Bought 7 4TB SAS drives for $160. They had about 7 years of runtime with no errors after going through the scripts here: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/buddy-backup-and-more-storage-server-part-1-construction/249802. I mixed them with some existing 4TB consumer drives and I’m working on automating my 3-2-1 backup (albiet the 1 is still whenever I get around to it).

Based on those specs it sounds like it’s going to be more than capable in a homelab environment. If you’re streaming to ~5+ devices at the same time id assume it may start to struggle if it’s transcoding all of those so if you can pick or convert your media to something that doesn’t need transcoding that would be ideal.

but that looks like a solid buy. For reference I run on an old office potato and an external GPU from 2013 that I picked up for nothing a few years ago and have no problems. eventually I’ll have to upgrade when the drivers stop being supported but until then 2-3 streams max is fine for me.

it’s not recommended. AMD graphics in general have poor h.264 encoding: Encoder Quality: NVIDIA (RTX 50) ≥ Intel (Arc-B) ≥ Apple ≥ Intel ≥ NVIDIA ≥ AMD ≥ AMD H.264 (RX 9000) >>> AMD H.264*

Official Recommendations for low power: Intel 12th gen or above N series platforms Apple M Series Mac mini Rockchip RK3588 / RK3588S SBC (Advanced Users Only)

Note 10th gen and older integrated graphics are losing support in Linux due to Intel dropping SDK support or something. Don’t buy a nuc or small PC with Intel 10 or older but if you have one it’s fine for now.

Another option would be an old laptop with dedicated graphics (e.g. e waste/recyclers). then you can get away with older than 10gen Intel since you’d be using the external graphics. Just research how to limit battery charging in the bios since it’s always going to be plugged in.

Top Motivation: Cost

The several hundred dollars a year and hours spend is definitely worth saving that $14-30/month in subscriptions right? right?

yunohost + ebay or old office desktop (or literally any computer you can get your hands on for cheap). There’s a lot of people with very strong opinions but you really don’t need much.

As other commenters have said yes you can run these depending on the Pi. Do note however if you need transcoding, A Pi is not recommended by jellyfin:

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-selection#potentially-problematic-hardware

Most Single Board Computers (SBC): Most SBCs (including the Raspberry Pi, especially the Raspberry Pi 5) are too slow to provide an acceptable Jellyfin experience as they often lack proper support for hardware acceleration. If you really want to run Jellyfin on an SBC, you may wish to consider models based on the following platforms: Rockchip RK3588 / RK3588S, Intel Core, Intel 12th gen N series

if you want to lock your phone to one app when you hand it to them you can use app pinning in settings. otherwise look into creating a user profile and see what you can do to lock that down.

what type of phone/OS are your phone and computer?

there’s some hands-on controls too that may be useful but it starts with just giving them their own profile or login that’s ideally with as few permissions as possible. For android, there’s profiles which you may be able to lock down a bit more than your own profile. Apple had family mode settings that you may be able to turn on and off when they have the device. For a computer, same approach. Standard user account with whatever you installed using an admin account and lock down content via DNS like cloudflare for families, https://adguard-dns.io/public-dns.html, a self hosted one or something like https://nextdns.io/.

Worth a read if you haven’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

but hasnep covered it well. also emoji use, overly wordy and that graph/tree is a common style of llms.

looking at the install script it looks like casaOS is installed directly on the laptop. you can check by running

systemctl status casaos

in a terminal. if that’s not found try docker ps -a to list all docker containers including any not currently running.

I’ve never used Netbird or casaOS. I run debian and docker containers. I would recommend looking at wg-easy as a VPN. it also uses wireguard but for me it just works. you open 1 port on UDP and route it to wireguard, it’s a secure way to access your network and is quite hard to detect from the outside.

I’ve heard good things about caddy.

“data at rest/LUKS” is something you should consider if your personally worried about someone physically trying to get information off your computer/server. if the server is running or an attacker gets into your system remotely, it doesn’t matter. as a beginner, I would determine if the data your saving is worth the extra headache of encrypted media, especially if something goes wrong/an update breaks something or your configs/setup messes something up. if you do, keep a copy of your decryption keys on a NEW USB drive (flash drives go bad) or printed out in addition to saved on your workstation/laptop/password manager.

Personally for new systems I recommend Proxmox hypervisor instead of running directly on the laptop. having your debian OS/casa or whatever you use virtualized gives you the ability to take snapshots in time of your OS, makes backups easier and can help when you expand later (backup and restore on the new computer running proxmox). mine is: proxmox on bare metal old office PC

• | debian > docker w/ portainer (I plan to replace portainer w/ komono)
• | TrueNAS > S3 bucket application (garage)

if Casa becomes limiting as you learn and grow, I would recommend docker compose stacks w/ a web gui like komono.

one final note, although AI can be very useful for troubleshooting and getting some code to fix a problem (albiet logic/problem solving isn’t their strength) it’s awful for retaining knowledge and learning in the same way that using a calculator or other tool before fully understanding how to do addition/multiplication manually. I would strongly recommend taking some time to learn the basics without ai if your goal is to understand how everything works. resources to start with are using and reading “man + command”, command help flags, online courses and websites: https://linuxbasecamp.com/ https://explainshell.com/ - copy paste a command with all arguments and it tells you what it does. https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/

you could definitely run proxmox in a VPS but I was thinking more of debian in the cloud. Then exporting that computer from wherever you host it as a ova file then importing it into your local server: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Automatic_Import_of_Full_VM

and on the ram issue, I’m running on over 10 year old workstation hardware ddr3. it doesn’t take much to run.

NAS with zfs storage does typically want a lot of ram (e.g. truenas) but still for a small home environment it works fine with a lot less than 64gb.

I run proxmox bare metal (debian-based hypervisor) and virtualize debian which has all my docker containers.

with virtualization you can take a snapshot and backup everything that way. super simple to roll back if you mess something up. the added bonus is you could probably take a snapshot of your VPS and migrate it to a local vm.

Ubuntu is something I played with about a decade ago and I never felt like I was “missing” something for debian, especially on servers.

I’m not entirely sure about the technical differences but from my understanding VPN connections are preferred. From a security perspective, ssh has some more considerations since it’s easier to detect it’s open, and you should lock down root access and other privileged accounts. but SSH seems simpler to actually get working vs a VPN solution which would probably require a reverse proxy or something to get the TV working.

For example, compromising a ssh service gives you access to the shell immediately vs wireguard or similar that historically (from my knowledge) has had fewer critical vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code injection or access. This is also why many corporate and best practices recommend layering ssh through a private VPN like IPsec, OpenVPN, wireguard, etc.

in practice it’s most likely fine as long as

• you don’t use root or an account with sudo to do the ssh forwarding
• require a ssh key for all connections (at minimum any remote/internet connections)
• update the system regularly. you can automate security updates with unattended upgrades on debian-based systems.

Are you connecting from a public network or something? like a hotel wifi or other?

The easiest solution would be to setup the pi as your router and use a VPN like wireguard (wg-easy) or tailscale.

if it is a public network, you can double NAT. There’s dedicated boxes like the GL.inet travel routers that support wireguard/openVPN and beta for tailscale. they have some features that work well with captive portals.

If it’s a home network, you can probably use your PI as a entry/exit node or VPN client instead of using ssh.

wireguard is self hosted and you do have to “expose” one UDP port. From the outside it’s difficult to detect that this “opening” exists because wireguard just listens and ignores everything unless you send the encrypted credentials. Compared to hosting a webpage or jellyfin directly this is much more secure. As long as you keep wireguard relatively up to date you don’t really have to worry much about it.

I personally use wg-easy. It’s designed to be deployed into docker (using docker compose is by far the easiest).

Then you can either use your IP address, or ideally a dynamic DNS provider so you’d connect to myexample.com:51820. Duckdns is free, otherwise options are available like cloudflare. If you can get jellyfin working, this should be relatively straightforward.

I recently had to increase my proxmox storage as well from an old 256 to 1TB. What I did was make a copy of /etc via PVE Host Backup and saved that on my NAS/external storage. Almost everything is in /etc/pve. Then I created backups of all the VMs and stored those on the same external storage. I then installed proxmox as normal and compared configs between backup and new configs then restored VMs from backup. The reason I did it this way is because 1) I had installed proxmox a while ago and new config > old config for stability after adding some necessary PVE scripts (e.g. intel chip, and 2) I’ve had weird issues before cloning drives and a fresh install was easier than risking some weird edge case troubleshooting. It also let me keep the old SSD as a backup in case something went wrong.

Edit: Also recommend going with zfs mirrored on the new install during the setup: target disks options and zfs mirrored. ZFS offers some benefits vs the default lvm.

Absolutely no problem with it being virtualized as long as you have a pci storage controller and pass that through to trueNAS. HBA cards can be found that do this without raid or anything so you can use zfs in trueNAS.

GUI for managing fingerprints/PAM that allows complicated or at least some customization with PAM such as requiring password on first login then allowing graphical fingerprints for sudo, unlock and other prompts with fallback to password.