Good point, I’ll consider MOCA. The main problem is that we have three sets (OTA antenna, satellite, and internet), and I’m not sure which are which, but figuring that out should be quite a bit easier than running cable. :)

I’m not planning on getting anything more than gigabit in the near future, though my city is rolling out fiber and claims to support up to 10gbit.

Yeah, I don’t understand why JBOD with a decent chipset is so hard to find. I really don’t expect much from it, I just want to slide some drives in and have everything run consistently for a few months at a time. I’ll power cycle periodically to apply updates, so I’m not looking for 24/7/365 operation or anything.

FWIW, Level1Techs seems to recommend MediaSonic (timestamp is where he talks about reliability), but doesn’t give it a ringing endorsement. And that was one of the better ones he’s seen…

After a bunch of research, what I’ve found is:

• okay chipset, but garbage build quality (no dampening for drives, no hot-swap, etc)
• fancy controller that doesn’t support JBOD - non-starter for me, I don’t want anything to do with hw controllers
• expensive - at a certain point, I’ll just keep my oversized ATX case that does the job

Now I’m looking for compact cases that support 5 drives, like this one (a little too cheap perhaps?) or this one. It just seems reliable 4-5 bay USB-C enclosures just aren’t that popular.

Makes sense for single drives, but if I go with USB, it’ll be something like this with multiple bays, which will almost certainly support UASP. I also don’t want a hardware RAID controller because I’d much rather my BTRFS filesystem handle the individual drives than rely on some controller to not corrupt my data.

The problem, however, is that a lot of these enclosures use really crappy components. Sometimes drives will drop off for no reason and the entire unit will need to be power cycled. They also tend to require a separate power supply, which is also annoying. But if there’s a super high quality one for pretty cheap, the entire package (mini PC + enclosure) is probably smaller than pretty much any equivalent case. So I’m interested, I just haven’t found a good fit.

Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about. Fortunately, the previous owner seemed obsessed with phone and coax jacks, so almost every room has at least one of them. I could just run ethernet over those jacks, but I might be able to attach a string to them to pull in a proper ethernet cable. Then again, maybe I’ll just end up needing to drill new holes, idk.

I’m just not looking forward to doing it is all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I practice some ZeroTrust principles w/o using any of the above. I use Docker networks to associate services and their data and restrict them from accessing services/data they don’t need. I use HAProxy at the edge to route requests to specific nodes in my network, and all of that operates over my own WireGuard VPN. I’m working on creating VLANs for my network to further segment things, so I can dictate which devices can access which resources. For continuous monitoring and alerting, any separate device connected to my VPN would work (haven’t yet configured that); I personally don’t bother because my SO/kids will tell me if something they use goes down, and knowing a few minutes earlier wouldn’t matter.

You really don’t need AWS, Cloudflare, or Telegram for any of this. That said, it is interesting to read through when crafting your own solution, if only to check which parts you have and what parts you may have forgotten.

The latter, a VPS at the “edge” of my network. It doesn’t run any services itself other than HAProxy, which just routes connections to services inside my network.

That use case makes a ton of sense.

I only have my VPS and internal devices, so using DNS names makes it trivial to always get the best route since the only options are within my LAN (simple router config) or over WAN. If it was any more complex, I’d probably do the same as you.

Exactly. I tried Tailscale to get things off the ground, but it didn’t do precisely what I wanted, so I abandoned it and built exactly what I needed, which for me was a VPN at the gateway that tunneled SSL traffic via HAProxy to my internal network.

If Nebula solves your problems, great! I find I don’t need its features, and prefer to keep things relatively simple, which for me is a WireGuard VPN and a handful of containers to run my things. My setup is basically HAProxy -> Wireguard VPN -> Caddy (TLS termination; docker container) -> Docker container on internal network. HAProxy routes to the appropriate machine, and Caddy renews TLS certs and routes to the appropriate container. I could probably accomplish the same w/ Nebula, but I understand my setup a bit more than Nebula.

I’m not sure what the point is? Here’s my setup:

1. wireguard VPN on my edge VPS
2. lots of services behind my router that connect to that VPN
3. router DNS to resolve my domains to my internal services when on my LAN

This gets me like 95% of the benefit of something like Nebula or Tailscale. When connecting to my internal services, I get LAN speeds if I’m on my LAN and WAN speeds if not. I initially started with Tailscale, but realized that I really didn’t care about most of what it provided.