Another reason to self host https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-start-self-hosting/
Self hosting will be possible only when there is a software which doesn't have settings and runs on a box which also doesn't have settings beyond wi-fi settings. Plug it into the wall and forget about it.
Which is actually what WD is trying to do but apparently your setup can go down for days because it has an intermediary component which needs to be managed, can get compromised and can go down.
Buy a Synology DiskStation, and you get an easy-to-use yet customisable OS, that receives security updates for up to a decade.
Also comes with checksums/data scrubbing (btrfs; like zfs), Docker support, snapshots, E2E diff-based backups to your choice of cloud provider, an optional cloud-based NAT-puncher if you don't like/know to set up port forwarding, etc.
Sure, the hardware has a markup, but you're paying for a nearly-Apple-like experience that's still crazily customisable. I've had zero complaints.
It seems a lot of guidance about securing your NAS (eg [1]) starts with "it's bad if it's directly connected to the internet". So if you want to use the internet, it may be a better bet to use a managed service (or maybe look for a more security focused product?).
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/recent-qnap-and-synology-secu...
But I’ve been in a frugal mood lately, I find it hard to spend over $500 on an item like this.
I believe the $249 DS223 does indeed support all of the features I mentioned above.
It does get pretty tight, I probably wouldn't want to be adding any more services, but it's fine for my use cases.
https://xpenology.org/#What_is_Xpenology
having said that i bought the $200 model (220j) with a steep discount with points on amazon and it works fine but is a little slower than the others. i just use it for rsync (which never-deletes by default) and as an SMB server.
note the 220j unit doesn't do btrfs. the nas software seems pretty good but i don't use much of it. it takes some configuring to setup proper user home directories to rsync with but it only took me a few minutes of googling to figure it out. also their macos backup agent software kind of sucks but if you're using it for rsync or as a NAS volume it seems to work great. i don't use any of synology cloud or public cloud features.
I did that, and I have to say it does NOT play with linux very nicely. I had to change the UID and GID on my desktop for my default user and all of my files because Ubuntu starts with UID 1 and Synology starts with UID 26, so after you figure out how to mount the disk as nfs it says you don't have permission to access it (because your UID does not match the UID of the device). Solving this was one of those problems where you go back 10 years and so many people have posted forum posts and the answer was always some weird hack, and Synology has never fixed it. Changing the UID of my user on my desktop was the easiest hack. Then I installed another OS to dual boot and had to change the UID for that one too, so I could access my files, and somehow the "easy" NAS option has made me jump through lots of hoops.
Turns out self hosting is not easy even when you buy a Synology.
I just did not find it plug and play. It took a lot of messing with it. And I am a relatively experienced linux user!
For some anecdata, my Synology has always played perfectly with a vast assortment of Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS for many years, even a Chromebook!
I legitimately don't remember a single error, or ever having to do any debugging around supported services (obviously my own services and dockers have been a bit more involved)
I use SMB though
I’ve been using nfs for years and apparently just got lucky because I only ever have one user on every machine I use.
Even my crazy hacked together Debian running WD My Book Live (or whatever it’s real name is) has given me zero problems over the years.
My only issue with them was when I emailed them to confirm that I could have it connected to my network but not have internet access (people calling "wifi" or "ethernet" internet still drives me up the wall) since I was going to block its internet access on my router.
First I had issues getting support to understand the distinction between "network" and "internet". Second once I finally did get someone who understood I was asked "Why" or "what was I trying to accomplish". It almost put me off purchasing it that I would be asked why I would want a device like a NAS to have zero internet connectivity.
That aside I would agree and it does feel like a very apple like experience (maybe a bit more technical). I mean it isn't as easy as the time capsule was years ago, but its up there.
Granted, it's frustrating when you are a well-informed person that knows exactly what they're looking for. I just accept it as a cost of dealing with other people.
I mean I recognize that they may be dealing with far less technical people and maybe that is a valid question.
I get what your saying but wouldn't "I don't want my NAS to have an internet connection but I want to make sure it still works locally" be mostly self explanatory?
Maybe that is me putting more faith in other people than I should, like obviously it won't be able to update, sync with a cloud, or any other number of things. Maybe thats not obvious?
But also to be clear the bad taste it gave me was seeing products that should have no need for an active internet connection and yet are paper weights without it. So when a company seems to be pushing me to connect something to the internet, especially something as sensitive as a NAS... it sets off alarms.
Synology doesn't update their Kernel. Only the latest release model in 2023 comes with 5.10. The others are on 4.x, and if you bought any before 2020 you may be on 3.x. On the 2023 model You would have thought they would at least be on 5.15, no.
All Entry level model doesn't come with BTRFS.
But apart from that, it is still the best in the market right now.
Plus: people here calling for Raspberry or Synology do not know 'average' users
- People dont know what is ethernet
- Most people cant navigate GUI of synology or other stuff
- Some of the hn gurus need to work as CS for a week. People get confused what USB-A or USB-C cable.
- For hn-gurus with Rpi/nextcloud: These products are sold to average joe that has no clue about tech.
- for average joe people, google is internet, facebook is family and whatsapp is chat.
- The sales guy that sold it just works for commission. Capitalism.
- Same is for WD. They sold the product for $100 8TB so that is the quality one expects.
The corporations are working in direction where this is never possible but given how they all deal with data this is the only future that will be secure and makes sense.
We are slowly working towards such a future and common users by and large will appreciate it, but it's not going to be the future most tech nerds envision it to be.
We as tech nerds value our ability to power user, but this is quite simply at odds with the interests of common users.
Things like further and further abstractioning of file systems, further and further integrations of operating systems with online accounts and other internet services, further and further "appliance"ing of computer systems, etc.
No third parties will be automatically rummaging through your files and using it to stuff a dossier with details about you to sell or exploit for profit.
The webserver in your living room will only host your personal files, so it isn't a single target that can grant a hacker massive amounts of valuable data from hundreds of thousands of users at once if they can manage to get in. If a hacker takes the time to break into your server, they maybe get a handful of baby photos and MP3s, but before that they'd have to somehow know about and find your server specifically in the first place.
When your server gets hacked, you aren't going to pretend it isn't happening, or lie to yourself about what happened, and you won't have to spend days wondering what the impact to you was, and you won't bend over backwards to try to downplay that impact for the sake of your shareholders.
Just because it's not running under a single domain doesn't mean hundereds of thousands of users can't be affected by a single vulnerability. If everyone was using Nextcloud on Ubuntu and a vulnerability is found somewhere in that stack then attackers could easily scan the internet for unpatched installations. Happens all the time with corporate IT.
Also, people don't just store family photos and MP3s. They also store intimate photos, financial data, company data, health data, scans of passports and other official documents, utility bills, plenty that can be used as proof of identity and proof of address. If you had access to the contents of my hard drive you could easily impersonate me in almost every context.
That's fair, although it's much easier to find a heavily advertised corporate network and scan that than it is to scan the entire IPv4/6 space looking for a particular vulnerable server (which isn't to say that it doesn't happen). One advantage you have with a home server too is that hackers can't create legitimate accounts on your server to poke around and look for holes.
> They also store intimate photos, financial data, company data, health data, scans of passports and other official documents, utility bills,
People do have those things on hard drives, but I don't think most people would put that on their living room webserver. At least I don't think that was what was meant by "Imagine a future where all your photos, videos stay at your house on a box and others who have access can view them from anywhere." I assumed that "box" was a separate web/file server specifically designed and used for sharing your personal files and not the same device people would use to pay their bills and store their nudes. Keeping those two things separate would certainty be good practice!
I was thinking of self hosted replacements for things like iCloud, Google Photos or OneDrive. People use cloud services to access, share and upload their files from all their devices wherever they may be.
Sad non-average user noises.
Correction: People don't know what is computer.
I grew up in a time and an environment where I felt everyone taught and everyone shared.
It feels like more and more everything is made harder despite everything really being more accessible than before - if you only know.
I firmly believe that "appliance" computers like Macbooks, Chromebooks, game consoles, and smartphones are the future and ultimate destination of personal computing. Much as I hate to say it: Fucking nobody cares about being a power user, about messing with their computer. For the commons, a computer is merely just another appliance and tool to serve and enable bigger interests, a means to an end.
We should also remember that, eventually, the time will come when we become the technologically illiterate luddites, unable to "get" the new fangled tech that the youngsters will immediately master as they point and laugh at our seeming ineptitude.
No, people care only to have somebody that cares around, so that they can solve their issues. Do you think people with macbooks etc never encounter issues with software/hardware and all just work automatically always without having to care about anything? This is an illusion, and in the end of the day you (or someone) has to put the extra work.
It is similar to what happened to electronic and other devices through the years, everything becomes more user friendly but also more complex and opaque the same time, so younger generations were getting more and more clueless how these devices worked. I do not know how things will go now, but I see the same trend as computers, I do not see the older generation becoming technologically illiterate luddites (ok I do mot use tik tok so maybe that makes me one) as much as I see that the the big part of the younger generations not knowing much more than touching stuff on a screen. I do not see that the proportion of more technically adept people increased at all. But yeah, maybe there is some new neurotechnology thing or whatever at some point that changes things, but not something I see with present tech.
This is will not happen. Every other tech fellow I speak to (working in SAP-/Oracle/google/type Giant to a startup) tells me that I just do it as I need $$$. Done. As long as they can afford/get the appropriate help. They dont care about average joe that knows only bestbuy or google photos.
> Do you think people with macbooks etc never encounter issues with software/hardware and all just work automatically always without having to care about anything? Thi
The advantage is that with macbooks/chromebooks/windows (even ubuntu to some level) is that you can google and get some info. Worst case I have seen customers in Apple Store - with a old (i.e) 2 year old macs - asking the Genius to please copy everything to their new device.
With Raspberry or WD - one cant do it. (Sure there are some Linux User Groups where an old fart will do it for a beer but most people dont know this)..
It is a difficult challenge, ideally: one gets some kind of govt authorisation for a FAAANG-account - and it will get backup up with FAANG for some $/month. And one can produce some govt ID to restore it. Of course it has other issues - but for average Joe whose privacy is already lost - they would be too happy to just to get their wedding/holiday pics back.
I have had the fortunate pleasure of interacting with many genuinely intelligent, skilled, wise people, but it wouldn't surprise me if those same people couldn't understand computers or whatever new fangled tech that comes our way. I don't necessarily blame them either, lives are limited and they spent what they have in places they felt were worth it; we can't have everything.
Some enjoy doing it, some just purchase microwave food and some just pay or get someone else to do it for them. Then there are chefs in the media that try to make cooking more accessible with the message that it's not as difficult as people make it out to be.
However some pushback/warning against self hosting because we don't yet have a good alternative to reliable "microwave food" is good I guess.
As anything else! As the above picture shows.
With the added bonus that you are cluless of the state of a Cloud (no insights of its real state, its actual practices, also kept in darkness, only over confident corporate statements).
(actually there are quite fine self hosted products with maintainance updates and help where you do not have to be an IT practitioner to use, equal to the level required from Cloud services, just look around)
If it works and has no internet access, you'll just leave it there, running for a year, two years, when suddenly something changes. Either you need to upgrade the underlying OS to a new major version or some 3rd-party client changes, and you're confronted with a wall of stuff you must do.
Or even if it's something as simple as MongoDB, after a patch (not even a minor version bump), no longer being supported on the Raspberry Pi 4 even though MongoDB themselves posted a blog post a couple of months before that change showing how to easily install it on this device.
This is just to say that a chroot SFTP server and the lftp client is all one really needs to push backups to wherever with functionality similar to rsync but with slower directory enumeration because there isn't a corresponding sync client on the remote end. That's fine with me since I can be asleep when this occurs.
For cell phone backups one of the many SFTP clients is AdminHands but I find anything for cell phones is mediocre at best.
Genuinely concerned ive missed something
Hacker news is not the entire world.