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
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.
Personal privacy is a right. If someone commits a crime and the equivalent of a warrant is issued that data becomes evidence and it becomes your job to discover what’s on the devices.
Jobs like these exist in that balance between privacy and justice. A judge or however your justice system works has said that the potential crimes that person has committed justifies waving that person’s right to privacy in the same way as searching a home.
Your job and scope is narrow and you should take that seriously but would you rather someone who doesn’t respect privacy (e.g. a department inside the police force) does this job?
For the tools, those are the industry standards. they’re just tools and yes they’ve been abused but they or tools like them are necessary to do that job.
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
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.
digging into sources/references I’d take this as a pretty reliable source. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/tech-and-telecom-law/big-tech-ai-spree-revives-accounting-devices-that-toppled-enron
cloudflare and a simple docker container. There’s a reason why they’re the biggest. Annual cost of the domain and everything else is free.