I would check out Recallbox. It’s quite polished feeling and looking. It can run on a raspberry pi, or something more powerful. You mention accessing the files and I liked the SMB access because I could just cut and paste my new ROMs over from the PC or phone. I imagine you could set up a script to do this automatically or just expose a read only SMB server for your friends to access. If your games are older, like Atari or Sega Genesis this would work great. If you have big ROMs like Gamecube or Xbox, then you’ll probably need a different solution since copying entire romsets to the device itself may not be practical.

I have seen a DIY Steam-ish software floating around, hopefully someone pitches in to get you that link as well.

I hope your project goes well!

Same, once I got PWM set up right on my fans, my desktop former gaming PC server has been 90% silent. Even when under load, it only kicks up a notch or two. I’m under the roof, so my summer temps will be the real test.

Thanks for the reply. At this point, I’ve decided I’ll need to try both. Fortunately my old router still works. I just need to make some hardware decisions now as I don’t have any hardware with multiple lan ports to try it out on. I don’t want to buy twice, so I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to need to overshoot my requirements a bit but not go crazy overboard and overspending for unused specs. My current router is the GliNet Flint 2 which has an open-WRT advance mode that I’ve messed with a little bit.

Sounds like you are pretty far along in your networking journey. I can appreciate the vLans and the 10G backbone, but a lot of the hardware you mention is over my head. :D I’d take the miniPC route, but like you, I’d like to attach my 4g router as a failover.

Glad to know I’m not alone! Sometimes it feels like everyone else has either figured it all out, or I’m charting new (and potentially silly) territory and nobody knows wtf I’m doing.

I’ve been doing Linux stuff for a long time, but I was still living under my parent’s roof back then so I never had to network anything, I just had the wifi password. After school, out in the world, I still didn’t have my own network for quite some time. Only in the last few years have I really started to grasp how it works well enough to actually do something useful with that knowledge. I’ll take a look at ipfire too. Luckily my current router is still functioning okay, so I have time to play around and see what software will work for me. Right now I have to make some sort of decision about hardware because I don’t have anything with dual ethernet on hand.

I have the fiber ONT straight from the wall. The tech support guys at my ISP gave me all the details I needed to configure my own current router (GLInet Flint 2). I’ve just been not trusting corporate solutions lately. I’m almost completely degoogled on my phone and the recent router banning drama is encouraging me to do this now instead of later when I had originally wanted to do it.

This is good info. I remember hearing a little bit of that and someone set me straight on DDWRT vs OpenWRT as well. I think I’ll take OPNsense for a spin.

Thanks for the reply.

I have devices I could use, but they’re earmarked for other projects. I’m looking at acquiring hardware specifically for this project. I could acquire it at a garage sale or a classified ads site. I don’t really want to spend more than $350 if I can help it and even then, I have to be able to justify that to myself somehow. (since that almost enough to add another 2TB of SSDs to my server). Having said that, if the features I want are only present in pricier hardware, I want to find that out now.

I have a 4g WiFi router I carry around when I travel that I call “the hocky puck”. It also has an ethernet port, so when I’m home, I take the battery out and attach it to my router as a backup in case the fiber fails. If I want to do the same thing on OPNsense, I would need to add an expansion card with more network ports, right? That would steer me from miniPCs to barebones router hardware or a small-form-factor PC build where I could add as many NICS as I have PCI slots.

Does wanting a 2nd WAN pretty much rule out mini-PCs for me?

Even in my God Tier build-dreams, I only have 2WANS a LAN and a management LAN. :D

Uggh, I just got to the point where I’m as familiar with TrueNAS as my old Synology, but I want to move towards more freedom. TrueNAS beats Synology, but where is this going?

I thought that was odd too. Including the MS Office formats with everything else OnlyOffice can open is fine, perhaps even fantastic, but it’s weird as hell to make it the default.

I’m aware of Stash. I wouldn’t have thought of it and that might actually be a good solution. I’ll spin up a copy and see if it’ll work. Thanks for the suggestion. :)

Great to hear. I might give it a try in a limited area, like meeting people from a new hobby or friend group, then expand from there if it works f or me. I definitely see the benefit, especially for ADHD types who might otherwise forget to call someone for 1…2…3…12 months. :-D Thank you for making a cool piece of software.

Looks good. I’ve considered a personal CRM for some time and have been using Obsidian a little bit. Having said that, I am open to something more tailored to the task. A question: what would it look like if someone wanted to export their data out of this tool later? Do I need to be a programmer to migrate away or is it relatively simple?

Yeah, easier is better. I’ll have to confirm what apps outside of Jellyfin and Chromecast are needed, but I’ll compare some basic Roku devices. I could probably score one a online neighborhood marketplace for a few bucks.

I do sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Is there any reason to not combine the commands since the output always prompts prior to changes anyway?

The cables seem to increase exponentially don’t they? First, you have a few computers and a half dozen cables powering things and linking everything together, then you add a couple servers, maybe a second nic on your NAS, and another switch or two since things are now further from the router. Suddenly your office looks like a giant bowl of spaghetti covered in prop 65 stickers.

I run a beelink mini, not the weakest one, not the most powerful one, and it handles docker containers and VMs fine. I don’t have a tkn of integrated storage, but rather this machine handles apps while a separate NAS does all the file storage. Most I ever had running was 2 VMs and a handful of negligible docker containers but I still had plenty of ram and CPU to spare. I also think the minisforum stuff looks good. Their n5 pro nas just came out and would have made a good server with room to grow. I decided against it because I have parts and I want to use them :-) so the beelink is holding down the fort while I Frankenstein together a rig from my old gaming PC in a huge case that will host all my apps and less critical media. Home assistant which will stay on the beelink because it needs high availability. I’ve been curious how the lowest priced minisforum models would fare.

Interesting username. Are you a fellow student of Internet Comment Etiquette?

I know at least some of my containers use Postgres. Glad to know I inadvertently might have made it easier on myself. I’ll have to look into the users for the db and db containers. I’m a bit lost on that. I know my db has a username and pass I set in the docker compose file and that the process is running with a particular GID UID or whatever. Is that what your talking about?

I miss this from cloud hosting. It’s helpful to be able to save, clone, or do whatever with the current machine state and easily just flash back to where you were if you mess something up. Might be too much to set up for my current homelab though. My server does have btrfs snapshots of everything directly in grub which has let me roll back a few big screwups here and there.

That was my first thought. How do you keep it cold enough to run in a place like Arizona, Spain, or Mexico? It also reminded me of my Windows Mobile days before I had a smartphone when someone on a Windows Mobile forum took a Dell Axim x51v and built a dock for it that exposed all the ports so he could use it with an external display as an infotainment/nav system. He called it the Aximizer. An old android phone with a micro-hdmi port might be the modern equivilant.

https://youtu.be/ELANGsiaq5M