I would very much like to move from Google and Microsoft and other proprietary, non privacy services.
I have spent hundreds of $ and thousands of hours trying to setup various different services on various different platforms and every single one of them has been difficult, annoying, frustrating, and ultimately fails.
I have concluded I am just not the guy to do this as I am Windows CAD guy and have no idea what I am doing with networking, Linux or CLI. 90% of the words and terms in tutorials are greek to me.
I am looking for notes (Joplin), Google Drive replacement (NextCloud?), and email (??) on a cloud server. And then video streaming (plex or jellyfin + *arr?) and photo management (immich?) on my local machines.
Let me know if you are interested or know of somewhere better to post this.
Did you think about just letting someone else host your apps like:
- Joplin: https://joplinapp.org/plans/
- Nextcloud: https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers
- Email: https://proton.me/mail
Or generic providers like https://yunohost.org/ which have one click solutions for many different software.
It’s still baffling for me that none of their “budget-cloud” (Hetzner, OVH) providers have not gotten into this segment of taking open source packages and offer as a turn-key system.
It exists, but it’s generally really small shops that I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending.
The bigger hosting providers are fine with the status quo, because it means their support tickets are from people who at least know something about anything rather than complete noobies who need help resetting their password (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just higher volume and not what hetzner staff is trained on)
Hetzner has Nextcloud in their your-storageshare.de offer. It’s a hosted instance which you are admin of. About 5 Euros a month for 1 TB of storage for the smallest tier. This was the way I chose after years of self hosting. Your-storageshare is awesome and I don’t get tired of recommending it. Maybe I should ask for a commission at some point…
I’ll look into some of those links you sent, thank you.
I did try linode which advertised one click setup for some of these apps. But it still required dancing just the right dance just the right way and SSH’ing into a linux computer to initialize everything. Once initialized only one of my computers can sync with it, my phone and other computers say invalid connection. After troubleshooting for several days I tore it down and built it back up and now none of my devices can connect.
I do have Proton and that was painless to setup, but when I share files using a public link other people only get a blank screen. They have basically nothing for photos.
The problem is you’d need someone to do maintenance and updates too, because stuff can/does break and if you didn’t set it up, you won’t know how to fix it.
You can sign up with a Nextcloud hosting provider for access to files, notes, photo management, calendar, contacts, etc…
For email I recommend a solid provider like mailbox.org or skiff.com
For video streaming with Plex and the supporting *arrs you can install all of those on windows AFAIK, so you can probably do those yourself with minimal effort on learning new things.
That is a fair point about needing to have someone troubleshoot for me.
I have been fighting with Plex for 2 years. Tried it on Windows and tried it on TNAS. Despite buying a static IP from my ISP and telling Plex to allow outside connection Plex always said it was unavailable outside my wifi. Most of the time it was anyways, but every once in a while it wouldn’t. It would often just a stream in the middle and say the media was no longer available. On LAN and off. Could never link an error log entry with any of these failures. It would often mis identify movies and shows despite me following the naming schema. For example /Media/Movies/Hulk (2008)/Hulk (2008).mkv would often show up as “The Twelve Kingdoms”
I have thousands of discs I am scanning in and after going through 15 tutorials and trial and error I could never get *arrs to work properly. I couldn’t get radarr or sonarr to watch folders for ripped movies and move them into the appropriate folder, and tdarr would happily check my files for errors, but refused to convert, compress, or find subtitles for my files. It would just “complete” the task in 1ms and do nothing and report it was done. After trying TDARR on the sixth different computer I almost through it through a window.
There is a LOT to learn to start self-hosting, that’s for sure. With most stuff you definitely need at least basic knowledge of how your network functions, ports, NAT, and that kind of stuff.
Plex external access needs a port opened in your router to the plex server, it will try and do that automatically with UPnP but in some cases that’s disabled and you need to setup NAT (port forward) manually. Your ISP could also be using CGNAT which means you can’t open ports at all, but buying a static IP should make sure that’s not the case (although you certainly don’t specifically need a static IP for Plex). Often the message in Plex is wrong and will say remote access isn’t working when it is in my experience.
Depending on your router/modem there may be some kind of security system running on it and that could be interfering with Plex as well.
Doing some external testing with a port scan on the plex port against your internet IP might help tell you something to figure out what’s going on.
The *arrs not moving files or picking up watch folders is usually a permissions issue between the user they are running as, and your file/folder permissions for the source/destination folders. Windows definitely makes this simpler as you don’t run into that issue as long as you’re using an administrator account that has access to everything.
I’ve never used tdarr, but wouldn’t your DVD rip software already be doing the encode for you anyways? You can also configure your DVD software to name the files and place them in the plex media folder, instead of the extra step of using radarr/sonarr to do it, since those are more for internet download organization.
Plex can also grab subtitles for you, at least that’s how I manage mine.
Is skiff good?
I made an account when they were blowing up but I haven’t touched it.
Have tried it for a while and Its ok, nothing super special. It’s nice that they offer 10GB for free for. I would choose skiff any time over any other less privacy focused providers like outlook and Gmail. But my favourites still stand with Mailbox.org and Protonmail.
Wow, thanks for the mailbox.org recommendation. Looks like an easy and reasonably priced way to move away from Google for email and calendar.
I’m just going to give you props. I have worked in Managed IT Services for a dozen years and some of the worst clients are construction, engineering and architects who use solidworks, autodesk and archicad products.
You’ve eaten humble pie and admitted that using computers as a tool, and systems design are different and though you might understand a lot, just like I can build a 3d model, the devil is in the detail.
Building robust solutions that meet your business continuity plans, disaster recovery plans, secure your data for cyber risk and to meet ISO and yet are still somehow usable in a workflow for end users is not something you just pick up as a hobby and implement.
The way I handle technology Lifecycle is in 5 steps: strategy, plan, implement, support, maintain. Each part has distinct requirements and considerations. It’s all well and good to implement something but you need to get support when it goes wrong or misbehaves. You need to monitor and report for backups, patching, system alerts. Lots of people might do the implement, but consider the Lifecycle of the solution.
People do these things at home but they’re home labbing, they’re labs. Production requires more.
Anyway a bunch of people closer to your part of the world will probably help you out here.
I just want to again recognise and compliment you on realising and openly saying you want help rather than just do the usual “oh I know best” that I hear over and over usually just before someone gets ransomed on their never patched log4j using openssl heartbleed publicly exposed server infrastructure.
This is an interesting question.
Off hand I’d say look for a local SMB network consulting firm - the type that maintains numerous small clients (shops with 2 to 50 employees).
They typically charge in two ways: base by-the-hour as-needed or a “maintenance” plan where you have a contract and it includes a certain number of hours per month.
They aren’t cheap - in the $200/hr range depending on your locale.
But maybe by talking to them, you’ll eventually find a person or company that wants to take on this sort of thing.
You could also look for a local Linux/technical club. Or maybe a local school that has IT classes, could be a project for a class, or the teacher could know someone.
Just some ideas. I do think this is an upcoming market segment.
Somebody else mentioned it, but I want to second yunohost. That’s where I started years ago, and remain today. I run it on a box at home, and it has Nextcloud, Navidrome and a couple other things installed on it. About as easy as it gets.
For media server (Jellyfin, etc), I have tried several solutions and ended up with swizzin community edition. The hardest part was setting up the VPN to integrate with the torrent client, so I don’t get booted off the Hetzner host. Note that you could also set this up at home.
As you can see by the replies, lots of people want to help you, but very few want to set this stuff up for pay. If you really want to go that route, check out sites like fiverr or upwork.
