I had the same dilemma. It comes down to this in my opinion:

• Do you trust yourself and your current networking gear, software, security setup enough to host this yourself at home?
• Do you trust your vps providers tech stack, ethics, privacy policy etc. AND your own ability to secure it to host it on a vps?
• Do you trust Tailscale the company who’s in the business of “zero trust vpn” solutions to use their product?

I didn’t check if they were audited and if so how, but I went with the free Tailscale option, the most comfortable option for me now. Might change once I get more competent at the subject.

Since they are old, i would imagine the power efficiency isn’t the best on them for a 24/7 HA cluster at home. Unless you have an abundance of solar power or something. So I would use them as a test branch for whatever I want to do for self-hosting and learning

I would use them as learning platform for myself. Play with Active Directory DCs, replicataion, failover, recovery, networking etc. Just because more practice in that is what would be needed for advancement at work.

Others mentioned Kubernetes and Proxmox clustering. I could also use some sacrificial storage and compute to play around with those technologies so I could improve my self-hosted services.

Yeah, I tried tuta. I have (overall less but) the same issue with proton. I just want to use my own client apps of choice.

I have registered with mailbox.org and while the trial period is very limited, the web ui is minimalistic and basic looking. You could say outdated. I seriously consider paying for a “team” account for me and my wife. The price is unbeatable. Aside from the gui, the features I need are there.

I just need the Wife’s approval. She’d be migrating from yahoo of all places.

I can second most of the suggestions. I do not host an office suite (for now?) but I am syncing my keepass dbs over syncthing along with my notes and important documents. I think since 2016 or so. It works well.

Before I had a server I just synced them in a triangle between my phone, laptop and desktop. Most things had 3 copies this way. Any device could offload changes to another. Now I have a central node and the option to sync as before if the server is down. With Tailscale, I don’t need to be on the same wifi now eiter.

The keepassDX limitations are not a big deal if all you need is basic autofill.

Mail providers are hard to chose. I am leaving proton for the lack of easy smtp and their locked in nature. Get your oen domain and you will be able to switch more easily in the future.

After registering I wasn’t even able to pay for a sub to check out their offering for myself. English docs are lacking. I think they are focusing on fr and nl regions. Support e-mail autoreply also only replies in those languages. They are really small scale, ~2000 users by their own admission. Which is ok, but if you advertise a service, at least let people pay for it, so they can start using it, however janky it is.

I am finally in a position to have hardware running at home without it bothering anyone, so I cobbled together the hardware peaces I thrifted for over the years.

I played around with Proxmox and lxc containers, which are awesome, but not really useful for my usecase. I currently needed the essentials to get started and to finally have some kind of backups.

So TrueNAS scale it is. I got the ACLs down quickly, so the built in apps are no problem. But some things are not suited to be run as a built in app, I found. To avoid these headaches, I created an ubuntu server vm and a network bridge to allow for host access, and spun up those containers there.

I went for too little storage on the vm in the begiining (10G) so of course it filled up to the brim in a day. So I had to learn how to extend an lvm. Which worked only after I made some space available. It was so full, even mkdir failed.

I disagree about the you don’t have to part. You can, and you should explore these dialog options if you feel like. They are part of the game for a reason. It’s role play. This was just a standard conversation option with an NPC, and it also had an option to resolve the conflict it created.

The option to convince the guards that you are good was functionally broken. Gamoo explains that as well in the post above. The point is, it’s a bug. It’s far from perfect.

Also bugs: You can (at least we constantly ran into this, even recently) also lose romance options because of events that happen at long rests. They overwrite the romance events.

The mage tower quest, one particular and important NPC was stuck and didn’t even have a turn in combat. Just T posed there. Reloading the save did not help.

That said, the game is great. Just not perfect.

Juniors need to start somewhere!

It’s also a remaster of a game that aged very well in my opinion and didn’t really need a facelift.

I could live with this. I like the gnome “workflow” but I hate how restrictive it is. Not to mention that it runs worse on my laptop compared to KDE. Thanks for the inspiration! I might just try something like this.

Aw man, every midrange phone that would be interesting comes with MediaTek SOCs. I should check if the custom rom scene is still dead for phones with MT chips… Do they still withold the sources needed for rom developement?

I know this is a late reply, but I didn’t notice the notification. Sorry about that. What I do is, I open a free virtual card for each service. I have one for netflix, one for spotify and so on. I set the monthly spending limit just above of what they cost.

This way if I ever unsub, I can delete the card and they can’t charge me, or if they have a data leak, they only stole my deleted cards.

Revolut was mentioned before, but let me elaborate on it.

They are essentially a bank but you can open an account through their app with the needed IDs.

You load money onto your account via a card payment from a conventional bank account, so no transfer fees apply in that sense.

They have one time use virtual cards and free persistent virtual cards. You can order physical ones if you want. You can set limits and recurring transactions per card. It even recognizes subscripition services and lets you know in advance if you need to top up the account before a payment is due.

Caveat: ads for their own services to buy crypto, gold, stocks and crap. I personally wouldn’t keep huge sums on my account, but know people who use it extensively. Even after years of usage, they werent burnt yet.

I have no experience with customer service, as I only use it for what you are looking for. According to the internet, their CS can be abysmal.

Very interesting! It’s tempting, but I can already see the “Major Change ticket” coming in for “Divorce” if I asked for tickets at home :D

Yes, well shopping lists worked similarly for us as well. Wife would send me a list on discord, and go by that. That might not need to change. I guess we’ll have to see for ourselves how things go what sticks.

I’m afraid of falling into the trap of having too many new toys to play with, so I’ll keep simplicity and tasks.org in mind! For taking notes for myself, I have Obsidian set up the way I like it. I must say, I under utilize that one as well. Joplin, I used in university some years ago. I should maybe revisit it to see if I find any use for it.

So far this is the sanest setup for my usecase. I was only looking at the AIO docker because I thought it would be easier to scale back, rather than up from the regular. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the tip! I wouldn’t have stumbled upon it by myself. Looking through their demo, it’s rather complex, maybe too much for what I need. The price seems fair tho. With the source being available I’ll consider trying it.

An interesting take, and not very popular among the other comments, but I suppose you have your experiences and reasons to say this.

As I mentioned RAID is on the table, no problem with that. It is kind of the point to have a safer, more centralized storage for important stuff, and space for keeping media.

Speed wouldn’t be a concern. Noise is, since my apartment is very small. And reliability over time would be. Especially power cycles, or spin down - spin up events. I figured if I used SSDs, I could leave the whole rig powered on 24/7 But with HDDs I think I would probably need to turn the system off for the night.

Correct me if I am wrong about enterprise grade SSDs, but if I have the power on time and the TBW values for the drives along with the manufacturing date, ones with reasonable combination of those could be bought for a reasonable price. After some testing they could also be trusted. At what point would you expect an SSD like this to last some years in a home server environment? I am not an expert but with some pointers this should be easy to figure out, which is why I am asking.

I don’t plan to neglect backups. Currently I use Syncthing as well, but only between non-redundant storage locations, so I have duplicates. Like phone pushes photos to pc or laptop, those sync them between each other. Important docs that I can’t lose are also on all 3 devices.

And I plan to keep the local storage of mission critical data around on some clients at least. I just want to have a central, more robust, redundant system where one or 2 disks can fail without my data being gone or corrupted.