True open source products are your best bet. TruNAS and Proxmox are popular options, but you can absolutely set up a vanilla Debian server with Samba and call it a NAS. Back in the old days we just called those “file servers”.

Most importantly, just keep good backups. If you have to choose between investing in a raid or a primary + backup drive, choose the latter every time. Raid will save you time to recover, but it’s not a backup.

This is a qualified truth. In theory what you’re saying is true but for example with Synology they use their own raid format and while they ostensibly use btrfs they overlay their own metadata system on top.

Gotcha. I face similar issues with Synology. Their hyper backup format doesn’t seem to be standard. I’m considering setting up Borg Backup for offsite so I can restore it onto non Synology devices later.

Was this Synology by chance?

My thought as well. At what point do international flights refuse to land on US airports because it’s too dangerous?

That’s basically what Musk and DOGE were trying to do earlier this year. So yeah that doesn’t seem very far fetched.

I have a DS923+ with four Seagate 8TB drives in it that I really like. It’s easy to use and offers a lot of services.

However, like others have said, I do not recommend it for new purchases. If I were to do it again I would most likely set up an old PC as a server (though I went with the Synology mainly for power use reasons).

Synology is getting increasingly customer hostile, and from what I’ve read online their Linux version is so full of bespoke patches that they have painted themselves in a corner it will be hard to get out of. So, they’re likely to fall behind on keeping up with third party software. Their software is usually pretty slick and easy to use, but they discontinue things every few cycles.

The main thing I still use of theirs is Synology Drive, which was a pretty seamless move from Google Drive. On the flipside, their stuff is proprietary, so getting off of their platform can be challenging.

For my self-hosting needs I try not to tie anything to the Synology and just use it as a plain NAS. I use my Raspberry Pi or a VM instead.

Sounds the most likely to me. Faced with taking a loss from having their vaccine banned, flatter him into embracing them instead.

Yeah, I get it. I’ve had many libraries fail me in as many ways, which is why I consider it lucky to not have to implement my own. I work in .net these days, but there have been times where I had to just dig into the xml inside the xlsx and use xml tools. Those were mostly one-offs, thankfully.

Back when I did Java I had a frustrating experience with IBM’s libxml causing our app to crash after several days due to a memory leak. I didn’t have access to the production environment so it took me probably 3 weeks to find the cause and only after digging through a crash dump provided by the sysadmin. Not related, but you triggered my traumatic memory :)

I don’t know what you’re trying to do with Excel, but based on your posts, I can only wish you good luck. I’m happy to say that I have been able to outsource low level parsing to third party libraries for my needs so far. Well, except the interpreting semantic formatting part. That was on me.

You need another dragon for Excel and its two date systems.

I know it’s ELI5, but this is a common misconception and will lead you astray. They do not have the same level of isolation, and they have very different purposes.

For example, containers are disposable cattle. You don’t backup containers. You backup volumes and configuration, but not containers.

Containers share the kernel with the host, so your container needs to be compatible with the host (though most dependencies are packaged with images).

For self hosting maybe the difference doesn’t matter much, but there is a difference.

And that they didn’t use their own printer.

See if a light weight kubernetes installation is for you. Secrets are first class citizens in k8s. You can maintain secrets in a number of different ways, but they are exposed to containers the same way. They can become files or environment variables, whether you need.

I recommend looking at k3s to run on your Pi and see if that works for you. You can add vault software on top of that later without changing your containers.

Instead of calling tech support they should have checked on expertsexchange.com first.

The distinction is between bare metal and virtual machine. Most cloud deployments will be hosted in a virtual machine, inside which you host your containers.

So the nested dolls go:

• bare metal (directly on hardware)
• virtual machine (inside a hypervisor)
• container (inside Docker, podman, containers, etc.)
• runtime (jvm, v8, clr, etc) (unless your code is in C, Rust, or other such language)
• your code

I have one of my domains on Cloudflare and was thinking of moving the rest of them there. What makes it harder to move name servers away from Cloudflare than other places?

I’ve had co-workers who regularly pushed code from a service account and with no commit comments. Good times.

Ah yes, the Marty McFly strategy.