I built my PC in 2024. Okay specs - 7950X3D, 2x 48GB DDR5-6400, 4090, 1+4TB Samsung 990, all watercooled. About £4k total.
Today I could sell that PC for about 10-12k. RAM was originally £300, now it’s £1800 IF you can buy it. The storage also cost me around £400, today, easily £1500.
Does your compose file in itself give you a nice, easily readable status display, analytics, metrics, logging, etc. interface?
If you want a NAS specific case, check on AliExpress - a bunch of $200-300 options with SATA backplanes, EATX support, and your typical 8-16 front-loaded disk bay with disk caddies.
“The best” depends on what you really need.
Authentik and Authelia are two of the top most quoted solutions, but they aim to be an “everything in one” package, with tons of features a simple homelab will rarely need. They’re aimed more at enterprise-like setups.
On the other end of the spectrum you have e.g. Pocket-ID, which only does OIDC by itself (you can hook up an LDAP server as user database though); but that tradeoff means it uses little to no CPU time, and, in my experience, around 130MB RAM. Given RAM is getting more expensive than gold, one needs to consider memory footprint, especially for older homelab setups. We can’t all be running 256GB nodes after all.
So instead of hunting the mythical “best” solution, decide what features you really need, grab a list of providers that cover those features, and compare them to see what fits your needs best.
The recommendations so far are quite solid.
I’d also add that crowdsec with the right collections as a primary filter within your reverse proxy setup can be extremely useful, potentially even better than fail2ban, as CS delivers a literal “scan every packet and put them against these rules” approach - where the rules are crowd sourced, thus are more up to date than any manual blocklists, filter list etc. can be, and can spot even 0day intrusion approaches.
It depends on the app. You can use Authentik as an OIDC provider and allow apps that offer OIDC to log in through that - and that usually works for TV sticks and such.
Uhm, no.
Only if the licence allows. I personally go for A/GPLv3 wherever I can because I don’t want corporations to just take and not contribute back. But that means I can’t just copy MIT/Apache software, need to do my own implementation from scratch. Which I prefer anyway.
why would I try a book REQUESTING system when I’m working on my own AIO solution?
I’m actually working on an all in one solution that sort of fills the roles of Readarr AND Calibre - without all the baggage of the latter.
Oh, and of course a KOReader library plugin that foregoes OPDS and works like the Kindle interface (“available books” synced from this backend, one tap downloads them, plus potentially adding series handling too in the future).
But right now it’s mostly manual downloads + CWA ingest + OPDS via KOReader.
An mSATA or small NVMe in a USB enclosure is the best way to go. No wasting a precious internal slot, and they can be super tiny (2230/2242 enclosures are dime a dozen).
Windows Server exists.
It really shouldn’t, but it does.
You can buy ESP32 boards with built in DACs, just FYI.
Also there’s a handful of Pi Zero shaped ESP3 boards as well, which you could use with the existing DACs.
But again my point was that Sendspin requires even less hardware than Snapcast (and while technically you can indeed run Snapcast on an ESP32, last I checked it uses up a lot of resources, making the ESPHome given extras like BT proxy and usage in real time BT based location, unusable).
I am using it on a handful of devices (mainly voice interfaces), and it’s quite seamless, even in the beta stage.
Not up to Sonos level controls yet, but it’s getting there slowly. Music Assistant is gaining a lot of UX improvements recently, so it will be soon a viable alternative to not just SnapCast but Sonos too.
And you did it all in time just to have it be upended by SendSpin - which can even run on an ESP32 level MCU so you don’t even need a Pi Zero.
Except when I bought my lifetime it meant lifetime for the SERVICE, not the app…
ABS is for audio books primarily (though they did introduce EPUB support). Unfortunately the API isn’t standard so you can’t just hack it into e.g. KOReader (though I have been working on a plugin for exactly that)
USB tuner + Jellyfin.
You can also set up the IPTV stuff with Jellyfin (at least most likely, I haven’t tried this personally), so it’s all through one interface.
Not just code but infrastructure as well.
Plex makes it possible to stream remotely even if you’re behind double NAT, firewalls and whatnot blocking a simple port forwarding approach. they do that through proxy servers that need to handle a lot of bandwidth, even with the limited streams…
well the crack is only supposed to affect the license checking.
but if you want an alternative, MOS is shaping up pretty well.
TBF I was going all out 😂but yeah the fact that my build essentially tripled in price is insane.