While I have heard of people doing this a decade, I have never looked into it.

How was the install and setup process? How is the resource consumption of the server? At one point it seemed one had to supply their own quests. Are there open source quests available? Anything cool I didn’t ask about?

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The joke is electricity and Linux.

The real answer is the free hardware.

My main reliable is from 2008? It cannot do modern virtualization due to not having the CPU instruction sets.

Other options are LUKS with Tang and Clevis, or LUKS with SSH and Dropbear.

Sorry, I have no details.

Edit: Tang/Clevis are local software and a network server that provide keys. If stolen, won’t boot.

SSH and Dropbear make it so you can login to provide keys.

What features do you want?

What should my first configurations and preparations

Write on paper your goals. Write on paper a list of your systems and what needs to speak with what.

Then pick the most important or simplest device and get it connected the way you want.

At home, colors Whatever color the purpose is.

Look up what system vendors will sell for that CPU. If they sell 256 GiB, then you are likely good.

I don’t find I ever upgrade after the first couple months. I would max it out or get multi CPU boards wherI cannot afford to max it out.

Thank you!

Thank you. I had not seen this layout prior. (Plus the Japanese in English thing.)

Oh!

And the “Japanese” is written in English, while the French is “subtitled”. Two languages total, not three.

I am confused. Why does the woman in the black shirt think the woman in the white shirt cannot speak Japanese?

I tend to buy two at a time. Some are months old, others three years old.

Professionally, I have seen drives over 10 years always on at low utilization without issue. (The data was easily replaceable.)

crammed in to my case in a hideous way

Heat is a killer. Check them regularly.

Mainly, I’m wondering if I should migrate /home/ to my RAID array, or leave /home/ where it is and create a new directory on the RAID array.

Leave home where it is. Symlink to important directories on RAID.

Makes it easier to mess with the RAID if it doesn’t make logging in hard.

For roll your own, FreeBSD and ZFS on any old desktop with 4 SATA ports is pretty nice and cheap. Built in encryption, NFS, SMB services. Navidrome has install directions for serving music. Pretty secure by default.

I like reminding people that with every new technology, the old one is still around. The new gets most of the attention, but the old is still kicking. (We still have wire wrapped programs kicking around.)

You are all good. Spend your limited attention on other things.

“Easier” and “simpler” are in the eye of the beholder.

A different way to approach it is to limit the failure domains. If this breaks how sad are you?

I would separate storage from the rest. Networking stuff together may be fine. Home assistant depends on how dependent on it your household is.

I have not had an issue mixing and matching drives in a hardware or software RAID. Just needs to be at least as big as the previous.

I have had issues with non-vendor drives in Dell and/or HP systems.

(I am a pro, but not your pro.)

Yes! It is great.

Any more I reencode for local streaming to my TV.

Have you tried a restore? A non-differential smap snapshot should be fine, but differential snapshots would make a restore difficult to impossible.

A zfssend and zfsrestore with a differential snapshot would be more traditional. If one put mbuffer in the middle, it would even be fast.