Matrix and its implementations like Synapse have a very intimidating architecture (I’d go as far as to call most of the implementations somewhat overengineered) and the documentation ranges from inconsistent to horrific. I ran into this particular situation myself, Fortunately this particular step you’re overthinking it. You can use any random string you want. It doesn’t even have to be random, just as long as what you put in the config file matches. It’s basically just a temporary admin password.

Matrix was by far the worst thing I’ve ever tried to self-host. It’s a hot mess. Good luck, I think you’re close to the finish line.

While it sounds a bit hacky, I think this is an underrated solution. It’s actually quite a clever way to bypass the whole problem. Physics is your enemy here, not economics.

This is kind of like trying to find an electric motor with the highest efficiency and torque at 1 RPM. While it’s not theoretically impossible, it’s not just a matter of price or design, it’s a matter of asking the equipment to do something it’s simply not good at, while you want to do it really well. It can’t, certainly not affordably or without significant compromises in other areas. In the case of a motor, you’d be better off letting the motor spin at its much higher optimal RPM and gear it down, even though there will be a little loss in the geartrain it’s still a much better solution overall and that’s why essentially every low speed motor is designed this way.

In the case of an ammeter, it seems totally reasonable to bring it up to a more ideal operating range by adding a constant artificial load. In fact the high precision/low range multimeters and oscilloscopes are usually internally doing almost exactly the same thing with their probes, just in a somewhat more complex way behind the scenes.

I still use Nextcloud for syncing documents and other basic stuff that is relatively simple. But I started getting glacial sync times consuming large amounts of CPU and running into lots of conflicts as more and more got added. For higher performance, more demanding sync tasks involving huge numbers of files, large file sizes, and rapid changes, I’ve started using Syncthing and am much, much happier with it. Nextcloud sync seems to be sort of a jack of all trades, master of none, kind of thing. Whereas Syncthing is a one trick pony that does that trick very, very well.

I feel like you are the one who is confusing a “NAS device” or “NAS appliance” as in a device that is specifically designed and primarily intended to provide NAS services (ie, its main attribute is large disks, with little design weight given to processing, RAM or other components except to the extent needed to provide NAS service), and a NAS service itself, which can be provided by any generic device simultaneously capable of both storage and networking, although often quite poorly.

You are asserting the term “NAS” in this thread refers exclusively to the former device/appliance, everyone else is assuming the latter. In fact, both are correct and context suggests the latter, although I’m sure given your behavior in this thread you will promptly reply that only your interpretation is correct and everyone else is wrong. If you want to assert that, go right ahead and make yourself look foolish.

You can also automate this with autossh which is designed for exactly this kind of persistent tunnel. Although a simple “while” loop might seem like the intuitive way to keep it running, autossh is very reliable and takes care of all the corner cases for you.

That’s what LCARS means, it’s the name of the computer console in Star Trek. In the show, it stands for “Library Computer Access and Retrieval System” although it’s often used for stuff other than the library computer too.

Never had a single functional problem with Nextcloud, other than the fact that it’s oppressively slow with the amount of files I’ve shoved into it. Mind you I also don’t use MySQL/MariaDB which I consider a garbage-tier DB. Despite Postgres not being the “Recommended DB” for Nextcloud it works perfectly for me. Maybe that’s the difference.

Nah, I wanted to love NixOS, and granted it seems like a perfect fit for my recommendation, but a bunch of things about it rub me the wrong way. It’s just not for me. I’ve always been most comfortable with Debian and that’s what my setup script is designed for. Lots of apt.

I would need to factory reset the whole server for that, which would be … highly inconvenient for me. It took me quite a long time to get everything working, and I don’t wanna loose my configuration.

This is your actual problem you need to solve. Reinstalling your server should be as convenient as installing a basic OS and running a configuration script. It needs to be reproducible and documented, not some mystery black box of subtle configurations you’ve forgotten about ages ago. A nice, idempotent configuration script is both convenient and a self-documenting system for tracking all the changes you’ve ever implemented on your server.

Once you can do that, adding whatever encryption you want is just a matter of finding the right sequence of commands, testing it (in another docker perhaps) and then running your configuration script to migrate your server into the desired state.

$400 is pretty steep. That is probably more than a lot of the computers this would be plugged into.

I can’t live without my Nextcloud + Email server. Having all my personal files, contacts, email, calendar, and other personal information immediately accessible synced and backed up with a single app on any device or platform I want to use, is a dream come true, and I get to do it without any Big Tech, avoiding their lock-in and privacy invasion and without any fees or limits beyond my own hardware.

OpenVPN is how I can access it from anywhere in the world, so that gets an honorable mention too.

A Dockerfile is basically just a script that starts a container image (ranging from standard Linux OS installs like ubuntu or debian or alpine to the very specialized pre-made containers with every piece of software you want already installed and configured and everything unnecessary stripped away) and then does various stuff to it (copies files/dirs from local, runs commands, configures networking). It’s all very straightforward, and if you know how to write a bash script or even just a basic batch file that’s pretty much all its doing, and the end result is a container, which is basically a miniature Linux virtual machine (that is supposed to be “single purpose” but there’s no technical limitation forcing it to be)

The simplest way to create a container is to use a standard OS container as I mentioned and install the software you want exactly as you normally would in that OS, using the OS package manager if you want, following tutorials for that OS or installing manually using the instructions from the software itself. Either way should work fine. Again, it’s basically not much different from having a virtual machine running that OS. You can even start up a root bash prompt and install it that way if you prefer, or even connect over ssh by running an sshd server on it (although that’s totally uneccessary and requires extra work).

For basic Dockerfile syntax, look at other people’s Dockerfiles and realize you probably don’t need 90% of the more complex ones. There are millions of them out there, you should be able to find some simple straightforward ones and just mimic those. Will you run into “gotchas”? Sure you will, Docker is full of them, and when you do your Dockerfile will get a little more complex as you find a way to deal with the problem Docker has created for you. Here’s a pretty simple tutorial example of a Dockerfile that just installs a bunch of packages from Debian and doesn’t even run any specific services, or alternatively here’s a Dockerfile that does nothing but run and configure an ssh server like I mentioned above (again that’s totally unnecessary normally but the point is you can certainly do it if you want to!)

Owncloud is not fully open source. Nextcloud is. They have developed in different directions since then, but that remains the fundamental difference that split them apart in the first place. If that matters to you, Nextcloud is the right choice. If that doesn’t matter to you, then use whichever you prefer and has the features you need.

There’s going to be a bunch of caveats here, but basically…

Assuming you’re using a NAT router to connect to the internet (basically everyone is nowadays): If you’re using a local LAN IP address (10..., 192.168.., or 172.[16-32]..*) then nobody on the internet can access any services on that IP, unless you specifically port forward it through your router. Assuming there’s nobody dangerous on your local network (and nobody gets a remote-access virus) and your router itself is not hackable then yes it’s entirely safe.

You don’t technically need a public domain name to set up an SSL certificate, but to smoothly streamline the process in a way that modern software trusts it, you do. A self-signed certificate can be created for any IP address and it will provide full encryption and avoid interception of traffic between established clients, but you will get a scary warning that the certificate is self-signed every time you connect a new client or browser, because it cannot be verified. It still works though, it’s just (intentionally) scary, because it doesn’t know what you’re doing with it and it doesn’t know how to establish trust. You probably don’t need this, but it is an option. Setting up a self-signed certificate will have various degrees of complexity in documentation depending on what web server you’re using, I would recommend using the simplest guide you can find for the relevant web server if you choose to go that route, you don’t need anything complex for this. The keywords you’re looking for are “self-signed certificate”

Welcome to self-hosting. Nextcloud is a great thing to self-host, too. Hope you enjoy.