Until you lose that piece of paper in the thousands of other pieces of paper that were supposed to help you with this.

Apologies for the reddit link, but this is the dev explaining it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/18zjwl9/i_made_lubelogger_an_selfhosted_vehicle/kgia4jg/?context=10000

The other issue with this - If you lose access to that one system, you’re SOL. It’s a single point of failure.

I use Aegis, automatically backed up every time a new key is added. Was using Authy for a while, but they’re going down the enshittification hole, so I dumped them.

The point of 2FA is “something you have” and “something you know” to enter a secured system.

If you put both of those into one system that is accessible by one password, the whole concept is defeated.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - blame Dodge (yes, that Dodge) for setting precedent that shareholder satisfaction legally comes before customer satisfaction.

Source

It was a while ago, I don’t remember much of it unfortunately. Only the idiots.

Syncthing is incredible. I use it on my devices, and everything is also backed up to my NAS.

This, so much. I remember when Louis told everyone about it, people (mostly Reddit) were so nitpicky over every minor detail.

How fast/reliable/cheap are USB drive enclosures?

For a NAS? Not very. Mine drops out periodically. That’s part of why I’m building another machine to house everything. The USB enclosure will not see “production” use after that.

As long as the NAS software doesn’t require much overhead, I’ve got an old laptop that should be able to handle things well enough if that would work.

Old laptops are alright for running services; not very good at holding data. And the battery is a fire risk unless you have a model that allows the battery charge to be limited. If not - run it without the battery. I killed a few laptop batteries doing this before I finally figured that out.

Plus, then I could still grab one of these cheap Win 10 machine as a server box to run all of the services to go along with the NAS.

IMO - Run the NAS as only a NAS. It’ll save you a lot of headache and you won’t lose all of your data in case an errant service takes down your machine. Also - use Linux. There are multiple Linux distributions catered specifically for use as a NAS, like TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, and others. I use OMV personally, and create NFS mounts for my other servers to use for their data storage needs.

First and foremost: “NAS” is just an acronym for Network Attached Storage. A NAS is not a specific product. Don’t fall into that trap.

What should I be looking for in a used PC for this sort of use case? Specs, etc.?

You can run NAS software on pretty much anything. My current NAS is a Mac Mini 2014 with a 4-bay USB drive enclosure. I’m in the process of building a more reliable NAS out of an old HP ProLiant ML110 G2 case - which is fully ATX compatible, strangely enough - with modern(ish) guts. It’s got 10 drive bays, too.

Ideally, you want a case that can hold multiple 3.5" drives, plus a boot drive. Never boot from the data drives.

Specs-wise, pretty much anything from the last decade will work just fine. My Mac Mini runs an i5-4308U, which is essentially a low-power laptop CPU.

I think I’d like to do at least 3 hard drives in some sort of RAID config (whatever that is), but room for more would be welcome.

Good idea. Couple things:

• Do not use hardware RAID. Linux natively supports software RAID via mdadm. I’ve moved my software RAID5 array between multiple PCs and it’s been recognized as such by all of them.
• RAID IS NOT A BACKUP! RAID only prevents data loss in case of drive failure (with a mirrored setup, or something with parity - losing a drive in a RAID0 array means you’re fucked). RAID does not prevent data loss from malicious incidents or mass deletion.

Does anyone know where I would be finding these PCs? How would I know what a good price is? Are there centralized websites that sell this sort of used tech, or should I mostly be scouring Facebook Marketplace for local businesses getting rid of stuff on the cheap (in which case I’ll need to know what specs I’m looking for and how to price them reliably)?

eBay has taken much of my money for my server projects.

If anyone has thoughts on OS change as well please comment.

Linux.

The only ports I have open are 80 and 443, and 80 just redirects to 443.

I also have a BeamMP server that has to have a port open because that’s just how it works, but that VM sits on its own DMZ’d VLAN, and I only open the port when I’m actively playing the game.

Mini PCs have more than enough oomph to handle what you’re doing. Almost my entire home lab runs on 7th/8th gen mini PCs, which includes Plex and Jellyfin (working on migrating everything over to JF). Plex only ever threw a fit playing 4k stuff when my wifi started getting crowded with wifi cameras and zigbee devices. I fiddled with the channels, removed one of my 2.4 SSIDs entirely, and now everything is happy again.

It was often the automated things that I completely forgot about. I have ADHD, so if it’s not accessible in a reasonable way (where I don’t have to always google specific commands to find basic info on my own machine), then it gets lost in the memory hole. I know that a service is running, but would forget what it is.

These days I have it pretty down-pat. Hardware is labeled, static IPs are set for “critical” VMs and LXCs (because I’m shit at DNS and still trying to get that down), and things are actually somewhat documented in an easy-to-find place.

I don’t know how you guys function without some sort of visual. I will forget everything I’m running if it’s not on a dashboard of some sort. That’s not a maybe - it’s guaranteed. Because it’s happened before.

LSI is a common brand as well.

Why would I pay for Unraid when I already have a smooth-running Proxmox cluster and an OMV-based NAS?

I have one for beammp opened, but that machine is also on its own DMZ’d VLAN and only runs when I play BeamNG.Drive. Other than that, it’s just 443 to my reverse proxy.

Debian gang! I almost exclusively use Debian distros on any of my PCs/VMs/LXCs.

I’ve been a proud Debian stan since my dad introduced it to me back in the early 2000s. He used to be a QA engineer at Novell, so we had various OSes on the home computer, including Windows and multiple Linux distros (not at the same time - old Compaq Deskpro 2000). He brought home a Dell Latitude once, loaded with a basic Debian install and no GUI. Since I had a little experience with Linux already (some command line from watching my dad install OSes), he just showed me certain important commands (including rm -rf / - this was before --no-preserve-root was required; intentionally causing a computer to melt down the first time was pretty entertaining) and how to switch between virtual consoles. I just kinda figured it out on my own from there.

Debian just appealed to me over all the other distros I had used up to that point. I’m guessing because it was easy to work with (still is), and so highly-documented (it was always one of the first results on Google).

Not sure what got me on that tangent… Thank you coming to my TED talk.