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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: September 5th, 2025

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  • Briefly addressing the RAID types you mentioned:

    • RAID-0: OH NO OH GOD PLEASE NO AHHHHHHH
    • RAID-1: There’s nothing wrong with it, but it feels very weird to me that BTRFS can do RAID-1 over 3 disks. It’s still technically 2 copies of every block, meaning you can in theory lose any single drive and still recover the data, but idk, it just feels wrong.
    • RAID-10: Again, weird that BTRFS allows this with an odd amount of disks. From what I can find, this has no advantage over RAID-1 with 3 disks and can in fact perform worse.
    • RAID-5: It’s probably fine if you have backups, and you get the most usable space out of your disks, but performance will take a hit, and scrubs are terribly slow.

    Now, you mentioned not wanting ZFS due to complexity, but really, it is no more complex to manage than BTRFS. It’s fairly easy to get it working on any modern Linux distro (Ubuntu has support out-of-the-box, Debian has it packaged as a DKMS module, Arch has it in AUR, and so on).

    With ZFS, you could create a RAID-Z1 (equivalent to a RAID-5) without any of the performance penalties or risks that BTRFS RAID-5 has. Both have pretty much them same features, with the main difference that ZFS can’t be “re-balanced” to a different disk layout like BTRFS can, but it will also generally not corrupt your data if you look at it wrong. Everything else maps pretty much 1:1 between them. Both support:

    • Transparent compression
    • Transparent checksums
    • Scrubbing
    • Snapshots
    • Block-level transfers (btrfs-send / zfs-send)
    • Fairly intuitive CLI
    • Filesystem (BTRFS) == Pool (ZFS)
    • Subvolume (BTRFS) == Dataset (ZFS)

  • I had the same problem: Debian host + official Jellyfin Docker image, all set up according to the official guide, but it would fail to transcode anything.

    There was no relevant information about what was wrong in the logs so what I did was:

    • Copy the ffmpeg command from the logs.
    • docker exec -it into the Jellyfin container.
    • run the same ffmpeg command manually so I could see the error directly.

    Long story short, because the Nvidia toolkit uses the driver/libraries from the host, the error was that I was missing the library libnvidia-encode1 on the host. After installing that, everything works as it should.



  • No idea how it compares to Ring, but my wife is a severe technophobe and she had no issues or complaints with Protect. We only have one doorbell + one camera connected to a CloudKey+ though, so your mileage may vary.

    Motion detection works reasonably well as far as I can tell, with person, vehicle and animal detection too.

    Regarding the doorbell, one option you have is to try finding a second-hand Unifi G4 Doorbell (non-pro). It can be wired with only the two wires you already have. Just make sure you have relatively good 5GHz WiFi reception near your front door, because the 2.4GHz antennas on this model are notably bad.





  • Hey. I realise my comment may have come off as rude and made me sound like an asshole. It was not my intention to be disrespectful, apologies for that. The reason I posted that is because I read your post (thanks for taking the time to write and share it) and it left me a bit puzzled. I respect wanting something stable, familiar and that requires minimal maintenance, but you seemed to imply this is not possible with a more “traditional” NAS setup. Many of the points you raised about wanting an applliance-like experience are equally achievable on most Linux distros, with no license fees, and with a lot more flexibility, should you need it in the future (although I understand you don’t need or want it).

    Take Debian for example (a.k.a. the world’s most boring distro, in a good sense). With the knowledge you demonstrated about the underlying services involved (BTRFS, Wireguard, etc), it would have taken you no more time to configure the same set of services on a minimal Debian install, it would also run rock-solid for many years, and updates would be entirely at your discretion (as they are with RouterOS). Plus, your pockets would be 50 EUR heavier. But for me, personally, by far the biggest avantage of going with Linux for a data storage solution like this is the possiblity of using ZFS.

    Also, have this Debian meme:

    An elderly man smiling, holding a folded shirt gifted to him, which exactly matches the one he's wearing. The new shirt is labelled DEBIAN 12 while his current shirt is labelled DEBIAN 11






  • Damn, that’s scary indeed! First of all, congratulations on your resolve to take control of your data. You have a long journey ahead of you, but don’t be discouraged, take one step at a time and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

    As for where to start, I think you’ve already figured it out yourself: invest some time in learning the basics of networking. You don’t need to become an enterprise-level networking wizard, just learn the basics: learn what an IP address is, what a network mask is (sometimes also referred to as “prefix length”), what DNS is and does, how to change these settings on your home network and why you’d want to change them. Try stuff, break it, fix it, repeat. Also, if you’re not familiar with or already using it, it might be a good opportunity to pick up Linux. If you’re coming from Windows, a beginner friendly distribution like Linux Mint will do nicely. Try installing it on an old computer to see what it’s like, poke at it until you’re comfortable, then maybe make it your main operating system. Knowing Linux basics (command-line shenanigans in particular) will give you a big edge when you decide to start hosting your own services.