Nine

Rocky & RHEL

I’m wasn’t implying that you shouldn’t host it yourself at all. Just maybe use a VPS for hosting it yourself.

Getting buy in on the family & friends aspect is being able to match or exceed the popular free services. If there’s a perception that it’s not reliable then it’s highly unlikely they’ll keep using it. So the last thing you want is to have something happen to your internet connection, NAS, etc. At the end of the day it’s the pesky perception equals reality thing that dooms things like this and tanks the spouse approval factor.

Self hosting XMPP works well for most internal things. IMHO communication software that you’re relying on shouldn’t be hosted at home.

Both of those that you mentioned are great. I’ve used ejabberd in addition to that. I think prosody is better. Here’s a link to a list of more servers.

Another option since XMPP can do E2EE is use conversations.im it is my go to for XMPP hosting.

TBH, if something like invoice ninja isn’t working for you, even the paid hosted version, then maybe just use PayPal?

Some things are, but the core functionality is easily extended through modules and you can find a lot of sites with them. Some of the best modules are going to cost you some money but it’s worth it.

That being said Odoo is overkill if you just need to send an invoice. Odoo is perfect for running a business though. It can and will do EVERYTHING and then some.

I know people who run their entire businesses on it. Website, HR, inventory, time clocks, billing, etc etc. it scales really well too. Largest business I know using it has 100s of employees. They even have a paid developer on staff that writes and maintains custom modules for them. Smallest business I know of using it has 5 employees, including the owners.

It’s seriously impressive software!

Are we just gonna not talk about OP using 10/8? 😂

That’s really neat! Thanks!!

I’ve found nextcloud to be slow too when dealing with 10s of GB or more of data. Anything less that seems to be fine. I don’t use it myself for that reason.

The synology stuff is neat but I personally wouldn’t use it. There’s a lot of stuff that is abstracted away from you and when you run into a problem it’s not easy to resolve. Plus you’re already running things that can do more.

If you want something like it casaos would be worth a look. You just take a base install of Debian 12 and run their script on it. You’ll get the ease of use that synology has without it fighting you when you want to do something different.

Once you have that going it’s just as simple as getting next cloud going and anything else you want. Which is just one click in the webui. It can manage all the containers you have running on the Fedora vm too. So your reverse proxy, blocky, etc shouldn’t be a problem to run on there.

Unless you REALLY want the synology apps and stuff like that. If that’s the case they go with xpenoloy.

I use RHEL/Rocky 8 for all my home server stuff mostly because i like my home server stuff boring and stable.

Since you were considering TrueNAS, maybe consider something like Debian/Ubuntu + CasaOS. That will give you a good base and webui to work with.

It’s not going to be a lean as it could be but it should give you enough guard rails and hand holding to get you started. Then you can figure out the rest of your needs from there. If you don’t like it you can always wipe it and try again with something else.

I’d stay away from the TrueNAS, Unraid, Proxmox, etc. mostly due to your hardware and that it’s your first home server.

They’re not bad at all, but a lot of the stuff is abstracted from you and since you’re more than likely going to want to tinker with it having a standardized base install with a distro that has a lot of documentation is going to be very helpful.

I haven’t had the time to look into NixOS… but damn that’s just fucking magical…

Came here to say the same thing.

At the end of the day you simply can not beat unreasonable effectiveness of plaintext.

Testing ideas with kubernetes before moving to the POC stage

It wasn’t meant to be taken literally. What I mean by that is if you’re the type of person who enjoys the upkeep of something as critical (though maybe not so much theses days) as email then go ahead and host your own password vault service. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done and couldn’t be done.

My point is that there’s going to be times where you NEED your password vault and having it be down because something happened at home or your VPS had a problem is a really shitty situation to be in.

Of course there’s work arounds and edge cases to everything too. For me planning and building for those possibilities came down to what can I do that is the most reliable, simple, and boring. Because that’s what most people need with anything that is critical.

IMHO much like backup, password storage should be reliable, simple, and boring. Kinda like flushing a toilet or flipping a light switch.

Having gone through all of these options I have thoughts.

Option 1 sounds awesome but will almost always leave you in a situation where you can’t get your logins when you need them in an emergency. You’re always depending on a chain of things. Depending on your situation it may not be a big deal. But this option sucks, imho.

Option 3 sounds amazing because it gives you the control of option 1 with the ease of option 2. But… unless you’re the kind of person that enjoys hosting their own email server you really don’t want this option. Fun in theory but not so much when you realize you now have a 3rd job.

So that leaves option 2. It’s great but you’re depending on someone else. This is the option that most people should choose too, imo. However it lacks some of control and trust that option 1 and 3 have.

Sooooo, that leaves us with option 4, the onion option. Breaking up your data into layers and using different tools for them.

So first and foremost I want my password storage to always be available. For me that means Bitwarden, (though I’m evaluating protonpass currently.) this is the outer layer. Things that can and should be stored here are stored here. I use it to manage web logins and 2FA tokens for those sites. I also use it for storing autofill data eg credit cards. I don’t use it to hold things like my gpg keys.

Next layer is pass. This layer is mostly things that I need to have logins or other information on headless/remote servers. Think self hosted lab services like a mariadb/postgres or backups. This is easily kept in sync with git. This is the layer where I’ll store things like gpg keys and other VERY sensitive data that I need to sync around.

For other things on this layer I use ansible vault. This is mostly used for anything where I need automation and/or I don’t want too or can’t easily use my yubikey for gpg. This is kept in sync with git as well.

Lastly the inner layer I use AGE or PGP. This is for anything else I can’t use the above for. So my Bitwarden export/backups are in this level too. I also use this layer for things that I need to use to bootstrap a system. Think sensitive dotfiles. This can be kept in sync with git as well.

Git is the best sync solution imo because you can store it anywhere and use anything to sync that repo. Just throw that raw repo on Dropbox, use ssh with it on a vps, rsync it, etc. you’ll always have it somewhere and on something.

My work flow goes like this Bitwarden -> Apple/Google/Firefox -> Pass -> Ansible -> AGE/PGP

This allows for syncing things as needed and how needed. It also gives you the option of having an encrypted text file if/when everything fails.

Neat idea, would be interesting if it used your own content from DLNA, Jellyfin, etc. The code looks simple enough that it should be possible to add a plug-in/provider for that stuff.

I think that it’s not going to have a long lifespan though. Being a simple and easy front end for various streaming sites might paint a target on it. Rightly or Wrongly.

I can see it having a longer life if it were to integrate some other technologies aside from the above like IPFS, BitTorrent, etc. The libraries to do that are already readily accessible eg LibP2P. Though that again might paint a bigger target.

Either way it’s definitely really neat and I’m sure a fun project to fork and explore if someone is feeling up to that kind of work.

This is the best answer. I use it regularly to keep hundreds of TB in sync across nodes. Works extremely well and is pretty much hands off once setup.