Buying a NAS changed my entire digital life

Coffee
204

I too have a NAS and a separate home lab server where I do similar things. In addition to the already mentioned services, I run:

  • Stirling PDF: Edit PDFs etc.
  • Portainer: Have a GUI overview of all my running containers, you could technically even manage compose files through Portainer but I prefer to have it as a local file
  • Traefik: Instead of Nginx Proxy Manager. It’s a little bit more complicated, so I might end up switching to NPM or Caddy.

What I can recommend when working with docker compose is using VSCode with it’s Copilot Agent capabilities. I simply tell it that I want a new service (e.g. Stirling PDF) and it will actually create a new docker compose file similarly structured to how I have created my other services.

Now my next to do items are to setup HTTPS for my NAS and automate backup of the server… :smiley:

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205

I checked out Stirling PDF but I think BentoPDF is actually better because it’s client-only running. Nothing gets really uploaded. The developer just released a major update: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1pxmrfn/bentopdfs_biggest_update_1151/

services:
bentopdf:
image: bentopdf/bentopdf-simple:1.15.1
restart: unless-stopped
container_name: bentopdf

The compose file is pretty simple too, you only need that when using a reverse proxy. Otherwise add port-mapping.

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206

Running my own NAS for almost 20 years and a Network with different VLAN and clear Firewall rules for IoT/ Airbnb etc (moved recently almost every hardware to Ubiquiti) I always considered myself as quiet good in IT/Network as someone without IT background.

This changed when I read this thread :sweat_smile:

Reverse proxy limits port exposure, right? Wouldn‘t it be more secure to access with a VPN? What are the pros and cons of reverse proxy?

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207

Yes it would be more secure. It‘s actually the best way of running your services on a NAS and access them remotely. But if you want family or friends to access things like Jellyfin, you‘ll eventually run into a wall. It‘s just much easier to tell my brother 3 things: „This is the server-address, this is your account name and password“. He can then run it on any device.

So if wouldn’t be sharing my NAS with others, I would just use a VPN like Tailscale (Wireguard) and not expose anything to the internet.

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208

By the way, I’d be really curious how you experienced those 20 years? We went from simple file servers to Docker, Compose stacks, reverse proxies, Jellyfin, hardware transcoding, SSDs for cache and volume, 10 Gbit networking, more powerful CPUs with iGPUs etc. → a single consumer NAS today does things that needed multiple server racks in an enterprise environment 10–15 years ago.

Did it feel like a slow evolution, or more like a few big jumps? And were there moments where something suddenly made everything much more powerful or simpler?

209

as I said:

I used it mainly as simple storage. Longtime woth some media manager which was on a Raspberry Pi, do not remember the name. So I do not have the knowledge to describe the technical development

Discovered a use for Home assistant etc only recently but with two small kids it is not so easy anymore to dive into a new topic

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210

You made me think that I have been running some kind of network for over 20 years, but for me not much had changed. Maybe at the beginning, I had SATA drives with ext3/JFS/XFS shared with NFS over a 10Mbit network. Services ran on bare metal or maybe were abstracted with BSD jails, or Xen containers.

Today, they run ext4/ZFS on NVME drives on 2.5Gbps networks (I avoided 10Gbps to save on energy costs). Again bare metal or docker/KVM/lxc containers. Actually, with AI making storage expensive, I’m actually buying some SAS drives with old 2nd hand LSI HBAs to build a backup machine. I’m experimenting with SeaweedFS as an S3 compatible storage option.

211

You motivated me to improve the way I use my NAS. Main use for me at the moment is Drive, Active Backup for Business, Photo and Surveillance Station for the security cameras I have around the house. Also I run another NAS at my parents building as Backup (Hyperbackup). Until now all was done with quickconnect. Now I followed your route, installed revers proxy, did stop the use of quickconnect, finally installed a VPN connection (needed this anyway for my heating system and is in use now for active Backup) for clients outside my homenetwork.

I also used this motivation to finally getting used to a password manager.

You asked what changed for me in the last decade: It is still some trial&error when setting things up. I thought AI would help but in fact I got misled multiple times and had to use old school technique like own research, a nights sleep to understand, re-try…

At least to me your thread had an impact - I improved my setting I think quite a bit. Thy for bringing up the topic

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212

I found another use: normally I listen to podcasts on my phone. When I want to avoid watching a video I normally have a bit of a process to get it into audio on my phone:

  1. Download audio with yt-dlp -x
  2. Establish a pairdrop connection to phone
  3. Transfer it over
  4. On phone move it to my podcast folder
  5. Refresh podcast app

New process:

  1. Download audio with yt-dlp -x
  2. Copy audio file over to the network podcast folder
  3. Computer detects new file
  4. Computer generates a podcast.xml file to include this
  5. Phone is subscribed to podcast and detects new episode
  6. Phone downloads and queues new episode

Next step is to put a simple download form so I paste the yt URL and the computer does steps 1&2 automatically.

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