Seems so, yes.

I’d look at wireguard / tailscale / headscale and hide your services behind a vpn

Yeah, if there’s a full system failure without any backups and no option to get the system operational again then I would land in clone the drives before trying to restore data from them.

1. RAID is never a replacement for backups.
2. Never work directly with a surviving disk, clone it and work with the cloned drive.
3. Are you sure you can’t rebuild the RAID? That really is the best solution in many cases.
4. If a RAID failure is within tolerance (1 drive in a RAID5 array) then it should still be operational. Make a backup before rebuilding if you don’t have one already.
5. If more disks are gone than that then don’t count on recovering all data even with data recovery tools.

The first thing to check is whether you can install your CAD software on a virtual machine with your current license. If you have good internet at home and already own a CAD machine then it might be easier to setup VPN access and remote control that machine for your Windows needs. Sunshine/Moonlight works good if you have the bandwidth for it.

Interesting that Toshiba/Seagate has best 16TB stats and WDC bad ones in comparison, but for 14TB it’s reversed. My homelab disks apparently has 0.71% risk of dying after 22 months (seagate exos x16 st16000nm001g).
edit: WDC does good in 16TB too, their only outlier there could be due to low number of disks in deive count. And the same is true when checking total no of disks for 14TB.

I can only be another “everyone” and say go for a Synology. If you wanna run services on your NAS then the DSM is a godsend. The 423+ sounds like a good fit, might wanna grab a RAM upgrade for it though.

edit: As you mentioned Jellyfin - if you wanna stream video you definitely want the 423+ and not the 923+ as the AMD Ryzen R1600 lacks GPU to transcode video streams.

I’m only running a single eGPU + USB Controller passthrough and while it took some tinkering to get it started it has been smooth sailing afterwards. The B650 series of motherboards has mostly had good IOMMU groupings so there’s a good chance your motherboard will allow you to play around with some KVM/QEMU/VFIO if you wanna try gpu passthrough to a virtual machine.

Regarding Case: Generic I would look into getting one with dust protection (bottom and front) and preferably sound proofing. Having the dust get stuck outside the computer makes cleaning so much simpler and having a quiet computer is lovely.
Personally I’m a fan of the Fractal Design Define 7 but I imagine you can get a case with the dust protection and sound proofing much cheaper than that if you take the time to look around and read some reviews, especially if you don’t need E-ATX or multiple 3.5’’ disk slots.

Alternatively, you can create new users from the command line.
This can be done as follows:

If synapse was installed via pip, activate the virtualenv as follows (if Synapse was installed via a prebuilt package, register_new_matrix_user should already be on the search path):

cd ~/synapse
source env/bin/activate
synctl start # if not already running
Run the following command:
register_new_matrix_user -c homeserver.yaml
This will prompt you to add details for the new user, and will then connect to the running Synapse to create the new user. For example:

New user localpart: erikj
Password:
Confirm password:
Make admin [no]:
Success!

This process uses a setting registration_shared_secret, which is shared between Synapse itself and the register_new_matrix_user script.
It doesn’t matter what it is (a random value is generated by --generate-config), but it should be kept secret, as anyone with knowledge of it can register users, including admin accounts, on your server even if enable_registration is false.

https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/setup/installation.html

OpenWrt with 802.11r and 802.11s configured will work as a mesh network with roaming functionality.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/mesh/80211s
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/roaming

Not many Ruckus devices that are supported though:

Brand - Model - Supported Version
Ruckus - ZF7025 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7321 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7341 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7343 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7351 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7352 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7363 - 23.05.2
Ruckus - ZF7372 - 23.05.2

https://openwrt.org/toh/start?toh.filter.supportedcurrentrel=22.03|23.05

Software: OpenWrt - https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/roaming
Devices: Supported devices found here - https://openwrt.org/toh/start?toh.filter.supportedcurrentrel=22.03|23.05

pfsense and opnsense are very similar. The pfsense devs has acted like jackasses towards the opnsense gang. They are both great for a router/firewall/vpn device. I would use external access points with them.
I think there are more addons to pfsense than opnsense.

OpenWrt is great when it comes to WiFi, but I find it much less intuitive to use for router/firewall parts. Could be that I am used to the way pfsense and opnsense do things.

Neither do switching from what I know, so pair the router with a switch of your choice.

Gonna check it out!
Is it easy to setup automatic responses to the alerts, f.e. restarting a service if it isn’t answering requests in a timely manner?
Have you used it together with Windows Servers too?

I’ve used SNMP a lot together with nagios so I should be able to handle it. :D

I’ll have a look! Cheers!

Cheers! I’ve heard of Prometheus/Grafana but VictoriaMetrics was a new one. Gonna look into it!

I consider client devices to be a big risk factor and if I can keep them from having direct access to the Backup NAS and the IoT I consider that a big win. A simple ransomware attack on a client device would find any NFS/SMB shares the client can access and start encrypting - having the Backup NAS on a separate VLAN that only the server can access stops most of those from affecting the backup and makes restoring a lot easier. I would definitely recommend having an offline backup of the NAS as well in case of the server being breached.

I agree with this, protecting everything behind a VPN is the way to go. I help friends setup their vpn client to my stuff if I want them to access an internal service.

If you go for SSD another thing to think about is the TBW on them. Buying a low endurance SSD might save some electricity but will cost more in SSDs over time. Example:
Crucial P3 Plus M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB (2.67W on your link) has 440TBW compared to Kingston Fury Renegade M.2 NVMe SSD Gen 4 2TB (4.92W on your link) with 2000TBW.
Those few watts you save on using the Crucial P3 Plus will be less than the extra cost in buying new SSDs earlier.
The site I checked TBW on has the Kingston Fury at $9.4 more than the Crucial P3 Plus.

I think proper datacenter 3.5’’ HDDs will give you the most efficient Wattage per TB disk space
Seagate Exos X20 Harddisk ST20000NM007D 20TB SATA-600 7200rpm is supposed to have
Power Consumption 5.4 Watt (idle) | 9.4 Watt (random read) | 6.4 Watt (random write)

Regarding management UIs I’m a fan of Cockpit (https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit https://cockpit-project.org/)

Regarding management UIs for docker I believe most use either portainer (https://github.com/portainer/portainer https://www.portainer.io/) or dockge (https://github.com/louislam/dockge https://dockge.kuma.pet/).

Regarding Samba most NAS devices simplify it a lot, but it isn’t that complicated to do on Fedora either and once you’ve got it setup it’s not gonna need a lot of tinkering. (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/samba/)

Whether you invest in a NAS or not I recommend you invest in a USB disk large enough to act as a backup for the storage disks. That’s not an investment for later but one you want right away. And do make certain it takes backups, not replicates data. A popular option is Borg Backup (https://github.com/borgbackup/borg https://www.borgbackup.org/)
If I went for a NAS I would Borg Backup the laptop to the NAS and then use the NAS own backup software to backup to the USB.