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.

Which is really weird IMO.

If you want to run everything over a VPN, you’re going to have issues when the internet goes out. Use VPN as a fallback or to get around CGNAT, not as a primary way of routing everything.

Here’s my setup:

1. VPS runs WireGuard VPN and HAProxy forwards services through VPN to the relevant internal device
2. router runs DNS server and routes my domains to local addresses
3. TLS is handled on the device that serves the content for whatever service it is

So when I connect on my LAN, my router just points the domain to the machine running Jellyfin and I get all the goodness of TLS. When I connect outside my LAN, my VPS tunnels TLS through the WireGuard VPN to get around CGNAT and I get all the goodness of TLS. So it doesn’t matter where I connect, I use the same URL and get TLS.

My setup is pretty simple. I use static DNS on my router, which points my jellfin domain to the local address when on my LAN, and I set up DHCP to point my devices to use my router for DNS. It’s incredibly simple, so all I do is type in my jellyfin domain and it works optimally wherever I am.

I actually had my internet go out for a couple hours and we were able to watch our content just fine.

Yup, there’s a chance. If you get another or if anyone else is interested, please do your research first.

Mine worked completely fine, but I also did a fair amount of research before picking one up.

For DVDs, I used Handbrake initially, then switched to MakeMKV. For Bluray, I used MakeMKV and flashed my Bluray drive w/ Libredrive so it can rip UHD disks.

I have only done this on Linux, so I don’t know what this looks like for Windows, but it’s really quite smooth IMO.

price-per-unit-compute is really high

Well yeah, they’re optimized for storage. And if you’re starting from nothing, you’re going to need storage.

Synology is your budget home cloud, and it’s just good enough to handle basic cloud tasks and small-scale service hosting. If you grow out of it, you leave the Synology NAS for purely data storage, and add another box for heavier compute.

TrueNAS, on the other hand, is usually overkill for a home NAS setup because it’s designed for small-ish business use-cases, so it has a lot more CPU and RAM than you’d need when you only have a handful of users in a home setting. So it can probably handle any CPU workload you throw at it, within reason. It probably wouldn’t make a great compiling cluster, but it would do really well hosting things like NextCloud. If you’re looking for transcoding, you need to check the hardware and drivers on FreeBSD (maybe it’s not an issue, but it’s good to check first).

Do they have some kind of VPN or TURN system?

How would the router help with that? If you’re behind CGNAT, you’ll need something external regardless. If you’re not behind CGNAT, pretty much any router on the planet can do port fowarding, and many can handle a network-wide VPN if that’s what you’re after.

I’m behind CGNAT and I have a VPS that hosts my VPN and routes all traffic using HAProxy over the VPN to my internal devices, and my internal devices maintain a persistent connection to the VPN. It sounds complicated, but it’s really just two config files that I’d be happy to share if anyone is stuck. I do have a Mikrotik router, but it’s not needed for any of this, I only use it for static DNS routes so I don’t hit the WAN when accessing my services by their domain names (and VLAN for ZeroTrust shenanigans, but again, not needed at all). If I didn’t have that option, I could always just host a DNS server right on my NAS and do the same thing (any router can set the DNS server over DHCP).

How beefy? Multiple CPU?

No, I’m not that productive. I just want it to run builds of my Rust projects, and those can take some time. So 6-8 recent-ish cores is plenty. Right now I’m using a Ryzen 1700, and once I upgrade my PC, I’ll move my Ryzen 5600 to it. I want my builds to finish somewhat quickly without interfering with other services on the machine (e.g. if I’m running a build while we’re watching a movie, I don’t want the movie to stutter).

If my project grows (i.e. I get outside contributors), I’ll need higher specs.

And yeah, my preference for a single box is storage space. My NAS sits on my desk, and I’d really rather not get a rack setup. More machines means higher power and more space. I do have a couple of Raspberry Pis around for specific use-cases (e.g. one on my TV for RetroPie), but I’d really rather not have a handful of PCs running 24/7. Electricity is pretty cheap where I live, but even then, I’d rather not waste power just because I can get a good deal on servers. My single box uses something like 40-50W, and once I upgrade to my 5600, idle draw will drop another 10-20W (I have a 20-30W floor due to the drives).

Isn’t that basically just a commercial NAS? Go buy a Synology NAS, or get fancy w/ TrueNAS. You don’t need an entry-level enterprise-grade router at all, you can just plug the NAS in anywhere and you’re golden. You can usually install a few services like Plex/Jellyfin or HomeAssistant alongside the data storage if you like.

If that’s not going to work for you, you probably have a good idea of what will work for you. For me, a tiny x86 server isn’t going to cut it, because I want a beefier CPU to run CI/CD for my programming projects, so a beefier, modern CPU is quite valuable. That’s totally overkill if all you want is a simple streaming setup with 1-2 transcoded streams.

So I think there are two main markets here:

1. just give me something that works - these will flock to pre-configured solutions, like Synology or TrueNAS
2. I want something specific - they’ll DIY components together to build their own custom solution

The only other group I can think of is the group that can’t afford 1 and doesn’t know enough to do 2, but I really don’t think that’s a particularly big group, and they’d be better off reusing something they already have instead of getting some off-the-shelf solution.

I could absolutely be wrong here, that’s just my $0.02.