The two things that popped into my head are Immich and Nextcloud. I think Nextcloud is generally more useful, but Immich is more specifically targeted at Photos. As for how to synchronize it… Syncthing? Personally, I hate setting up Syncthing and so I don’t really use it myself anymore, but once it’s set up, it really does take care of itself. Poke the computer once a month to make sure it’s still alive, and you’re set.

You could probably host Nextcloud at one site and just have a client computer at the next site set to auto sync everything.

Been running NextCloud for a while, not for photos, but for just general Google Drive replacement.

Love my Nextcloud. It’s my go-to for half a dozen workflows. Screw OneDrive. Screw Office. Screw Spotify. Screw Airdrop. Screw Netflix. Screw Google Photos. Screw Google Calendar… NextCloud.

I have it on a bit better hardware than a Pi though.

Yeah, I did try that. Basically, if I doubled the memory I allocated, I gave it half again longer before it crashed, but it still crashed, eventually.

It’s no big deal, this was last year, I may try again one day. Loving Searxng though!

I tried running yacy for a while but it just ran for a bit less than a day then ran out of memory and crashed, over and over. Tried to figure out the problem, but it’s niche enough that I couldn’t get anywhere googling the issue.

I have dyndns, have since they were 10$ a year, and I’ve gradually realized that my ISP changes my IP on average less than once a year…

I have it working with LaCP’d 4gb networking for the transfers. Five nodes. I agree though, It’s a beast on RAM.

I have tried a couple of Proxmox clusters, one with overkill specs and one with little Mini PCs. Proxmox does eat up a fair amount of memory, but I have used it with Ceph for live migrations. Its really useful to me to be able to power off a machine, work on it, then bring it back up, and have no interruptions in my services. That said, my Mini PCs always seemed to be hurting for RAM. So that’s my pros and cons.

You mean I didn’t need to spend years and thousands of dollars learning Linux and servers? Oh man! Oh wait, I’m getting ads in Windows on the start menu. Yeah, I’m happy.

There’s a series of Lemmy posts called the Linux upskill challenge that goes step by step through setting up and using Linux. I tried self hosting and jumping straight in too, and it sucked.

What worked for me:

1. Start using open source versions of stuff, like switching from Chrome to Firefox, Office to Libre Office.
2. Set up Virtual Box, and practice running server apps on Linux on virtual machines, until you’ve done a few Linux VMs and gotten used to the interfaces and commands.
3. Dual boot a laptop or desktop, one by one getting your daily use apps working in Linux.
4. Distro hop a bit. I never thought I’d land on Fedora, but here I am.
5. Get used to running and configuring servers from the command line.
6. Host some stuff with VMs and get used to the networking and bridging and stuff.
7. Containers!

I’m still in the middle of 6+7. Not super comfy with Docker quite yet, but getting there. I really do love having my stuff self-hosted though. Well worth the effort.

A schooner is a sailboat!

What I know: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/A_guide_to_mdadm No need to do hardware raid, mdadm is great. I got an HBA card off of art of server on eBay, and have ungodly amounts of disk. Also, am ungodly power bill… You can stick regular SATA drives into a SAS Bay, but not SAS drives into a SATA bay. Some HP equipment is bitchy about non -HP drives, cards, etc. I saw a fair amount of “Do RAID 6!” But I found on my hardware that RAID 5 and a hot standby was moderately faster. Try not to mix drive sizes, it messes things up and wastes space. Have fun!

I have two old usb2 4tb drives attached, and the only issue I run into is a bit of delay at the start of a video in jellyfin. My jellyfin is running in a container in the Nuc though, not natively, and it’s a Celeron from a while back, so…

SELinux: Tries doing a thing, didn’t work Spend eight hours trying various crap. setenforce 0 Works now Five minutes cussing 30 seconds googling how to set the context Works forever

Tries doing a thing…

Hmm… The nice thing is, I don’t use the remote. I have a little wireless keyboard plugged in to my Tiny PC… But yuck. I guess I’ll have to start tinfoil hat wearing soon.

I have a “smart” TV with a network cable plugged into nothing at all, with no wifi connected, plugged into an Oooold Lenovo Tiny PC running Mint. The Mint box does all my smarts. Pihole, ad-block, all that jazz. It never occurred to me that it might have connected to some open wifi out there, but none of my neighbors have guest wifi or anything, so hopefully I’m good. It’s definitely not on my wifi, anyways.

I’m old school, I wouldn’t spend a bunch on a liquid cooler unless I was going to overclock and do random high intensity stuff with it. I use a Noctua fan and never have issues, and I’ve got a chunky GPU in a pretty small case too. Still, fun setup! I hope you have a blast! Make sure the motherboard is flashed to the latest level for the CPU, or that you have a way to get that done, like a friend with an older CPU you can hijack for an afternoon. I had to do that with my first Ryzen. The store lent me an Athlon for a deposit.

I’m not a windows guy, but I sync a lot of my files with NextCloud. It’s free, and I’m sure someone has a way to do it seamlessly with Windows. Maybe a VirtualBox VM with NextCloud in it? Is there a Windows implementation of Syncthing? Those would be what I’d try.

Thanks for this! Looking forward to trying it out!

I’ve had pretty good luck with www.era.ca. I’m in their city though, so I can pick up locally, and I can return anything that doesn’t work for me. They have an eBay store www.ebay.ca/str/calgarycomputerwholesale. They do sell “for parts” and “as is” though, so read the listing.

There’s a store in my town called Memory Express, and I bought their generic card back in the day. I can’t remember if it was vantech or Startech branded. I didn’t actually buy it for that purpose, I just had it lying around. I originally bought it because my work computer had no ethernet port, and I was testing networks with it. It’s funny, I seem to wander through my Linux-using experience with amazing luck. I always hear about ‘no sound’ or ‘no wifi’, and I’ve never run into that.