I have 2 questions:

Do I understand the colors correctly in that /home is deprecated and shouldn’t be used? What’s the alternative in that case?

Where would you guys put configuration files for services? /srv seems like an adequate directory

Honestly, in my opinion it kind of is (though I’m not an expert on it). Except for convenience I don’t think a browser should be allowed to access my USB devices. Though I would welcome it if it was enabled with the same kind of request that pops up when a browser wants to access the microphone or camera.

Oh I have it disabled. Pretty much among the first things I do with any new windows install is disable and uninstall as much bullshits as microsoft preloads. It gets pretty annoying though how much there is you have to opt out of. I also like complaining about them so you’re not too wrong there.

At least they are still better than samsung in that regard who preload facebook on their phones as a system app thereby preventing the user from uninstalling it.

The difference is that these programs are not preinstalled. They are shortcuts to install said program.

Honestly, what else would it be? Text takes ridiculously little storage compared to a single picture of a decent resolution.

Depends I guess. For me the biggest concern when I bought my Synology was simplicity of usage and idle power consumption which is much lower than I could get with one of the older computers I have lying around.

I am currently using 2 16TB drives in Raid 1 and was planning to move to Raid 5 (or maybe it was 6) if I need more storage by adding a 3rd drive.

What would you recommend instead?

Well, theoretically yes but it doesn’t continuously send data and both WiFi and Zigbee also allow for operation on various channels. Does your neighbors WiFi interfere with yours?

Also, most WiFi devices now support 5GHz WiFi anyway so it’s even less of an issue anymore. The bigger problem would probably be WiFi interfering with ZigBee. But again, that can be resolved by changing the channels.

Isn’t Zigbee always on 2.4GHz regardless of country? Trying to shift the frequency to 915MHz for all devices sounds like a lot of work with questionable benefit

That’s a good point. Another one I have is sort of failure tolerance. I used to have a really unreliable router which would often crash and could only be reset using a full power reset. While it was in this state, wifi obviously stopped working but my zigbee devices where still available. I used to have a zigbee button linked to a smart plug for toggling my router off and on again.

This shouldn’t be a concern for most people obviously but I wanted to share my experience.

Another point I want to mention is that zigbee works at 2.4Ghz just like basic wifi so they can still interfere with each other.

Zwave on the other hand uses another frequency (I think it was around 860MHz) but is more expensive.

Performance is good and streaming works well. Not a fan of the webinterface personally but there are client programs available for all platforms since navidrome exposes the subsonic api.

Personally I use sonix on windows and linux as well as symfonium (paid but really great app) on android.

The only thing I am missing from it is better user management so that I can restrict specific users from accessing parts of my library.

Regarding access from outside my network I specifically wanted to avoid needing to be connected to a VPN so that’s why I use a cloudflare tunnel. Since my upload rate is not very good I have a Pi-Hole DNS server at home so that queries to my domain while in the home network don’t need to leave my network.

+1 for navidrome.

I’m also using that and have it exposed to the web using a cloudflare tunnel. What I didn’t like in the beginning but really appreciate now is that the service itself doesn’t have a lot of permissions and cannot delete files or change their metadata. I’m hosting it in a docker container and everything except the config file is mounted read-only.

I’m not sure how relevant that is but it gives me more peace of mind exposing it publicly.

That’s basically what I’m doing right now but the web version sucks in my opinion. Embedded content takes forever to load since and it’s not cached across sessions which makes quickly switching between multiple pages annoying

What do you use on android? The main thing I want linux compatibility for is for reading my notes on my computer, not for actually creating them. I thought about just annotating PDFs directly but I’m not sure how good that will work

On the topic of note taking programms.

Is there anything like onenote that is linux compatible, especially for handwritten notes? The closest in regards to decent handwriting support I could find was xournal++ but that felt kind of limiting to me especially without the infinite canvas and the ability to switch notes within the program (think onenote sidebar)

I think the Pi 4 was the first Pi with gigabit ethernet. All the Pi’s before that were limited to 100Mbit. For that reason, syncthing is probably a bad idea since it will be very slow in terms of syncing speed

Can definitely confirm this. I started with a Proxmox system which had a TrueNAS VM. TrueNAS just used a USB HDD for storage though. Setting everything up and getting the permissions set correctly so I could connect my computers was a pain in the ass though.

Later I bought a synology and it just works. Only thing I would recommend is getting good HDDs. I bought Toshiba MG08 16TB drives and while they work great, they are obnoxiously loud during read and write operations. They are so loud, that even though the NAS is in a separate room I have to shut it off at night.

Meanwhile the Seagate Ironwolf drive I used for TrueNAS was next to my bed for multiple months and was basically silent.

Thanks for your reply. I think I managed to solve this issue and have updated my post to reflect this. Apparently I had a setting disabled in Pi-Hole which caused my DNS requests to be forwarded upstream for some reason, even though there existed a local DNS entry.

It returned the local IPv4 address of the server and two IPv6 addresses belonging apparently belonging to a cloudflare server in california.

I think I managed to fix the issue though. I have updated my post to include my solution

I think I fixed the issue by enabling the Never forward reverse lookups for private IP ranges option in Pi-Hole. After that I flushed my dns cache again and called tracert for my domain name. I only get one hop directly to my server now. nslookup also shows only local addresses now.