I could absolutely be wrong here, that’s just my $0.02.

I don’t meet all of the items here (my homelab setup is still a WIP), but here’s basically what I have:

1. Cloudflare manages my domain and DNS, but nothing else; I only use them because they’re cheaper than my last registrar (Namecheap)
2. VPS at Hetzner acts as my edge - HAProxy forwards packets based on SNI over my WireGuard VPN to the relevant device on my network
3. I use Caddy on each device to handle TLS, and all services are inside docker with zero directly exposed ports
4. each service only has access to the files and other containers it needs to accomplish the task
5. my router is configured w/ static DNS, so all requests to services go to my domain name over TLS, but they don’t hit the WAN if I’m on my LAN

I don’t have continuous monitoring and alerting, mostly because the only people using my network are me, my SO, and my kids. I am planning on adding some alerting though, and I especially need to configure SMART reporting (had it configured at one time). So when I do that, I’ll add some dashboards for my various other services as well.

Some things I plan to add:

• backup and restore - I plan to use Backblaze, my main hurdle is that I don’t want to backup my large media files (movies and whatnot), and I haven’t put in the work to configure a service to handle backups; this is a top priority for me
• VLANs to separate devices - I want one network w/o internet access for my IP cameras, one for devices that need access to specific external sites (e.g. my smart TV, or a separate media device once I switch to a dumb TV), one for privileged services (e.g. my NAS, which will talk to multiple VLANs), and one for guests
• continuous monitoring and alerting - each device would report to a service on my VPS (or maybe a separate VPS)
• home automation system - my focus has been on replacing external services, and I don’t use an automation system yet, so I haven’t gotten to this; but I’m planning on using HomeAssistant as I roll out my other home monitoring stuff

So I’m probably halfway to what the OP has laid out. I don’t do this type of thing at work, and I don’t share anything outside my network, so I’m in no hurry. However, I do need to handle backups and SMART monitoring on my NAS ASAP, since those are the last glaring gaps in my setup.

I’d appreciate it as well.

I have a somewhat sophisticated setup as well that doesn’t use Cloudflare (aside from domain and DNS hosting) or AWS (I use a simple Hetzner VPS). I’m considering using Backblaze for backups, and everything else is self-hosted.

One of my main goals is that every responsibility should be modular and have a compatible drop-in replacement. I’m very interested to read what others with a similar perspective have done.