Take out any spinning rust and pack those in a foam HDD case. Number them as you pull them for easy reinstall.

Put a bit of plywood under the rack, ratchet strap it, and now you can put it on a dolly without the lip hitting the equipment as you try and lift it. For avoiding it falling off the dolly, use a 2nd ratchet strap and wrap it around the chassis / dolly.

Put a 2nd piece of plywood on top once its in the uhaul so you can load more boxes on top… Maybe even do that at first so the initial strap is securing it as well.

As for the bottom plywood, if you add some felt pads, then it will help you shimmy the chassis into / out of its position once its unloaded. I have my rack vhb taped to ply with felt under it and recommend it to people IRL a fair bit.

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smb share if its desktop to desktop. If its from phone to PC, I throw it on nextcloud on the phone, then grab it from the web ui on pc.

Smb is the way to go if you have identity set up, since your PC auth will carry over for the connection to the smb share. Nextcloud will be less typing if not since you can just have persistent auth on the app / web.

Woosh :p

I run freeipa internally, which handles all internal https certs (as well as nice things like handling non sudo auth so I can just ssh to machines from an already authed machine without a PW prompt, and doing ldaps for internal things that support it)

For external web, I have a single box running nginx as a reverse proxy thats web exposed. That nginx box has letsencrypt certs for the public web stuff. The nginx rp has the internal CA on it and will validate the internal https certs (no mullet SSL here!)

I also do different domains for internal vs external, but thats not a requirement for a setup like this

Rhasspy. Idk if rhasspy3 is out fully, but I would wait for that and then set it up. (I have began to see the home assistant side being released - its supposed to tie in a lot better than rhasspy2, and even brought the dev on to the HA project)

Batman? I believe it was a mesh protocol

Old PC that can be on all the time.

If you dont have one and want dedicated hardware, I would recommend a used server, or something you can whitebox (like using as asrock rack mobo that takes a desktop ryzen but supports ecc memory)

Put proxmox on as the host OS, two ssd’s in raid 1 is good for a boot drive / VM storage drive. Raid 10 if you want real high performance, but probably unneeded.

Look for a case that has a SAS backplane, and then connect the backplane to a HBA card. Pass this card through to freenas for storage shares and stuff.

I recommend not virtualizing your router. So, if you want togoet away from Soho gear, either flash a Soho router with openWRT, or build a separate box for pfsense or opnsense. If you go that route, you will need a separate switch / access point. Unifi gear has a good balance of features and affordability, and can all be managed from a single ui (let’s say you have 3 switches and 2 access points… You dont need to go to 5 web UI’s, its all in one spot - and you can self host the web ui in proxmox)