Go with used & refurb business PCs right out of the gate instead of fucking around with SBCs like the Pi.
Go with “1-liter” aka Ultra Small Form Factor right away instead of starting with SFF. (I don’t have a permanent residence at the moment so this makes sense for me)
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Buy an actual NAS instead of a rats nest of USB hub and drives. But now it works so I’m too lazy and cheap to migrate it off.
Use actual nas drives. Do not use shucked external drives, they are cheaper for a reason, not meant for 24-7. Though I guess they did get me through a couple years, and hard drive prices seem to keep falling.
I would have taken a deep dive into docker and containerised pretty much everything.
Instead of a 4-bay NAS, I would have gone with a 6-bay.
You only realize just how expensive it is to expand on your space when you have to REPLACE HDDs rather than simply adding more.
This. And build my own instead of going with synology.
I always redo it lol, which is kind of a waste but I enjoy it.
Maybe a related question is what I wish I could do if I had the time (which I will do eventually. Some I plan to do very soon):
- self host wireguard instead of using tailscale
- self host a ACME-like setup for self signed certificates for TLS and HTTPS
- self host encrypted git server for private stuff
- setup a file watcher on clients to sync my notes on-save automatically using rsync (yes I know I can use syncthing. Don’t wanna!)
What is the downside of using tailscale over wireguard?
I don’t think there’s any significant downsides. I suppose you are dependent on their infrastructure and uptime. If they ever go down, or for any reason stop offering their services, then you’re out of luck. But yeah that’s not significant.
The reason I want to do this is it gives me more control over the setup in case I ever wanted to customize it or the wireguard config, and also teaches me more in general, which will enable me to better debug.