Yep - I feel that, especially after the branded hard disk carry on last year.

I’m a +1 on this. A secondhand Synology set up with some RAID will delay this decision for a few years and give you time to build your expertise on the other aspects without worrying much about data security. It’s a pity that you’re nearly at the limit of 8TB - otherwise I would have suggested a two bay NAS with 2x8TB, but if you’re going to use second hand drives (I do because I’m confident of my backup systems) maybe 4x6TB is better. Bigger drives are harder to come by 2nd hand - and plenty of people will not be comfortable with secondhand spinning rust anyway - if that’s you, then a 2 bay with 2x12TB might be a good choice.

The main downside (according to me) of a Synology is no ZFS, but that didn’t bother me until I was two years in and the owner of three of them.

Proxmox on the metal, then every service as a docker container inside an LXC or VM. Proxmox does nice snapshots (to my NAS) making it a breeze to move them from machine to machine or blow away the Proxmox install and reimport them. All the docker compose files are in git, and the things I apply to every LXC/VM (my monitoring endpoint, apt cache setup etc) are all applied with ansible playbooks also in git. All the LXC’s are cloned from a golden image that has my keys, tailscale setup etc.

Batocera surely?

Time to book another press conference at that landscaping company.

100% this. And Lenovos and HPs designed for the business market generally are a pleasure to work on (in the hardware sense) if you need, with good manuals and secondhand spare parts.

To stray even further from OP’s question (because books), I loved the dialect in Riddley Walker and the slang in A Clockwork Orange.

I’m local first - stuff I’m testing, playing with, or “production” stuff like Jellyfin, Forgeo, AudioBookshelf, Kavita etc etc. Local is faster, more secure, and storage is cheap. But then some of my other stuff that needs 24/7 access from the internet - websites and web apps - they go on the VPS.

I just do one Docker container per LXC. All the convenience of compose, plus those sweet Proxmox snapshots.

Is there a reason not to use Tailscale for this?

Great job on the banner - I could hear the theme in my head.

Forgejo - actively developed open source. It’s what powers Codeberg. Easy to set up and manage with Docker. I moved to it from Gogs and skipped Gitea after reading about the forks.

It is only resolving for devices in the Tailnet. Kuma is checking they are all up, and this Ansible playbook is checking they have all their updates. I wouldn’t have thought that was an unusual arrangement - and it’s worked perfectly for about a year till about three weeks ago.

Yes, this.

Thanks yes - that’s exactly what I needed.

Thanks - this is exactly what I needed.

Yes - we’re “I’ll let you use my electricity for your computer thing” friends, not “I’m okay with seeing your printer on my home network” friends.

Kavita is for ebooks - it’s not perfect, has some weirdness with series sometimes because of it’s manga heritage.

For me, AudioBookShelf is the clear standout for audio books, and I ended up going with Kavita for ebooks.

I have it in a git repo, broken down by the nodes and vps names. In each of these folders is a mixture of Ansible playbooks, docker compose or just markdown files with the descriptions. Some is random stuff - my VPS allows the export of the cloud firewalls as JSON for instance. All the secrets needed by Ansible are in an Ansible vault, the rest in KeePass.