The most important thing for everyone to remember is that if you don’t fully own the thing such that you can install and run it without asking permission, or if it isn’t simply free and open source, then it can go away at any time.

Honestly, if you’re running public facing services, you should run the latest everything you can. There’s a risk that stuff breaks, but at least you’re not having to worry about patched exploits.

I’ve been using a number of different tools which I interface to my nextcloud.

My main nextcloud has a llm plugin which was really easy to install, you just install the plug-in, make sure that you are configured properly with python in your path, and then run an OCC command to download one of a few models.

https://localai.io/

I also hosted localAI, which was a little bit more involved, but the website did a decent enough job of explaining exactly all the things that you needed to do in order to get all the different types of AI model working. Besides LLMs, it also supports text to speech, speech to text, and image generation.

Two things that are important: first, if you are server doesn’t have a pretty advanced video card then you’re going to be using the CPU exclusively for AI, and that’ll be pretty slow. Second, I found it very quickly that the amount of RAM you have is critical. My main server is a core i5 4th gen, and so I put AI software on another one of my servers which is a core i5 7th gen. You would think that the latter would work a lot better, but it had half the ram, and it basically wasn’t even able to get started.

Besides hosting ai, if you have a desktop computer or gaming laptop you can run local AI models. There’s a fantastic piece of software called Faraday that works pretty well on my laptop. You can get more and more sophisticated models depending on how much memory you have.

https://youtu.be/aLy_vVLUHZk

Krita has AI dal-e support for image generation available as a plug-in. I haven’t used it yet because I just got it started downloading last night before I went to bed, but the installation process has defined in the video seems accurate and was extremely easy and mostly automated.

https://youtu.be/AU8NDSBIS1U

Perhaps ironically, lemmy. I had the database catastrophically fail early on, and ever since then federation has been broken with most major instances. I kind of prefer lotide anyway, much more minimalistic, less of a focus on upvotes and downvotes, and the code base is simply enough that I’ve been able to hop into it and make changes.

If you do end up using postgresql, over time the database could end up getting fragmented and that can lead to increased latency, so routine pg_repacks imo are a worthwhile thing to schedule.

One thing that might work is uPnP to open ports.

The level of raid is fundamental to the operation of your raid array.

As I recall, RAID 0 is striping. It will give you faster throughput because your array can pull values out of multiple drives at once. RAID 1 is mirroring. In that, half of the drives are used for data, and the other half are used to back up the first half. RAID 5 is parody, and that’s what you’re looking for. Essentially, your drives will mostly be used for storing data come up with the last one will be used to track what information is on the other four, so you will have one drive for redundancy and the other four will be storing data.

Hardware raid versus software raid matters to the extent that parity calculations are relatively expensive and so if you’re trying to do RAID 5 on software raid, that’s going to eat up more of your CPU power and reduce your drive throughput.

I don’t recall truenas in particular, and what you using the nas for is really what is important, but I do recall that some Nas software doesn’t even want you to be using hardware raid because it will be using its own software algorithms that are separate from what you would typically consider to be raid.

I’ve never used syncthing, but nextcloud has become a major part of my life in part because of the notes app, which I use for my work log, as well as nextcloud news, which lets me read news from any device and which articles I’ve read are tracked so my news feed is actually news. A third thing that’s neat is I keep my windows user folders in my nextcloud folder so my computers have the same synchronized user folders – if I download a file on my main PC it shows up on my travel laptop and vice versa, and if windows crashes I don’t lose the files in my user folders, I just resync.

There’s a writeup out there where you can use the GoDaddy API to update your actual DNS IP every time your external IP changes. Not free, but works pretty well.

As long as they’re mostly the same. For example on many controllers no mixing SSDs with HDDs.

I really hope that they’ve added some algorithms for mirroring. I still want an algorithm to mirror based on user subscriptions, since those are the videos most likely to be watched on one instance and so the most useful ones to mirror…

To be fair, pretty much every government breaks its own rules, particularly when privacy is involved.

We have the largest and most invasive world governments in the history of the world thanks to the overwhelming technology that allows such a thing. And even governments that pretend to follow the rules just get their buddies in another country to do their dirty work for them. “I can’t spy on you, but England can!”

Typically nobody is going to use raid 0 and give you access to all the drives. I suspect your system is set up for raid-5 so 3 drives are data one is parity.

When the system boots there’ll be a prompt to press something like ctrl-D to enter disk setup then you can delete the raid array and set up each disk as individual drives.

One important thing with SSDs is that many even today aren’t great with power loss detection.

Kingston makes a very reasonably priced data center class SSD with lots of RW cycles and specific power loss protection. I haven’t tested them yet, but it’s a good sign they at least mention it in their specs. I previously used intel data center class SSDs, but they’re harder to get ahold of these days.

You can get surface mount cable raceways that connect to the wall with adhesive. Works well and also looks great.

https://www.amazon.com/Raceway-Management-Channel-Paintable-Concealer/dp/B07GPFDL1K/

Another option is called “sticky backs”, they’re not as nice looking, but they’re commonly used by electricians in cabinets to secure wires:

https://www.amazon.com/Adhesive-Mounts-Holders-Multi-Purpose-Sticky/dp/B08XLR46Y7

One thing is if you’re really concerned about the walls, maybe put a strip of masking tape on the wall before the sticky backs or cable raceway. That way you don’t need to worry about the adhesive on them taking the paint off afterwards.

My ISP had the same problem, ultimately I was able to convince them to let me use my own router. In doing that, I was able to at first use a standard off the shelf router and later a pfsense firewall to handle NAT that exposed my servers to the outside world.

Before I was able to do that, I was pretty convinced I wasn’t going to be able to self host. There are other options, such as special VPNs for self-hosting, but that’s not really the point, is it?

I like fanless PCs. Some have gpio headers for home automation purposes.

For just self-hosting, I’d probably like using refurbished laptops. Seems nuts, but low power, included input and screen, built in UPS, and sometimes you can get them for like 100 bucks. You can just use a USB or wifi device for home automation purposes if need be.

It is a little dangerous to do in case you experience a crash or a power failure, but you can get a lot more bang for the buck from your server hardware if you have a decent amount of memory by tuning your different system components to keep more data in memory and write to disk less often. This can be done with sysctl.conf and dirty writes, or with php or MySQL using more working memory and not writing to disk as often.

It was particularly required when I was still using a spinning drive, since random io was a show stopper. Even using a decent sata SSD it can be beneficial however, letting the system choose to write at more opportune moments instead of doing it in the middle of read ops.

I can vouch for the power of a nuc, they’re basically laptop grade hardware.

Dominant failure modes are fan failure and ssd failure. The latter can be solved by using a quality ssd, the former by keeping your nuc out of dirty areas. You can clean it up if it gets dirty, but it’s a high risk operation, I’ve seen fan blades break.

I’ve used opnsense in other applications since where I’ve wanted a good firewall that runs on x86 hardware.