I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore
If you have Hue bulbs, you can buy little radios that attach to your light switch (or replacement light switches) that will still operate your lights when the server is down or the network is unavailable. It’s a worthwhile upgrade.
Is there a reason to avoid Nvidia cards on Proxmox still?
First things first: Synology as a beginner NAS is perfect! It’s what I recommend to everyone that is getting started out. So good move there.
I think you should get a four-bay NAS. You don’t have to put four drives in it; you can put two drives in it and have an upgrade path for later. Plus the drives are far easier to install and remove. The processor will also be better in a four-bay NAS, which will give you more options if you want to play around with a docker container or run a VM.
To answer your questions:
Totally unintentional. I’ll edit it.
Porkbun is sort of the darling of the self hosting community. I settled on them after doing a huge comparison of prices and features of all the different registrars available to me. Porkbun was by far the best.
Seeing people recommend nginx proxy manager, I’ve tried to set this up but never managed to get the certificates to work from letsencrypt (“internal server error” when trying to get one). When I finally got it working a while ago (I think I imported a cert), any proxy I tried to setup just sent me to the Synology login page.
I think WebStation is causing this. I just investigated my Synology NAS and discovered that the default web portal is redirecting ports 80 and 443 to the synology login portal (which lives in ports 5000 and 5001 depending on whether you use SSL or not.)
My homelab started with a Synology NAS as well. At first I put a few VMs on the NAS, and then I expanded the homelab to include a single PC. I almost bought a NUC instead. I’m glad I didn’t, because the NUC only offered one advantage: it was small. Beyond that, the PC was better in every respect. More expandable, more configurable, etc. I decided to get a really small PC case intended for home theater PCs to get some of the smallness offered by the NUC and called it good.
The Homelab Show frequently explores the topic of security in a homelab. I’m a big fan of Jay LaCroix, since I learned how to use Proxmox from his fabulous Proxmox course. They touch on security from the broad to the specific, and talk about incidents, as well. You do have to search through it to find the episodes where security is a topic, but they are there.
This looks amazing!
My recommendation is that you not put a large number of hard drives in this machine. Instead, buy or build a separate NAS for data storage, and put fast networking into the machine instead. You will thank yourself a few years down the line when a single drive has a fault, or you decide to add additional storage, because you won’t have to take your server offline and slice your hands to ribbons accessing the drives. Probably the best decision I ever made in my homelab was to get a Synology NAS with hot-swappable drive bays. They are compact and easy to maintain. (I do wish they had faster networking built in, but you can get expansion cards to enable 10G if you have it.)
If I were rebuilding my media server today, here’s what I would do:
I would not put a discrete graphics card or any spinning platter hard drives in the machine. For the OS, I would install Proxmox and then create a virtual machine or container for your media server. Since you are using the graphics on the CPU, pass-through of the graphics will be much easier this way.
I would direct any additional funds to an external NAS and a UPS that can tell the server (and NAS) to shut down when power is interrupted.
This is what I came here to suggest. Everybody should be using power toys and keyboard entry as much as possible on windows.