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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2025

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  • It’s a bit steep, you can go on YouTube for a bit, then browse the documentation of any word you don’t understand (AI can help a lot with understanding but will get confused at any troubleshooting task) the steps can be resumed quite easily:

    Find an OS:

    • see what kind of data you’re working with (photos, videos, films,…) it all depends on your orientation/hobby/personality
    • find what kind of applications you’d want to run, for how many people roughly ( personally I knew I would aim to replace netflix and cloud for close family and maybe a couple friends and circumvent as much as possible things like WeTransfer and compressions when sharing pictures in chats)
    • see how much money and time you are willing to put in : first for the launch, then on a weekly basis (you can go for very cheap non redundant app first os like OP mentioned if you can pay to back it all up remotely/ have a separated NAS or see if you’d prefer to assume resilience mainly on your side)

    Then you have a rough idea of your needs (this is all YouTube knowledge thus far, you can start looking at videos of people trying to use, comparing, ranking different solutions and tutos for how it’s like to set up for the first time and how do app work in those systems (docker, app stores, how big the community is around them, how much of a sysadmin you have to be to run and set it up…)

    Then from that you can start seeing how which install fits in your budget and time allocation. After that, sinking hours of troubleshooting and setup is almost straightforward, it’s just going to be a list of side quests to complete the main one with a side of documentation.

    On my side I initially wanted to go full free software, I wanted to use my 10 years old windows desktop to run trueNAS (it was already running jellyfin in docker desktop, useless for the process but is a fun starter to dip a toe in to get a feel). I bought on eBay a couple hard drives (ended up buying very cheap enterprise SAS, I recommend, mind you you’ll need a daughterboard)(you’ll see that different OS require different RAM, SSD, HDD ratios to run smoothly so recycling old hardware often requires upgrades) I completely failed to make trueNAS work correctly and since it’s enterprise first it has very… unfriendly conceptions about flexibility and user friendliness (brutal on the kind of budget and time I had).

    After abandoning the project for a couple of months (due to exams mainly, and the fact I couldn’t repress myself from spending nights on unresolved issues) I decided to go the Unraid route (which is paid, yikes, but truly hasn’t let me down once, the community is huge and the software is rock solid and really helps you not fuck everything up (which trueNAS will happily let you do), I truly recommend that investment, they have a generous trial period, it’s really really great).

    After that it’s just more setup for hours on end, transferring files to Immich, re-setting all the AI knowledge about faces (also for me a lot of metadata correction for very old family photos), letting disks and parity initialize, moving old backups from old drives into the new system, including the clean disks into the array, setting up prowlarr, radarr, sonarr, jellyfin.

    Then comes the other hard question : how to do you access remotely ? (By now you already have a better idea about how docker and local network works and how important it is to secure it properly; and you’re about to learn how little your ISP cares about you)

    I tried boilerplate wireguard, it’s wonderful but a very MANUAL setup with a DDNS. But honestly (even though I really did not want to spend another penny) the cloud flared tunnel with your own domain is kind of what you want (because they have neat zero trust features, for exemple to access any of the services I host that do not have to have in-app access (Immich, jellyfin, that have authentication built-in) are behind 2FA based on a short whitelist of email addresses which reduces immensely how much protection I have to care about.

    After that you can go on to nextcloud (requires remote access on a domain) and all the rest of the fun stuff.

    Now the thing is (like every hobby) there is a perfect solution, it’s at least tens of thousands of euros and you need a guy to manage it, but it’s bulletproof and will survive any attack.

    You are not that person, you try stuff that is on your level, you don’t assume perfect functionality in one weekend and you take time to learn on every step of the way. In my quick little summary you can already feel (as I am a noob as well) that it’s a very iterative process, often you’ll half-ass something to move on, then come back to upgrade it when needed. You are very much building a machine, first from the hardware side, then mainly from the inside.

    At some point you’ll have people around you start finding out how useful and interesting all this is, and it’s a very rewarding feeling to see what you assembled (because you haven’t typed a single command line in the terminal thus far) starting to get some use.

    Hope this helps as a little piece of motivation, and if you are to start now I hope you have some old RAM laying around, in any case, start small and build up :)






  • I am more and more learning about how personal interests often conflict with societal interests (as simple as it may sound). We are globally going to understand soon enough that democracy isn’t worth shit as long as feedback loops that allow personal interests to creep in are “meta”.

    Loads of people have lots of ideas on how to run countries and communities, but ideology and doctrines are not really proven concepts.

    And the other big problem is that to declare new forces within existing infrastructure (creating counter power to prevent positive feedback mechanisms), societal interest must still be powerful enough to not require a revolution to be enacted in a sensible and effective way.

    A lot of countries have already in my mind gone way over that threshold, it’s recognisable when actual societal interests, long term initiatives and big questions about the future are not asked anymore because the political power is working at consolidating their position and redistributing favours they owe to the soon to be oligarchy.

    But you can’t really allow anyone to be a defeatist because cynism is the last nail in the coffin, staying awake and fight hoping that enough will join soon enough is the only way to keep existing.