962: The Home Server / Synology Show

Welcome to Syntax. Today we're talking about our home server setups, what we're running, what we're running on them, why we have them, how much data we got going on, what's going on with that data, and just generally. What's up with running home server stuff? What's a good process for doing that and all kinds of stuff? My name is Scott Talinsky. I'm a developer from Denver. With me, as always, is Wes Boss. What's up, Wes? I'm excited to talk about this. I feel like we...

We did a Synology home server show probably four years ago. And a lot has changed since then. And I feel like we're always talking about our home servers. And we're like, we got to do a whole show laying it all out. Especially, this is going live during the holidays. You got a little bit of time over the holidays. Why not spend...

installing virtual machines and banging your head against the wall to make stuff work. Of course. Yes, why not? All right. So the whole idea with this episode is we're going to first talk about like... The hardware, why you might even want a home server. Do you also use it for backing up? And then as well as like what software do you run on it? What kinds of apps are you running on it? Both like handy stuff as well as.

like media you know plaques or jellyfin and downloading things and we'll have to have cj on at some point because i know cj has a pretty crazy downloading setup which is spans many countries that's pretty cool and like also how to expose them to the internet as well like how do you get access to these things when you're out and about so first one

Why do we use home servers and what is the stack? So maybe let's first start with the actual hardware that we're running ourselves. So I'm running a Synology. DS 918 plus. This is several many years old. I probably have run it for about six years now.

I have 16 terabytes in it with a RAID setup that works out to just over 10 terabytes of actual backup space. Over the years, I've upgraded it to 16 gigs of RAM. Even though it says you can't do that, it works just fine. I recently... upgraded it to two and a half gig networking with a simple like $20 USB dongle which is unbelievably has changed how fast transferring things

to it uh it's obviously like two and a half times faster it used to be a gig wired um did you end up doing that too scott i did i did the uh usb dongle i dongled it and uh yeah big improvement there absolutely that's amazing it's so anyone who doesn't know there's a like a real tech chip and most like usb to ethernet adapters use this chip inside of it and you can simply just install this package on your Synology and that will be the driver for it and then you simply just plug it in

Hook up your Ethernet to it. And then the old ones you can keep plugged in as well should that ever fail or get bumped. And then you just set the 2.5 gig one as the priority. and uh and then your networking is good i fussed around with the like dual what is it smb version three allows you to like parallel send i could not get it working for the life of me and

If I would have known that just spending $25 on this dongle would have two and a half X'd my speed, I would have. I should have known that earlier. Yeah. But I also I slapped two 256 gig SSD drives in it. So if you're running applications, there's a read and write that needs to happen. And you have like these. like actual hard disk drives that need to spin and find the files on the drive and bring them back.

and that could be very slow especially when you're running like apps on them i specifically noticed it when i'm using like jellyfin and you have frequently accessed uh files like thumbnails and javascript files and css all of those things that when you're using an application need to be served up quickly as well as there's like a write cache as well where if you're writing

data to your SSD you can write it to an SSD much faster than you can to the hard disk drive so it'll sort of like ingest it quickly and then just throw it over to the slower drives as it has time to do so so that was a big upgrade in making things feel faster as well as like the whole dashboard feels a lot more snappy since i did that and then i have it auto mirror to backblaze b2 so backblaze v2 is just a

a spot where you can host files or upload files. And I use a app on the Synology called Hyper Backup. And what that does is it just basically just constantly is

watching folders and uploading the new versions of those files. So that way I have both a Synology local as well as I have a backup in the cloud. And now that I have... fast internet at my house and decent internet at the cottage i have been tempted to do a second sonology at the cottage and then you can mirror them mirror them now but like that's a lot of money to spend

on hard drives, whereas like cloud hosting is very cheap. So I've run a very similar setup to you. Obviously, we have the same Synology that we've had for a long time. I have 16. terabytes also i the big difference for me is that i have two terabytes of cash so i have a big old cash man running two one one terabyte cash drives

That's good. So that just hangs on to more stuff for longer. Hangs on to more stuff for longer. And I guess you can, when you are transferring stuff to it, that right cash is a lot bigger. Yeah, quite a bit bigger. Yeah. So that's pretty much the only difference.

you know i've been running out of space online because of how much video i upload like yeah it's getting absurd so i've been actually going through and deleting old video project files on mine manually and finding stuff even like right now i just ran and we'll talk about some of the software running but i just ran like an indexing on copy party on my on my synology and i'm just like going through and seeing like

client projects that I had that had like 20 copies of every image or 40 copies. Yeah, like I have old WordPress projects that are like five or five gigs. I'm like, should I really be spending like eight cents a month to to store this? Well, I was thinking, I was like, oh, I should get another drive. And then I'm like, you know what? How about I just go through it and actually delete my stuff? Because I don't need more space. I don't need more space. Yeah.

What's interesting about the drives is that we're at a spot now where it's almost cheap enough just to slap SSDs in the NAS itself. and that would make it both quiet like you can't put this nas in like your office or bedroom it's loud as hell because it's constant like writing files to it but and then it's also like slow so

I'm at a point now where I was like, if I built a new one, would I go for like 80 terabytes of like slower hard disk drives? Or would I try to go like... eight terabytes and go all in with ssds i want both for not very expensive that's what i want yes right right exactly

Let's talk about apps that we actually run on our home servers. We're talking about Synology here, but we'll talk about running a home server on literally anything. Scott runs a Mac Mini. I run Home Assistant for all of my smart home stuff, which I'm a big fan of that. I run Jellyfin for all of my movies and TV shows. I really like that because when we go to the cottage, we have Starlink.

And it's a very slow internet. Well, it's not very slow, but it's relatively slow. So what we'll do is we'll just download stuff at home where the internet is fiber. And then we'll be able to stream it to the cottage at a lower bit rate, like on demand. And then it's much quicker to be able to download and watch a show that way versus trying to download it right when you're at the cottage or stream it from some website.

yeah yeah word i also have audio bookshelf i recently got which i find really helpful as well i paid for audible for years and years and years and i lost all of my i was really upset that i like lost all of my things that i had

Paid credits for they're like all gone. I don't know if that's normal or not when you stop paying for audible your credits go away and you lose all the books that you paid for over time but i was kind of cheesed at that because there's a couple books i wanted to go back and re-listen to so i got audiobook shelf

to reclaim those books as well as like the kids and stuff. They, they like listen to audio books. Yeah. And audio bookshelf is great for podcasts too. I haven't used it for that, but I know it works well for that. Oh, yeah. The one thing I like, I paid for a audiobook shelf iOS app because you can download locally. And I did that right before I went on a flight without internet. And I love that because then I could just listen to them.

Listen to them constantly and I'm slowly getting into prowler radar sonar all of those but I i don't know it's it's a lot of work to it's a lot of work to that so what are those so prowler is a torrent indexing radar and sonar are

um like auto downloaders for tv shows and movies things like that music so they're just like a whole setup to get into it but If I am streaming stuff, I'm just using either Jellyfin and just downloading the torrent directly on the NAS, or I'm just using something called Streamio, where you just...

You stream it directly from there. And that's pretty sweet. I do occasionally use it for hosting like node applications and whatnot. I was running Coolify as a VM. And we'll talk about that in just a second. But it. It was not fast enough to host all the applications that I wanted. So I ended up having to pause it. It was eating up all my RAM. So I was like, I need to build. I think what I'm going to do soon is just build a dedicated. local server that's not for

like NAS and media and stuff like that, but simply just for hosting my projects because like I have several I have several like WordPress projects that I'm still paying for for hosting. And I was like, I probably they don't get a lot of traffic. You could throw Cloudflare in front of it for caching. I was like, I should probably just put this on the box in my house and serve it up from there. Probably save a couple hundred bucks a year by doing that. And then I...

Don't use it for surveillance. I was dipping into that at one point, like running your own surveillance software. But I've been using Unify Protect, which has a hard drive in my house and just records constantly. that app is sick. It's so fast. It's so good. You can scrub through it. It's like so much better if you've ever fussed with like a ring or like I still have lots of wise cameras you have to look at the clips and try scrub around the unify protect stuff is like

four thousand times better yeah i i haven't gotten into any of that stuff that i'd be interested in but i like would require so much work in my house to be able to wire those cameras up and just getting the the a bunch of them are like just plug in you know their wi-fi but the best ones are are poe i don't even have like good locations though for plugs and stuff right like oh yeah yeah it's a pain uh for me the stuff that i run i run

on my nas so i have two home servers one of which is a mac mini that you can maybe see over here that's running all the time and that's connected to the nas obviously but it is also have my nas which I run things on. And I've actually been slowly moving most of my things over to the NAS or the Mac mini. The big problem is, is that I don't have a container management software solution set up yet. So I'm just kind of YOLO running stuff from the terminal.

or from Docker as I go. And then therefore, if things are crashing or if I need to restart, I gotta go manually rerun everything. On my Synology, I pretty much run Audio bookshelf. We have a lot of audio books for my wife and myself. I run Qubit Torrent on there. That app sucks, but it's like the most reliable one. And I do have Prala, Radar, Sonar.

Is it Prowler? Yeah. Yeah, I have those installed and running, but I couldn't tell you if I've ever opened them up. Maybe. I think I probably have at some point. Yeah, we're at this weird spot where I was like... I'm really into piracy for many years as a kid, but the streaming services got so good. What are you talking about piracy? Well, for Linux ISO. Sorry, not piracy. Downloading Linux ISOs, you could stream them very easily.

So for like many years, I just didn't fuss with any of this stuff because it was just way easier to pay for three or four apps a month. But it's starting to get like... It's obnoxious. We pay for like Apple TV and Netflix and Prime. We pay for like four or five. And often I can't get the stuff I want, which is so frustrating. So if that's the case, then I... I find it on a Linux website. Yes, possibly. You know, I...

Then pretty much run everything else on my Mac mini for like media streaming. The problem I was having was like trying to do transcoding of like really large. Blu-ray discs that I ripped from my own personal Blu-ray collection. Trying to transcode those on the fly on my Synology would just crap out.

in any of them whether that was jellyfin plex or uh mb and then you know what after dealing with jellyfin and dealing with mb and trying to then get the bootleg install for the app on my samsung tv for the jellyfin i was just like you know what i'm going back to plex and i installed plex on my mac mini and it transcodes everything and it works

It works great. I don't fuss it. The app on the TV is actually very, very good and everything just works and I'm very happy with that setup. So the only thing I haven't really done is configured it to... run outside of my network. We're pretty much just using it internally. We'll talk about that. I got a solution for you.

Well, I have solutions for other things. I actually run quite a bit on my stuff outside of the network. One of those things is a Minecraft server. So one of the things I run on my Mac mini is a Minecraft server for my son and his friends to all join on.

actually cool minecraft has got like really interesting like hacking scene obviously but like there's the bedrock version and the java version the bedrock is the one that installs on like the nintendo switch or ipads and then there's the java version which is like a completely it's a different game to some extent even though it's the same Yeah.

somebody wrote like a translation layer between the two. So I'm running a translation layer. So now you can join on switch or you can join on this and I have, you know, being able to configure in, in update. And I'm now managing a Minecraft server for a bunch of, uh, Second graders, third graders. He's in third grade now. Crazy. Yeah. That Minecraft stuff is super interesting to me. I need to try it out because every now and then I run upon like somebody.

trying to port minecraft server to rust or you know trying to port it to go and like that seems like a rabbit hole to go down but it seems like a interesting compute problem apparently the like java version was just an absolute nightmare so it's not written very well yeah i think that since changed over time with the amount of money that is coming in and out of minecraft yeah but

Yeah, no, it's actually it's a lot of fun, a lot of fun to run that server. So let's talk about actual hardware. So we talked about like what we're running, but what are your options as well? So you're thinking about running a home server.

what do you possibly need right you you need some actual physical hardware which could be an old pc could be an old macbook could be an old rack server you can run linux on these you don't necessarily have to worry about what OS is running on these things, right? Like obviously a lot of them are like just custom Linux distros, but you can run Mac OS, you can run Windows and a lot of the stuff, as long as you have the ability to run VMs.

They will run very well on these. The one thing I do want to say here is that like, be careful with older tech. So like right beside me here, I have a 2009 Mac Pro, like beefy. awesome like computer still pretty good i can install the latest os on it you can upgrade the graphics card and i was like working on it a couple months ago and then i was like you know what this is probably

too expensive to run because these old Macs, especially a lot of them that have Intel chips in them, they use a ton of energy. Right. And like I looked it up. This Mac Pro at like a normal load, you know, not idle, but not like full, fully kicked out. It's 250 watts, which is about at Ontario electricity prices, which is...

Electricity is very cheap in Ontario because we have a huge-ass waterfall. It's about 90 cents a day, right? Yeah. And if you... Scott's Mac Mini... uses at medium not at idle uses seven watts right think about that like 250 versus seven and at a normal load it uses about 20 24 watts so that's 10 times less energy. So at my cheap Ontario prices, that's about 300 bucks a year. And like, what's, what's a Mac mini cost? Like six, 700 bucks. Yeah. Unless if you get the one.

So refurbished. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case. something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to century.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right. It makes sense.

the math maths folks go out and buy yourself a mac mini if you're looking to do a home server because You run that thing like you have to run these things constantly and it's it uses quite a bit of energy even I did the math on my Synology one at one point and it was over 150 bucks a year to keep it going which is you can pay for a lot of cloud storage or uh or uh arm processing for that yeah no absolutely huh glad you did the math on that i uh don't have the patience for that

Do you know that that's my pet peeve with people is that they don't do the math. So often, like we have an electric vehicle and so often you come across posts being like, cost so much to do it or like have you noticed it in your electrical bill or like that's how everyone gauges whether the electric and it's like you don't need to notice it in your bill literally do the math

you can figure out how much you pay per kilowatt hour you can figure out how much these things consume how many kilowatt hours they are using And then you can multiply those things and figure out how much it costs to maintain it. These are not unknowns. You don't need to hear from somebody that something is very expensive to run. You can literally figure it out. That's shocking.

It's going to blow people's brains. I'm going to, I'm going to, that's the hill I'm going to die on is people not doing the math on simple things like that. Yeah. The same with like leaving lights on. I leave lights on all the time. I don't care. I did the math. It's not a lot. LEDs. Yeah. LEDs. This isn't incandescent bulb territory anymore. No. Yeah. No, that's true. You don't need... Obviously, I turn them off at night.

But I'm not one of those people being like, if you leave a room, turn the lights off. Yeah, that's not a thing for us either. Yeah, I agree. I'm with you on that one. Yeah, that's never been something I've been concerned with since we got these fast bulbs.

Software. You need some sort of software to manage. either or both virtual machines and containers so let's talk about the difference between those two so a vm is like running an entire computer virtual computer on your machine right it has its own hard drive system you know virtual hard drive system. It has its own networking. It has all of that stuff. Whereas a container is running on your host machine. A container is like Docker. That's the most popular one, right? It's running.

on your host machine so it's running on your laptop or whatever but it's it's has a limited container access to things that are outside of it so you still have to install things to that container and you still have to do that but you're exposing things like like folders and ports and networking

from the host machine to the actual container. So a VM is going to be more powerful, but more resource intensive. So in my case, I was trying to run Coolify as a VM, and I was running several other VMs as well. it was becoming a bit too much. Whereas like I can run Lots and lots of Docker machines on my Synology. No problem because those are a lot less resource intensive. What would you use a VM for? The ones that I'm using. So like Home Assistant OS. So many of the plugins.

in Home Assistant are themselves Docker containers. So you can't Docker inside of a Docker. So you need something that's going to supervise and orchestrate all of these.

Docker containers and it needs to be at a higher level. Same with like Coolify. Coolify is just you can install it to Linux, right? But you can install it as a VM. So I installed like a. Ubuntu or something VM I ran it like that and then I installed coolify on there and then coolify for those who don't know is a self-hosted kind of like run your own versell you can deploy multiple applications to it you can have grids of many machines you can spin them up you have a networking layer

I love Coolify. Coolify is fantastic. So if you want to like run like a node, you want to run like a node app and have them build and get integration, all that stuff. But you want to self host it.

Not necessarily just like at your house if you want to run it on like some servers like on Hetzner or something like that You can do that with coolify and you can install coolify as a vm or you can sell linux as a vm install coolify on that and then containers just simply a docker container right i mean and and so many things run inside of

containers from pretty much any of these apps. But if you have something like Synology, there's container management built in. Do you do anything specifically for container management? Like, I've been looking into some systems like here's a Mac app called orb stack that is supposed to be like a nice one. I've heard of all these different systems, but I don't run anything for managing containers. On Synology, there's a Docker app and I just use the GUI. So you log in and you click.

Click go on the thing you map your your folders you map your ports And then if the the thing reboots it will automatically restart your containers from their last state or it will just boot them fresh depending on on what settings you have so that's all i have on there and then and then on the synology as well they have a whole

like virtual machine so similar to if you've ever used like virtual box on the mac or you can install linux isos and whatnot so as a vm i'm running i was running coolify and home assistant os and then All of the other apps that I was running were running as Docker containers. Yeah, same. Yeah. And for me, even for me, for Home Assistant, I have it on a little Raspberry Pi, just on its own thing.

Oh, yeah. So it's not even virtual. It's literally its own hardware. Right. So other options, if you've got a piece of hardware and you want to run it on there, you don't want to run, like obviously you can run Mac, Linux, Windows Plus. docker and virtualbox or some other vm software but proxmox is a really popular one unraid hex os is another interesting one that seems to be coming up there's a lot of

These like home server OS's that you can sort of take a look at. Some of them are more towards the NAS side of things. Like Synology is a NAS with the ability to run apps on it. And then a lot of these other ones are. They're not a NAS at all. They're just simply a home server that you can run apps on.

It does a lot of nice stuff for you. There's like a GUI. You can log in. You're not in the terminal with all of this stuff. As much as I am a terminal head, I like being able to just log into a GUI and click the buttons when I need to. I kind of need that or want that.

in my in my life they're so they're such a massive youtube uh community of people sharing these tools that i it's like too overwhelming for me when i look into it and there's just like this and then this and then this and then this and then this and i'm just going i don't know what to pick just i want something easy yeah

let's talk about exposing it to the internet so you run all these applications but you want access to them when you're out of the house but you also don't want random people having access to your applications if there's no auth so what's your move for that scott My move is cloud flare tunnels pretty much exclusively. So I have on my Synology, I have cloud flared running as a container.

And then I use tunnels pretty much for everything, which ends up being really nice and easy because if you have that cloud flared installed, you have it installed on your computer and it's running. You're really just saying point this IP to this domain. You can put.

it behind a username and password if you want to have another layer of protection in front of it so a little cloudflare window will pop up and make you sign in before you can have access to that resource but cloudflare tunnels are great because the alternative would be for you to go into your router and say, all right, this port is going to be open to the internet with my IP and I personally am not enough of a security person to...

really want to manage that or think about the consequences of that. Yeah, forwarding ports is not the move. Forwarding ports is not the move. So for me, just being able to establish that tunnel and make it nice and easy, static IPs for the stuff that I'm going to be connecting and then that's it, is great. I'm a big fan of that. Yeah, so I am also using Cloudflare Tunnel. So I run Cloudflare D.

That's the daemon that runs on your computer and will proxy traffic from a domain name. So I have a domain name that... every single app is a subdomain. So I have like Synology.whatever.com, photos.whatever.com. And by running that, a lot of these things like Home Assistant, whatever, they will give you the ability to...

install a plugin that is Cloudflare Tunnels, but I run it as a Docker container. And what that does is it allows me to proxy anything on my home network. So it doesn't have to be running on the Synology. So I run... other stuff that has local servers like i have six or seven instances of wled that control like the Christmas lights on my house and the mirror gym, all of that stuff. And I often want to be able to access the Christmas lights.

when I'm away, especially because if I go to the end of my driveway, I lose Wi-Fi. So I need to be able to access it through the LTE on my phone. Yeah. So Cloudflare Tunnels, you simply just go into the Cloudflare GUI and you say, all right. point this subdomain to this ip address and port and it might just be local host which means it's running on the same machine as cloudflare that's running on my nas

or it's going to be another IP address that exists on your your home network. Another one is 3D printer. I have a what is it? Flash Forge printer with a camera on it. And I'm running like a third party firmware on it. So I'm not using their cloud service. So if I want to be able to monitor the print when I'm away, I simply just expose that out via my CloudFlare tunnel.

So did you say you have it installed on your router? No, I have it installed as a Docker image on my NAS. Okay, sorry. And basically, because my NAS has access to the home network, it can then... it can then proxy outside internet traffic to anywhere on my home network you know what i i have it running on my mac mini and my nas and that's probably not required probably not the thing is with

with running it on each machine is that you don't need to make sure that your applications are exposed to your your home network so if you're running like a vdap you need to explicitly Use the dash dash host flag, and then that will give you an IP address and a port, and then you can then forward that. So I do run, I run CloudFlared on my Mac, like my laptop here. Okay, you do.

And I use that just so I can turn my local on and off because every now and then I'll want to expose something and I'll just write, I'll just type cloud flared tunnel. localhost whatever the port is and then it goes to local.westboss.com and then that's exposed to the the greater world. But then things like my Jellyfin, my WLED, all of my local apps that are running on my home server, those are just constantly running with the Cloudflare Daemon. Interesting.

access so most of these apps will have their own auth built in you know like uh jellyfin will have username and password home assistant will have username and password but some of them don't like especially if you're just building an app and you're running it yourself and you don't have any auth in front of your application how do you protect that from the the wider internet so for that i use something called cloudflare access and cloudflare access is essentially just

you just put it in front of your tunnel you have to configure some rules around it depending on like sometimes you want api endpoints to be hit without having auth like for example jellyfin yeah if you want like a jellyfin android app to be able to access it you can't sign in there you know you have to give like an api token or something but

You can set it up. For me, I have it set up with email me a token, text me a token, or sign in with GitHub. And then you whitelist your email address, your phone number, and your GitHub. uh id and as i say if any of these are met then allow the person to go through and it just it works beautifully yeah that's so much nicer than exposing your your port just yolo to the internet yeah yeah

And hoping somebody doesn't find it. Yeah. Oh, my God. Tailscale is another one. People love Tailscale. I've never used it myself, but that seems to be another super great. I use Tailscale. I used it for. uh vibe coding from my phone there's a terminal app that connects really well but you have to have a tail scale connection there and

It worked really well. I think I prefer the cloud flare tunnels approach rather than like being on that VPN of the tail scale. And I don't know if you need to do that. I'm not enough of a pro at that. But like, I think you need to be on a VPN.

of the tail scale to be able to connect and that was kind of cool running you know open code commands for my phone for a little bit but then I decided to touch grass and stop doing that I also use, I've got both at the cottage and at my house, I have Unify.

networking so i can use something called teleport they have an app called wi-fi man and you just turn on teleport and installs a little vpn config on your mac and then you can you can access your whole home network At any time so if for whatever reason you needed to access something That is on your home network that you you haven't yet forwarded you can install that so I use that once to access to mount my Synology

because I just wanted to drag some files into it as if I were home. So I just turned on Teleport. And Tailscale will do that as well, as far as I understand. So that's kind of where we're at right now. I really want to build... I have that itch. Like I want to build a computer, you know, and I'm kind of curious about like, what should I do? I kind of, I think the Mac mini is probably the move just given how fast.

those things are but there's not a lot of expandability you know so maybe I don't want to spend like thousands of dollars on a home server so I'm curious down below connect it Right to your Synology. Then you got the storage. You got the speed of the Mac Mini. Yep. Yeah. But like, what's the hard drive space on your Mac Mini? I don't know. I don't use it really. You don't use it a ton. I'm curious if that would be the move. I certainly would want some sort of arm chip running.

I've thought about doing the Mac Studio thing because then you could run local LLMs on there. But that gets very expensive for sure. That's the other thing I'm thinking about is that... Should I also be getting something that has like a GPU in it so I can run these LLMs locally? And then I realized like my LLM budget is... like $8 a month. I'm really not spending all that much. So it's not a big deal to ping the APIs. But let us know down in the comments.

What you have, what you've built, send us photos on Twitter, our blue sky, because I love seeing everybody's rack. If you want to see it off a rack, I will send you a picture of mine. It is very dusty. It was very haphazardly crimped ethernet cables. This has got the dustiest rack on earth. Yeah. It's just brutal.