I’ve been using CommaFeed for a while and I’m very happy with it. https://github.com/Athou/commafeed/ plus it is actively developed. I’ve reported a couple of small feature requests and the author implemented them very quickly.

As far as I know there are many third party android apps that you can use, but its responsive webUI is good enough, once you install it it is essentially as good as an app.

As other mentioned, an advantage is that it blocks ads on phone apps too. My other use case is to add extra DNS entries to name devices on my local network. Finally, after using pihole for a while I switched to blocky. It has similar features but it lacks the UI and the dchp server, but in exchange it uses much less resources. Since I didn’t use either of these it sounded a good trade to me

Devices are named after characters from books I recently read, trying to match the name with the character of the book. But for virtual hosts for services I use their purpose (wiki, files, feed…) because I wasted too much time updating all the bookmarks last time I migrated to a new server.

I started using headscale (the opensource reimplementation of tailscale server) on a private vps. It is incredibly better compared to plain wireguard. I regret waiting so much before switching.

Something that really made my life easier: wireguard is poor at roaming: switching to and from my wifi created issues because the server wasn’t reachable anymore from its public ip and wireguard didn’t bother to query the DNS again to check the new IP. Also, configuration is dead simple because it takes care of iptables for you (especially good when you enables forwarding to a node).

Since the server just sends small messages for the control plane and all the traffic is p2p between the devices, the smallest vps with the smaller connectivity is more than enough to handle it.

Yes, but it is a different cron job that needs to run, and you need to monitor it for failures. Caddy does everything out of the box, including retries.

Nginx for my intranet because configuration is fully manual and I have complete control over it.

Caddy for the public services on my vps because it handles cert renewal automatically and most of its configuration is magic which just works.

It is unbelievable how shorter caddy configuration is, but on my intranet:

1. I don’t want my reverse proxy to dial on internet to try to fetch new SSL certs. I know it can be disabled, but this is the default.
2. I like to learn how stuff works, Nginx forces you to know more details but it is full of good documentation so it is not too painful compared to Caddy.

I didn’t find anything for syncing yet. But I settled with plain smb shares which works for 99% of my needs and https://www.filestash.app/ for a simple webUI which is more convenient when browsing files and photos from the phone.

Consider Ireland, it is not Shengen but it is EU, meaning that you can freely travel only after you get the citizenship. But you can get it after 5 years you lived in the country, as far as I know it is one of the easiest (if not easier) EU country to get it. Also you wouldn’t have language issues. I’m not sure how difficult is to get a working visa tho.

I tired the same, but my router wants to be smart by filtering DNS responses that points to local IP. I guess whoever designed it considered it a security feature. It is a stock router from the ISP, its configuration interface is minimal, borderline to non existent.

awesome-selfhosted.net is a good start

I remember that I started by following these two guides.

https://fardog.io/blog/2017/12/30/client-side-certificate-authentication-with-nginx/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7768593/

something I’m not sure it is mentioned here is that android (at lest the version on my phone) accepts only a legacy format for certificates and the error message when you try to import the new format is totally opaque. If you cannot import it there just check openssl flags to change the export format.

If security is one of your concerns, search for “HTTP client side certificates”. TL;DR: you can create certificates to authenticate the client and configure the server to allow connections only from trusted devices. It adds extra security because attackers cannot leverage known vulnerabilities on the services you host since they are blocked at http level.

It is a little difficult to find good and updated documentation but I managed to make it work with nginx. The downside is that Firefox mobile doesn’t support them, but Firefox PC and Chrome have no issues.

Of course you want also a server side certificate, the easiest way is to get it from Let’s Encrypt

There are plenty of zigbee options available on Amazon UK (and I would expect some wifi too, but I have already a zigbee network so I prefer it when possible). Do a quick search there, most of them have the wiring diagram in the photos. Some of them can be installed in the box, so you don’t have to replace the switches (which may be ugly compared of the others you have). Also note that if both the switches you want to replace control the same light you just need to replace one of them.

You can configure caddy to use 80 and be a reverse proxy for both the services, serving one site or the other depending on the name (you will need a second DNS entry pointing to the same IP). about not exposing 443, I really doubt that caddy can automatically retrieve SSL certificates for you if not running on the default port. Check the documentation, if I’m right either you open an empty website on 443 just for the sake of getting SSL certs to run https, and manually configure the other port to do the same, or you get the certificates manually using the DNS verification (check let’s encrypt documentation) and configure caddy to use them.

NAS are essentially small computers made for connecting a lot of storage and with a fancy OS that can be configured with a browser.

So the real question between the NAS or a custom build is how much time do you want to spend being a sysadmin. NAS mostly work out of the box, you can configure them to autoupdate and get notification only when something important happens. While with a custom build everything is completely on your own. Are you already familiar with some linux distribution? How much do you want to learn?

Once you answer the previous question, the next is about the power. To store files on the network you don’t need any big CPU, on the contrary, you may want something small that doesn’t cost too much in electricity. But you mentioned you want to stream video. If you need transcoding (because you have a chromcast that wants only video in a specific format for example) you need something more powerful. If you stream only to computer there is no need for transcoding because they can digest any format, so anything will work.

After this you need to decide how much space you need, and what type. NMVE are faster, but spinning HD were still more reliable (and cheaper per TB) last time I checked. Also, do you want some kind of raid? RAID1 is the bare minimum to protect you from a disk failure, but you need twice as much disks to store the same amount of data. RAID5 is more efficient but you need at least 3 disks. Said so, remember that RAID is not backup. You still need a backup for important stuff.

My honest suggestion is to start experimenting with your raspberry and see what you need. Likely it will fit already most of your needs, just attach an external HD and configure samba shares. I don’t do any automated backup, but I know that syncthing and Syncthing-Fork are very widely used tools. On linux you can very easily use rsync in a crontab.

If you want an operating system that offers you an out of the box experience more similar to a commercial NAS you can check FreeNAS. I personally started with a QNAP and have been happy for years, but after starting self hosting some stuff I wanted more flexibility so I decided to change to a TerraMaster where I installed a plain Debian and I’m happy with it, but it definitely requires more knowledge and patience to configure and administrate it.

You cannot install addons from the UI, but you can manually install them. Addons are just Docker containers that get configured automatically.

FAT32 doesn’t support unix file permission, so when you mount the disk linux has to assign a default ownership which usually is to root. And this is the issue you are facing.

You confused the disk permission with the filesystem permission. The udev rule you wrote gives you permission to write the disk (in other words, you can format it or rewrite the whole content) but doesn’t give you permission on the files stored inside because they are on a higher abstraction level.

If you use this computer in interactive mode (in other words if you usually sit in front of it and plug the disk on demand) my suggestion is to remove that line in /etc/fstab and let the ubuntu desktop environment mounting the external hard drive for the current logged in user.

If you use this computer as a server with the USB disk always connected (likely since you mention Jellyfin) you need to modify the fstab line to specify which user should get permission on the files written on the disk.

You can see the full list of options at https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/vfat.txt

You either want uid=Mongostein (assuming that’s your username on your computer too) to assign to yourself the ownership of all the files, or umask=000 to give everyone all the permissions to the files and directories while ownership will remain to root. You should prefer the second option if jellifin runs as a different user, while the first one is better if there are other users on your computer which shouldn’t access your external disk.

To summarize, the line in /etc/fstab should be one of these two.

LABEL=drivename /mnt/drivename/ auto rw,user,exec,nofail,x-gvfs-show,dev,auto,umask=000 0 0

LABEL=drivename /mnt/drivename/ auto rw,user,exec,nofail,x-gvfs-show,dev,auto,uid=Mongostein 0 0

There is no need to add a udev rule to make the device writeble by your user. If you have a full Ubuntu setup the external drive should appear in Nautilus as soon as you attach it and it can be mounted and umounted from UI.

if it doesn’t work you can add a line te /etc/fstab like

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/mydisk noauto,user,uid=yourname 0 0

duble check the man page for the right sintax (I’m going by memory), but what you are saying here is that any user can mount this device which shouldn’t be mount automatically on boot, and files there are owned by the user “yourname” The issue with this approach is that the device name changes depending on what you have connected, Udev should also add some symlink which contains the device ID so it is more stable.

che RAID mi consigli

Da cosa vuoi proteggerti e quanto sei disposto a spendere? Prima di tutto ricorda che raid non e’ backup. Il raid ti protegge da un disco che si rompe, ma un sovraccarico di corrente può bruciarti tutto il computer, quindi una strategia di backup seria e’ sempre d’obbligo.

Detto questo io fino ad ora ho usato un semplice raid1, usi 2 dischi che hanno lo stesso contenuto. Un po’ ero forzato perché la mia vecchia NAS aveva solo 2 slot ed un po’ onestamente non ho mai avuto motivo di andare oltre. Conosco personalmente gente che non si fida di nessun raid che abbia meno di due dischi di parità, la spiegazione che danno e’ che se hai un raid5 (4 dischi di cui 1 di parità) quando un disco si rompe devi rileggere il contenuto di tutti gli altri per sostituirlo con uno nuovo, questo mette gli altri sotto stress ed aumenta la probabilità di romperne un secondo. Nonostante trovi la spiegazione molto convincente (tra l’altro dettata da loro personale esperienza) non credo sia un problema concreto per l’uso che ne faccio io.

La mia strategia di backup per le cose importanti (principalmente foto) e’: un backup offline, ho un disco USB che connetto di tanto in tanto alla nas e faccio una copia di tutte le ultime foto aggiunte. Un servizio di cloud cold storage (backblaze era il più economico quando avevo cercato qualche anno fa, e non ho mai avuto bisogno di cambiare) e periodicamente la mia NAS lancia rclone per fare un backup incrementale crittografato sul client. L’idea e’ che tutti i file in cloud sono illeggibili anche nel caso di accessi non consentiti.

come posso collegarmi al cloud fuori casa? Io pensavo una vpn (senza aprire porte al modem) ma il problema è che uso gia una vpn sul mio smartphone android.

Senza aprire porte credo che l’unico servizio sia https://tailscale.com. Non lo uso personalmente ma ne ho sentito parlare molto bene. Hanno un generoso piano gratuito che dovrebbe andare bene per la maggior parte della gente.

Senza aprire porte sul router, devi per forza appoggiarti ad un server esterno. Io ho un piccolo server virtuale su hosthatch.com il piano non credo ci sia più ma di tanto in tanto fanno offerte economiche che non scadono fintanto che le rinnovi. E poi ho messo wireguard su quello, sulla nas e sul cellulare. Onestamente, se hai un IP pubblico a casa aprire una porta per la vpn e’ ragionevolmente sicuro ed hai il vantaggio che non costa nulla. Io ho fatto questa configurazione quando la mia internet di casa non aveva ip pubblico quindi era irraggiungibile. Ora che ho cambiato provider ho configurato anche la connessione diretta tra il mio cellulare e la nas di casa, ma ho problemi a tenere la vpn collegata quando passo dalla rete pubblica alla wifi di casa (credo sia un problema del modem che e’ veramente inconfigurabile, ma non ho avuto ancora tempo o voglia per cercare alternative).

In ogni caso, non mi pare che android supporti piu’ di una vpn attiva. Quindi dovrai scegliere quale usare. Ma anche in questo caso, perché hai una vpn sempre attiva sul cellulare? da cosa ti vuoi proteggere? a mio parere c’e’ molta disinformazione sulle vpn. Hanno molto senso ma in casi ben precisi (raggirare blocchi nazionali, trasferire dati su una rete insicura, oscurare la navigazione) ma per l’utente medio che usa internet in una nazione non ostile sostanzialmente per navigare solo in siti https, una vpn non aggiunge molta sicurezza se non nascondere al tuo provider i nomi dei siti che visiti (ed anche questo ormai non e’ piu’ del tutto vero con le ultime estensioni https).

mdadm

Si, l’autocorrettore del cell diventa creativo con i nomi di programmi :/