It’s an 8 bay unit with six drives that are a mix of WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf, all NAS grade drives, basically. The other two slots have SSDs for hosting the aforementioned containers and VMs.

The largest drives I have are 4TB though, so maybe the larger capacity ones are louder? I also ran the fan profile in whatever the quietest setting is.

I am a tech oriented person, I work in IT, and a Syno ticks the boxes in many respects.

• Low power draw. Power efficiency is very important to me, especially for something that runs 24/7. I don’t know how efficient self-build options are these days, but 10 years ago I couldn’t get close to the efficiency of a good NAS.

• Set and forget. I maintain enough systems at work so I don’t really want to spend all of my free time maintaining my own. A Syno “just works”, it can run for months or years without a reboot (and when it does need one, it does it by itself overnight), and I can easily upgrade or swap a dead drive in a couple of minutes. When the entire NAS dies I can stick the drives in a new one and be up and running almost instantly.

• Size and noise. I don’t have a massive house, so I need something that can sit on a shelf and be unobtrusive. In our last house it was literally sat in the living room, spinning drives constantly, and nobody was bothered by it.

The Syno I have is plenty good enough to run a bunch of Docker containers and a few VMs for all of my self hosted stuff, and it just does the job efficiently, quietly, and without complaining or needing constant maintenance.

I don’t like this creep towards requiring branded drives and memory, though I’m pretty sure it’s not legal in the EU. Regardless there are ways around it.

Right? I swear I see more brand new Teslas driving around my mid-sized town every day. Boils my piss.

If you own a domain, which you do, you can get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt using a DNS challenge. Most (all?) popular reverse proxies can do this either natively or via an addon/module, you just need to use a supported DNS provider.

Libraries were simple enough, sure, but have you delved into the full settings? Trying to figure out the correct settings for QuickSync hardware acceleration was a mission in and of itself and there’s very little guidance on what any of the options mean or do. I don’t have the container running right now or I’d provide examples, but In Plex it’s a single checkbox.

I’m sure Jellyfin will get there and it’s a cool project, but it’s fairly obvious that it’s written by hobbyists, for hobbyists. Meanwhile Plex excels at just working straight out of the box.

Judging by the rest of the thread I’m going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:

I’m sure I’ll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just… wasn’t great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there’s a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.

Yes, it sucks that they’re removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there’s a significant chunk of users who don’t know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren’t going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.

I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it’s honestly paid for itself many times over, and I’ve been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn’t pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It’s a shame they’ve had to do it at all, but I don’t begrudge them for it.

Good shout. I’ve just recently moved from Pihole to Adguard Home myself, complete with Hagezi lists. I consider myself very tech savvy and I work in the field but AGH suits my needs much better.

One example is wildcard DNS to route all of my hosted services via reverse proxy. In Pihole I had to make weird blocking rules to make this work, but AGH has specific settings for it. It also supports DoH out of the box, whereas Pihole needs non-standard faffery to get it working.

Very pleased with AGH in general.

HACS installs community integrations whereas addons are like external programs that hook in HA. You can do the same thing with HA in Docker by installing the addon containers separately and then hooking them in manually but HA OS makes it much simpler.

For example I’m running the Mosquitto broker, Z2M, a Visual Studio Code server, diyhue, and Music Assistant as addons.

Docco page about it is here: https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/

If you want to give Home Assistant a try like others are suggesting, save yourself some time and hassle and install Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine. While you absolutely can run it in Docker you lose out on some neat quality of life improvements like add ons (which, funnily enough, are Docker containers pre-configured to hook in HA).

Exactly this. Also it annoys me that Namecheap tries to automatically “top up funds” over a month before renewals are due. I think they’ve always done it but it wound me up enough this year to move to Cloudflare.

Yeah, everything that’s already been said, except that I specifically chose an off-the-shelf Synology NAS with Docker support to run my core setup for this exact reason. It needs a reboot maybe once or twice a year for critical updates but is otherwise rock solid.

I have since added a small N100 box for things that need a little extra grunt (Plex mainly) but I run Ubuntu Server LTS with Docker on that and do maintenance on it about as often as I reboot the NAS.

I always thought games should be accessible to everyone.

In a ideal world absolutely, but there’s literally zero chance of Sony reciprocating, as shown by their behaviour during the Bethesda case. Exclusives for me, not for thee.

I’m happy for PlayStation owners but, as someone heavily invested in the Xbox ecosystem since the OG, it feels like a kick in the teeth.

Were you talking about MacOS? It’s been a long time since I last had to use it but I assumed it was case sensitive because it’s Unix based. Uh maybe ignore me then!

NTFS absolutely supports case sensitivity but, presumably for consistency with FAT and FAT32 (Windows is all about backwards compatibility), and for the sake of Average-Joe-User who’s only interaction with the filesystem is opening Word and Excel docs, it doesn’t by default.

All that said, it can be set on a per-directory basis: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/case-sensitivity

Just to add to the info so far: while you’re spending the effort doing a migration it’s worth going the extra few steps and moving to their Docker image. It’ll make any future server moves a doddle, not to mention updates etc.

Isn’t that exactly why so many of these company and app names have missing vowels? Because they can’t trademark a word but they can trademark a collection of letters that sounds like a word when spoken aloud. It’s really dumb.

Pedant, but the pressure difference between 1 atmosphere and zero isn’t all that great, so explosive decompression wouldn’t happen even in the worst case scenario. Rapid yes, explosive no.

To be explosive you need something like the Byford Dolphin diving bell incident, which was 9 atmospheres to 1 in a fraction of a second.

Third Plex. It’s a bit baffling as to why it’s got such a bad rep recently because it performs its core function of serving media incredibly well, is super easy (barely an inconvenience) to setup, and there’s apps for every conceivable platform.

Yes there’s a few features locked behind a subscription (though they still sell lifetime passes, often at good discounts) and they’re trying to “legitimize” with their ad-backed streaming thing, but the core product of local media server is still very much there, and free, and isn’t going anywhere.

Yeah that’s cool and all but you’re strawmanning. Your original comment, that I hear parroted a lot, is that Telegram is (basically) unencrypted, and regardless of your feelings about the suitability of MTProto (not SSL) that’s patently untrue.

There’s no evidence that MTProto has ever been cracked, nor any evidence of them selling or allowing anyone access to their servers and recent headline news backs this up. Whether you choose to trust them with your data is up to the individual to decide. I’m just tired of seeing the “Telegram is unencrypted” claim in every instant messaging thread, made by people who don’t know or care to know the difference between encryption and E2E encryption.

Google, on the other hand, routinely allow “agencies” access to their servers, often without a warrant, and WhatsApp - who you cite as a good example of E2E encryption - stores chat backups on GDrive unencrypted by default. They added the option to encrypt last year but nobody was forced (or possibly even asked?) to turn it on, and to this day no encryption of backups is still the default. And while you might encrypt your backups, can you be sure the same is true for the people on the other end of your chats?

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make? The people that claim “Telegram is unencrypted” seem to be of the belief that literal plaintext is flying over the air for anyone with a mediocum of knowledge to easily intercept, and that’s just not true.

Lacking end-to-end encryption does not mean it lacks any encryption at all, and that point seems to escape most people.

To take it to its logical conclusion you can argue that Signal is also “unencrypted” because it needs to be eventually in order for you to read a message. Ridiculous? Absolutely, but so is the oft-made opine that Telegram is unencrypted.

The difference is that Telegram stores a copy of your chats that they themselves can decrypt for operational reasons. It’s up to the user to decide whether the additional functionality that comes with this is worth the risk of a hostile agent successfully requisitioning those chats directly from Telegram themselves, rather than just busting through your door and threatening to break your legs if you don’t unlock your phone.

On the other hand, if you fill your Telegram hosted chats with a whole load of benign crap that nobody could possibly care about and actually use the “secret chat bullshit” for your spicier chats then you have plausible deniability baked right in.