I have 2 questions:

Do I understand the colors correctly in that /home is deprecated and shouldn’t be used? What’s the alternative in that case?

Where would you guys put configuration files for services? /srv seems like an adequate directory

I found it a pain in the ass to remove amazon drm ebooks. What worked for one book suddenly didn’t for the next.

Whenever possible I try to avoid them for that reason

Honestly, what else would it be? Text takes ridiculously little storage compared to a single picture of a decent resolution.

Depends I guess. For me the biggest concern when I bought my Synology was simplicity of usage and idle power consumption which is much lower than I could get with one of the older computers I have lying around.

I am currently using 2 16TB drives in Raid 1 and was planning to move to Raid 5 (or maybe it was 6) if I need more storage by adding a 3rd drive.

What would you recommend instead?

I just wished they were more relevant in german politics.

It’s the typical dilemma. Vote for a party you know won’t get enough votes to do something or vote for the least bad of the established parties.

Well, theoretically yes but it doesn’t continuously send data and both WiFi and Zigbee also allow for operation on various channels. Does your neighbors WiFi interfere with yours?

Also, most WiFi devices now support 5GHz WiFi anyway so it’s even less of an issue anymore. The bigger problem would probably be WiFi interfering with ZigBee. But again, that can be resolved by changing the channels.

Isn’t Zigbee always on 2.4GHz regardless of country? Trying to shift the frequency to 915MHz for all devices sounds like a lot of work with questionable benefit

That’s a good point. Another one I have is sort of failure tolerance. I used to have a really unreliable router which would often crash and could only be reset using a full power reset. While it was in this state, wifi obviously stopped working but my zigbee devices where still available. I used to have a zigbee button linked to a smart plug for toggling my router off and on again.

This shouldn’t be a concern for most people obviously but I wanted to share my experience.

Another point I want to mention is that zigbee works at 2.4Ghz just like basic wifi so they can still interfere with each other.

Zwave on the other hand uses another frequency (I think it was around 860MHz) but is more expensive.

Performance is good and streaming works well. Not a fan of the webinterface personally but there are client programs available for all platforms since navidrome exposes the subsonic api.

Personally I use sonix on windows and linux as well as symfonium (paid but really great app) on android.

The only thing I am missing from it is better user management so that I can restrict specific users from accessing parts of my library.

Regarding access from outside my network I specifically wanted to avoid needing to be connected to a VPN so that’s why I use a cloudflare tunnel. Since my upload rate is not very good I have a Pi-Hole DNS server at home so that queries to my domain while in the home network don’t need to leave my network.

+1 for navidrome.

I’m also using that and have it exposed to the web using a cloudflare tunnel. What I didn’t like in the beginning but really appreciate now is that the service itself doesn’t have a lot of permissions and cannot delete files or change their metadata. I’m hosting it in a docker container and everything except the config file is mounted read-only.

I’m not sure how relevant that is but it gives me more peace of mind exposing it publicly.

Running a webserver is not the same as hosting a service. For the software examples requested by OP, an ESP32 is useless

I think the Pi 4 was the first Pi with gigabit ethernet. All the Pi’s before that were limited to 100Mbit. For that reason, syncthing is probably a bad idea since it will be very slow in terms of syncing speed

Can definitely confirm this. I started with a Proxmox system which had a TrueNAS VM. TrueNAS just used a USB HDD for storage though. Setting everything up and getting the permissions set correctly so I could connect my computers was a pain in the ass though.

Later I bought a synology and it just works. Only thing I would recommend is getting good HDDs. I bought Toshiba MG08 16TB drives and while they work great, they are obnoxiously loud during read and write operations. They are so loud, that even though the NAS is in a separate room I have to shut it off at night.

Meanwhile the Seagate Ironwolf drive I used for TrueNAS was next to my bed for multiple months and was basically silent.

Thanks for your reply. I think I managed to solve this issue and have updated my post to reflect this. Apparently I had a setting disabled in Pi-Hole which caused my DNS requests to be forwarded upstream for some reason, even though there existed a local DNS entry.

It returned the local IPv4 address of the server and two IPv6 addresses belonging apparently belonging to a cloudflare server in california.

I think I managed to fix the issue though. I have updated my post to include my solution

I think I fixed the issue by enabling the Never forward reverse lookups for private IP ranges option in Pi-Hole. After that I flushed my dns cache again and called tracert for my domain name. I only get one hop directly to my server now. nslookup also shows only local addresses now.

Outside hosting isn’t really something I want to consider. I didn’t mention this in my post but this setup is for my media server which needs a lot of storage space. I don’t know about the pricing for a VPS but I am pretty sure it isn’t as cheap as I would want it. Also uploading my media to a VPS with my upload rate would take a lot of time whenever I want to add something new.

Using two hostnames for accessing the same service isn’t really an option either unfortunately. The specific part I’m trying to set up is a navidrome server for music. The app I use to access the server is called Symfonium and can only add one address per media server. I could get around that by adding multiple media sources but that would result in all of my media appearing twice in searches.

Looking at the output of that command I get the following for my ethernet network interface

   DNS-Server  . . . . . . . . . . . : fd98:1919:5915:0:3053:4134:bdc9:295d
                                             192.168.1.60
                                             fd98:1919:5915:0:3053:4134:bdc9:295d

Using nslookup on that IPv4 address tells me that all of those addresses are pointing to my pi-hole

nslookup 192.168.1.60

Server: pi.hole
Address: fd98:1919:5915:0:3053:4134:bdc9:295d

Name: pi.hole
Address: 192.168.1.60

I’ve added another local DNS entry on my Pi-Hole which points the domain I use to the same server but this time uses its IPv6 address. That doesn’t seem to help though or it takes some time to update. I flushed the DNS cache on my machine after adding this entry though.

Do you have a better alternative you can recommend? My upload rate isn’t all that good so I would like to avoid having more traffic than necessary leaving my network if the target is within my network anyway.