Not necessarily. Tailscale uses their own servers in order to do the negotiation, but once the connections are opened on both ends you should be directly connected to each other. All without port forwarding or any config on your end.

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works

Start with a VM on your computer and see what you want to do/need from there.

Leaving a laptop on is (almost) free.

1/3 of my refurbished drives died early. It tested fine before I put it in my raid array, but about 3 months in I was getting error after error. I swapped it with my spare and they’ve been fine so far.

This is one.

https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/

What are you trying to run? a VPS is pennies, and a phyiscal server isn’t much more. We have a bunch of servers that are $40 a month each and they come with 5 usable IPs, 32 gigs of ram, 1tb SSD etc. The cost of getting a static IP for home will be almost as much as a server. If you want less you can get less for a lot less money.

I’ve self hosted my own personal website for years now and it’s not really an issue outside of the power going out and my IP changing. I just update DNS and move on. But if this is for an actual work? Just pay the $10 a month, not having to worry about it is worth that money.

My UPS at home just straight up won’t run off of another UPS unless it’s a perfect sinewave. Square wave REALLY makes it mad, and modified sinewave doesn’t work either. No matter what the UPS will refuse that power and only use its batteries.

I can’t find anything on their website about it being sinewave (pure or modified) so I’m going to assume it’s square wave. I’d imagine a high quality PSU found in a server will handle it, but it won’t be happy.

https://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/Anker-SOLIX-G179011A/p152319.html

AC Inverter Output - 6000 Watt Continuous (240V) / 9000 Watt Surge

Pure Sine Wave design provides extremely clean power

Why is this not on their own website?

For us it was more of a liability than anything. We didn’t use any of the high availability features, and every time we needed to remove and readd a host it was a massive pain in the ass and usually broke more things. It was nice for migrating VMs around, but we don’t do that all THAT often.

I’m curious if this datacenter will handle our shitty hosts spontaneously dying and needing to be rebuilt better.

After dealing with clusters before I don’t want any of my machines in clusters.

How does this differ from joining nodes to a cluster? I kinda figured a cluster was their (kinda janky) alternative to VCSA.

In pfSense land it’s called nat reflection. I believe it’s off by default on pfSense, but it makes accessing your own stuff “externally” while inside the network a pain so I’d imagine most devices have it enabled by default.

What you gain in quicksync you lose in raw CPU power for other tasks. If you don’t need to transcode your video, or you pre transcode what needs transcoding at night when you’re not doing anything then you can bog the CPU down then, while still having TONS more power available during the day.

According to geekbench the 7745HX is 2.5x the single core performance, and almost 6x the multi core performance. Under load power consumption will be a lot higher, but idle should be low enough to not really make a difference.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/9360225

https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7745hx

ZFS or other software RAIDs can though. Does anyone stll use hardware raid anyways?

There’s a decent supply of not humongous mATX cases with decent drive options. I found the JONSBO N4 which looked neat, but then saw this reddit thread saying it’s kinda poopy (but see the top comment for a fix). But fancy features like hot swap bays make them pretty expensive. If you don’t want hot swap there’s a ton of mATX cases with 4 drive bays that just aren’t marked as anything special. Cases with power supply basements tend to hide at least 2 drives down there. Or there’s the classic drives in the front and you can fit a ton of 3.5" drives up front in an mATX or even ITX formfactor.

If you’re planning on upgrading I’d highly suggest getting a case with at least 1 more free HDD bay. Replacing a drive in ZFS is a LOT quicker than resilvering a drive. I just did that the other day and I actually thought it was broken it went so quickly.

Depends, how much do you value your data? Is it all DVD rips where you still have the DVDs? Nah you don’t really need raid. Are they precious family photos where your only backup copy is S3? Yeah I’d use raid for that, plus having a second copy stored elsewhere.

Plus as others have mentioned there’s checks on your data for bitrot, which absolutely does happen.

Soldered to a desktop motherboard, so you have pci express expandability. Throw in an HBA and you’ve got like total 12 data ports. Plus two ram slots for 96 gigs of ram (or more maybe?).

Changing the CPU is more upgradability. But there’s no point in upgrading when the only upgrade is an i7 to i9 with 0.2ghz faster speeds and worse efficiency.

Do you already have a NAS? You could go back to your original setup, but with a more efficient CPU and run it all on one box.

N100 devices are neat, but those CPUs are really slow. Running the rest of the computer, plus the inefficiency of the power brick does add up to the power usage/heat output. Consolidating into one efficiently tuned device can save a lot of power.

Aliexpress has some funky boards which are laptop CPUs soldered to an mATX motherboard, if you can find a nicely sized case you could maintain that all in one formfactor, but with the efficiency of a laptop. I have no experience with them, but they look cool and should do what you need. They’re essentially your mini pc but as an ATX board so you have expandability.

The worst laptop you can find could probably be better than even a reasonably specced VPS. Low end VPS are dire, and you can get some pretty decent laptops for almost nothing. If it’s pre 8th Gen. Intel they’re basically worthless on the used market. But they’ll still easily get the job done.

Facebook Marketplace is my go to here in the US. Pre built computers don’t hold their value for shit, so you can pick one up with a nice i5 or a medicore i7 office computer for almost nothing. Just look for Dell optiplexs or the HP/Lenovo equivalents. If you don’t need a lot of drive space (or are fine with external storage) those mini PCs litter marketplace and can go for stupid cheap.

I’d target 8th gen or newer, ideally 10th gen, but one that comes with an i7 might cost a bit more than $300. You can always go with an i3 for now, then if you need more power then the non k i7s tank in value after a few years of being out.

Unless you’re hardcore I’d highly suggest not getting an actual server, especially a 1U server like that. Servers are loud, use a lot of power, and especially in 1U form not that expandable. CPU and RAM upgrades are cheap, but say you want more drives, or to install some weird expansion card it might not have the space.

If photoprism is actually “AI” you’ll want a GPU to do the processing, and 1U servers limit you to oddly sized 1U GPUs. But considering they say it will run on a raspberry pi I’d assume any desktop with a core i7 would do the job. If you can find a desktop with 4 ram slots of DDR5 that would get you plenty of expandability. The DDR5 spec is rated for up to 512gb per stick, so assuming the memory controller (and bios) supports it you’d be PLENTY future proof. But even DDR4 with 32gb sticks should be plenty, and those machines are CHEAP.