The Home Server / Synology Show

Oh, welcome to Syntax. Today, we're talking about our home server setups, what we're running, what we're running on them, why we have them, how much data we got going on, what's going on with that data, and just generally, what's up with running home server stuff? What's a good process for doing that? And all kinds of stuff. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me, as always, is West Boss. What's up,

Hey.

I'm excited to talk about this. I feel like we we did a Synology home server show, what, probably four years ago, and a lot has changed since then. And, like, it's I feel like we're always talking about our home servers, and we're like, we gotta do a whole show laying it all out. Especially this is this is going live during the holidays.

You got a little bit of time over the holidays. Why not spend it installing virtual machines and banging your head against the wall to make stuff work? Of course. Yes. Why not? Alright. So the whole idea with this episode is we're going to first talk about, like, the hardware, why you might even want a home server, or do you also use it for backing up, and then as well as, like, what what software do you run on it, what kinds of apps are you running on it, Both, like, handy stuff as well as, like, media, you know, plaques or jelly fin and downloading things. And we'll have to have CJ on at some point because I know CJ has a pretty crazy downloading setup, which is spans many countries.

It's pretty cool. And, like, also how to expose them to the Internet as well. Like, how do you get access to these things when you're out and about? So first one, uses. Why do we use home servers, and and what is the stack? So maybe let's first start with the actual hardware that we're running ourselves.

So I'm running a Synology Wes nine eighteen plus. This is Vercel many years old. I probably have run it for about six years now.

I have 16 terabytes in it, with a RAID setup that works out to just over 10 terabytes of actual backup space. Over the years, I've upgraded it to 16 gigs of RAM. Even though it says you can't do that, it works just fine. I recently upgraded it to two and a half gig networking, with a simple, like, $20 USB dongle, which is unbelievably has changed how fast transferring things to it. It's obviously, like, two and a half times faster. It used to be a gig wired.

Did you end up doing that too, Scott? I did. I did the, USB dongle. I dongled it. And, yeah, big improvement there. Absolutely.

That's amazing. It's so anyone who doesn't know, there's a, like, a Realtek chip, and most, like, USB to Ethernet adapters use this chip inside of it. And you can simply just install this package on your Synology, and that will be the driver for it. And then you simply just plug it in, hook up your your Ethernet to it. And then the old ones, you can keep plugged in as well should that ever fail or or get bumped. And then you just set the 2.5 gig one as the the priority, and, and then your networking is good. I fussed around with the, like, dual, what is it, SMB version three allows you to, like, parallel send. I could not get it working for the life of me. And if I would have known that just spending $25 on this dongle would have two and a half x'd my speed Yeah. I would have I should have known that earlier.

Yeah. But I I also I slapped two two hundred and fifty six gig SSD drives in it. So if you're running applications, there's a a read and write that needs to happen, and you have, like, these, like, actual hard disk drives that need to spin and find the files on the drive and and bring them back. And that could be very slow, especially when you're running, like, apps on them. I specifically noticed it when I'm using, like, Jellyfin.

Mhmm. And you have frequently accessed, files, like thumbnails and JavaScript files and, CSS, all all of those things that when you're using an application need to be served up quickly, as well as there's, like, a a write cache as well where, if you're writing data to your SSD, you can write it to an SSD much faster than you can to the hard disk drive. So it'll Scott, like, ingest it quickly and then just throw it over to the slower drives as it has time to do so. So that was a big upgrade, in making things feel faster as well as, like, the whole dashboard feels a lot more snappy since I did that.

And then I have it auto mirror to Backblaze b two. So Backblaze b two is just a a spot where you can host files or upload files. And I use a app on the Synology called Hyper Backup, And what that does is it just basically just constantly is watching folders and and uploading the new versions of those files. So that way I have both a Synology local as well as I have a backup in the cloud. I and now that I have fast Internet at my house and decent Internet at the cottage, I have been tempted to do a second Synology at the cottage, and then you can mirror them. Mirror them. I know. But, like, that's a lot of money to spend

on hard drives, whereas, like, cloud hosting is very cheap. So I run a very similar setup to you. Obviously, we have the same, Synology that we've had for a long time. I have 16 terabytes also.

The big difference for me is that I have two terabytes of cache. So I have a big old cache

Man.

Running two one one terabyte cache drives. That's good. So that just hangs on to more stuff for longer. Hangs on to more stuff for longer. And I guess you can when you are transferring stuff to it, that that write cache is a lot bigger.

Yeah. Quite a bit bigger. Yeah. So that that's pretty much the only difference. I I you know, I I've been running out of space online because of how much video I upload. Like Yeah. It it's getting absurd. So I've been actually going through and deleting old video project files on mine manually and finding stuff. Even, like, right now, I just Sanity, we'll talk about some of the software running, but I just ran, like, an indexing on Copy Sanity on my on my Synology. And I'm just, like, going through and seeing, like, client projects that I had that had, like,

20 copies of every image or 40 copies of every image. Like, I have old WordPress projects that are, like, probably four or five gigs. I'm like, should I really be spending, like, what, 8¢ a month to to store this? Well, that's what I was thinking. I was like, oh, I should get another drive. And then I'm like, you know what? How about I just go through go through it and actually delete my stuff? Because I don't need Yeah. More space. I don't need more space. Yeah. What's interesting about the drives is that we're at a spot now where it's almost cheap enough just to slap SSDs in the NAS itself, and that would make it both quiet. Like, you can't put this NAS in, like, your office or bedroom. It's loud as hell because it's constant, like, writing files to it. But and then it's also, like, slow. So I'm at a point now where I was like, if I built a new one, would I go for, like, 80 terabytes out of, like, slower hard disk drives, or would I try to go, like, eight terabytes and go all in with SSDs? I want both for not very expensive. That's what I want. Right. Right.

Exactly.

Let's talk about, like, apps that we actually run on our home servers. So, like, we're talking about Synology here, but this we'll talk about running a home server on literally anything. Scott runs a Mac mini. I run Node assistant for all of my, smart home stuff, which I'm a big fan of that. I run Jellyfin for all of my movies and TV shows. I really like that because Wes go to the cottage. We have Starlink, and it's very slow Internet. Well, it's not very slow, but it's it's relatively slow.

So what we'll do is we'll just download stuff at home where the Internet is fiber, and then we'll be able to stream it to the cottage at a lower bit rate, like, on demand. And then it's it's much quicker to be able to to download and watch a show that way versus trying to download it right when you're at the cottage or stream it from some website.

Yeah. Yeah.

Word. I also have audio bookshelf I recently got, which I find really helpful as well. I paid for Audible for years and years and years, and I lost all of my I was really upset that I, like, lost all of my things that I had paid credits for. They're, like, all gone. I don't I don't know if that's normal or not. When you stop paying for Audible, your credits go away, and you lose all the books that you paid for over time. But I was kinda cheesed at that because there's a couple books I wanted to go back and relisten to. So I got audio bookshelf, to reclaim those books as well as, like, the kids and and stuff. They they, like, listen to audiobooks.

Yeah. And Audio Bookshelf is great for podcasts too. I haven't used it for that, but I know it works well for that. Oh, yeah. The one thing I like, I paid for a audiobook shelf iOS app, because you can download locally. And I I did that right before I went on a flight without Internet, and I love that because then I can just listen to them listen to them constantly. And I'm slowly getting into Prowler, radar, sonar, all of those, but I I don't know. It's it's a lot of work to to get into that. So, I think it's what Wes set up. So Prowler is a torrent indexing. Radar and sonar are, like, auto downloaders for TV shows and movies, things like that, music.

So they're just like a whole setup to get into it. But if I am, like, streaming stuff, I'm I'm just using either Jellyfin and just downloading the torrent directly on on the the NAS, or I'm just using something called, Streamio, where you just you stream it directly from there. And, that's pretty sweet. I do occasionally use it for hosting, like, Node applications and whatnot. I was running COOLIFY as a Npm. We'll talk about that in just a second. But it the it was not fast enough to host all the applications that I wanted, so I ended up having to pause it. It was eating up all my RAM. So I was like, I need to build I think what I'm gonna do soon is just build, like, a dedicated local server that's not for, like, NAS and and media and stuff like that Yeah. But simply just for hosting my projects because, like Interesting. Yeah. I have several I I have several, like, WordPress projects that I'm still paying for for hosting, and I was like, I probably they don't get a lot of traffic. You could throw CloudFlare in front of it for caching. I was like, I should probably just put this on the box in my house and and serve it up from there. Probably save a couple $100 a year by doing that. And then I don't use it for surveillance. I was dipping into that at one point or, like, running your own surveillance software, but I've been using Unifi Protect, which has a hard drive in my house and rec just records constantly. And I that that app is sick. It's so fast. It's so good. You can scrub through it. It's, like, so much better. If you've ever fussed with, like, a a ring or, like, I still have lots of Wyze cameras. You have to look at the clips and try scrub around.

The UniFi Protect stuff is, like, 4,000

times better. Yeah. I I haven't gotten into any of that stuff that I I'd be interested in, but I, like, would require so much work in my house to be able to wire those cameras up and stuff. Getting the the a bunch of them are, like, just plug in. You know? They're Wi Fi. Sure. But the best ones are are Node.

I don't even have, like, good locations, though, for plugs and stuff. Right? Like Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a pain. For me, the stuff that I run, I run on my NAS so So I have two home servers, one of which is a Mac mini that you can maybe see over here that's running all the time, and that's connected to the NAS, obviously. But it is also have, my NAS, which I run things on. And I've actually been slowly moving most of my things over to the NAS or the Mac mini. The big problem is is that I don't have a container management software solution set up yet. So I'm just kind of YOLO running stuff from the term or from Docker, like, as I go. And then, therefore, if things are crashing or if I need to restart, I think I gotta go manually rerun everything. On my, Synology, I pretty much run audiobook shelf.

We have a lot of audiobooks for for my wife and myself. Her and QBitTorrent on there. That app sucks, but it's, like, the most reliable one. And then I do have Prowler radar sonar.

Is it Prowler? Yeah.

Yeah. I have those installed and running, but I do I couldn't tell you if I've ever opened them up. Maybe. I think I probably have at some point. Yeah. We're at we're at this weird spot where, like, I was, like,

really into piracy for many years as a kid, but, like, the streaming services got so good that I talking about piracy? It stopped well, for ESLint Linux ISO. Sorry. Not piracy.

Downloading Linux ISOs, there you could stream them very easily. So for, like, many years, I just didn't fuss with any of this stuff because it was just way easier to pay for three or four apps, a month. But it's starting to get, like it's obnoxious. Or we pay for, like, Apple TV and Netflix and Prime. Too much sense. Like, we pay for, like, four or five. And often, I can't get the stuff I want, which is so frustrating.

So Yes. If that's the case, then I I find it on a Linux website.

Yes. Possibly.

You know, I I, then pretty much run everything else on my Mac mini for, like, media streaming. The problem I was having was, like, trying to do transcoding of, like, really large Blu ray discs that I ripped from my own personal Blu ray collection. Trying to transcode those on the fly on my Synology would just crap out in any of them, whether that was Jellyfin, Plex, or, MB. And then you know what? After dealing with Jellyfin and dealing with MB and trying to then get the bootleg install for the app on my Samsung TV for the Jellyfin, I was just like, you know what? I'm going back to Plex. And I installed Plex on my Mac mini, and it transcodes everything, and it works. It works great. I don't fuss it. The app on the, TV is actually very, very good, and everything just works, and I'm very happy with that setup. So the only thing I haven't really done is configured it to run outside of my network. We're pretty much just using it internally. Well, talk about that. I got a solution for you. Well, I have I have solutions for other things. I actually run quite a bit on my stuff outside of the network. One of those things is a Minecraft server. So one of the things I run on my Mac mini is a Minecraft server for my my son and his friends to all join on, and it's actually cool. Minecraft has got, like, really interesting, like, hacking scene, obviously, but, like, there's the Bedrock version and the Java version. The Bedrock is the one that installs on, like, the Nintendo Switch or iPads.

And then there's the Java version, which is, like, a completely it's a different game to some extent even though it's the same game. Yeah. And somebody wrote, like, a translation layer between the two. So I'm running a translation layer. So now you can join on Switch or you can join on this, and I'm, have you know, being able to configure in in Update, and I'm now managing a Minecraft server for a bunch of,

second graders third graders. He's in third grade now. Crazy. Yeah. That Minecraft stuff is super interesting to me. I I need to try it out because every now and then, I run upon, like, somebody trying to port Minecraft server to Rust or, you know, trying to port it to Go. And, like, that seems like a rabbit hole to go down, but it seems like a interesting compute problem. Apparently, the, like, Java version was just an absolute nightmare, so it's not written very well.

Yeah. I think that since changed over time with Yeah. The amount of money that is coming in and out of Minecraft. Yeah. But yeah. No. I it's actually it's a lot of fun a lot of fun to run that server. So Let's talk about actual hardware. So we we talked about, like, what we're running, but what are your options as well? So you're thinking about running a home server. What do you possibly need? Right? You you need some actual physical hardware,

which could be an old PC, could be a old MacBook, could be a old rack server. You can run Linux on these. You you don't necessarily have to worry about what OS is is running on these things. Right? Like, obviously, a lot of them are, like, just custom Linux distros, but you can you can run Bos. You can run Windows and a lot of stuff. As long as you have the ability to run VMs Mhmm. They will run very well on these. The one thing I do wanna say here is that, like, be careful with older tech. So, like, right beside me here, I have a 2009 Mac Pro, Like, beefy, awesome, like, computer, still pretty good. I can install the latest OS on it. You can upgrade the graphics card. And I was, like, working on it a a couple months ago. And then I was like, you know what? This is probably too expensive to run, because these old Macs, especially a lot of them that have Intel chips in them Drop a lot of power. They use a ton of energy. Right? And, like, I looked it up. This Mac Pro at, like, a normal load, you know, not idle, but not, like, full fully kicked out, it's 250 watts, which is about at at Ontario electricity prices, which is electricity is very cheap in in Ontario because we have a huge JS waterfall, is about 90¢ a day. Right? Yeah. And if you Scott's Mac mini uses at medium, not at at idle, uses seven watts. Right? Think about that. Like, two fifty versus seven. And at a normal load, it uses about twenty, twenty four watts. So that's 10 times less energy.

So at my cheap Ontario prices, that's about $300 a year. And, like, what's what's a Mac mini cost? Like, $6,700? Even less if you get the Yeah. The the one. So It's refurbished.

And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at century.io/syntax.

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on over to century.io/syntax.

Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

It makes sense. The math maths, folks. Go out and buy yourself a Mac mini if you're looking to do a home server because you run that thing. Like, you have to run these things constantly, and it's it uses quite a bit of energy. Even I did the math on my Synology one at one point, and it was over a $150 a year to keep it going, which is you can pay for a lot of cloud storage or, or, Yarn processing for that.

Yeah. No. Absolutely.

Glad you did the math on that. I, don't have the patience for that. Do you know that that's my pet peeve with people JS that they don't do the math? So often like, we have an electric vehicle.

Yeah. And, so often you come across posts being, like, Scott so much to to do it or, like, have you noticed it in your electrical bill? Or, like, that's how everyone engages whether the electric and it's like, you don't need to notice it in your bill. Literally do the math. You could figure out how much you pay per kilowatt hour. You could figure out how much these things consume, how many kilowatt hours they are using, and then you can multiply those things and figure out how much it Scott to maintain. These are not unknowns.

You don't need to hear from somebody that something is very expensive to run. You can literally figure it out. That's shocking. That's I think it's gonna blow people's brains. Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna that's the hell I'm gonna die on is people not doing the math on simple things like that. Yeah. The same with, like, leaving lights on. I leave lights on all the time. I don't give I did the math. It's not a lot. LEDs. Yeah. Yeah. LEDs. This isn't incandescent bulb territory anymore. No. Yeah. No. That's that's true. You don't Node, obviously, turn them off at night. But, like, I'm not one of those people being like, if you leave a room, turn the lights off. Yeah. It doesn't it doesn't matter. Us either. Yeah. I agree. I'm with you on that one. Yeah. That's never been never been something I've been concerned with since we got these fast bulbs.

Software.

You need some sort of software to manage either or both virtual machines and containers. So let's talk about the difference between those two. So a VM is like running an entire computer, virtual computer on your machine. Right? It has its own hard drive system, you know, virtual hard drive system. It has its own networking. It has all of that stuff, whereas, a container is running on your host machine. A container is like Docker. That's the most popular one. Right? It's running on your host machine, so it's running on your laptop or whatever, but it's it's has a limited container access to things that are outside of it. So you still have to install things to that container, and you still have to, do that. But you're exposing things like like folders and ports and networking from the host machine to the actual container. So a VM is going to be more powerful, resource intensive. So in my case, I was trying to run COOLify as a VM, and I was running several other VMs as Wes, and, it was becoming a bit too much. Whereas, like, I can run lots and lots of Docker machines on my Synology.

No problem. Because those are a lot less resource intensive.

What would you use a VM for? The ones that I'm using, so, like, Node Assistant OS.

So many of the plugins in Home Assistant are themselves Docker containers.

So you can't Docker inside of a Docker. So you need something that's going to supervise and orchestrate all of these Docker containers, and it needs to be at a higher Vercel. Same with, like, Coolify. Coolify is just you can install it to Linux. Right? But you can install it as a VM. So I installed, like, a Ubuntu or something VM. I ran it like that, and then I installed Coolify on there.

And then Coolify, for those who don't know, is a, what, self hosted, kind of like, run your own Vercel. You can deploy multiple applications to it. You can have grids of many machines. You can spin them up. You have a networking layer. I love Coolify.

Coolify is fantastic. So if you wanna, like, run, like, a node, you wanna run, like, a node app and have them build and and get integration and all that stuff, but you wanna self host it, not necessarily just, like, at at your house. If you wanna run it on, like, some servers, like, on Hetzner or something like that Mhmm. You can do that with COOLIFY.

And you can install COOLIFY as a VM, or you can install Linux as a VM, install COOLIFY on that.

And then containers, just simply a Docker container. Right? I mean and and so many things run inside of containers from pretty much any of these apps. But if you have something like Synology, there's container management built in. Do you do anything specifically for container management? Like, I've been looking into some systems like, well, here's a Mac app called Orb Stack that is supposed to be, like, a nice one. I I I've heard of all these different systems, but I don't run anything for managing containers.

On Synology, there's a Docker app, and I I just use the GUI. So you log in and you click click go on the thing. You you map your your folders. You map your ports.

And then if the the thing reboots, it will automatically restart your containers from their last state, or it will just boot them fresh depending on on what settings you have. So that's all I have on there. And then and then on the Synology as well, they have a whole, like, virtual machine.

So similar to if you've ever used, like, VirtualBox on the Mac or you can install Linux ISOs and whatnot. So as a VM, I'm running I was running Coolify and Home Assistant OS, and then all of the other apps that I was running were were running as Docker containers. Yeah. Same. Yeah. And that for me even for me for Home Assistant, I have it on a little Raspberry Pi just on its own thing. Oh, yeah. So it it's it's it's not even virtual. It's literally its own hardware.

Right. So other options, if you've got a piece of hardware and you wanna run it on there, you don't wanna run like, obviously, you can run Mac, Linux, Windows plus Docker and VirtualBox or some other VM software. But Proxmox is a really popular Node. Unraid.

Bos is another interesting one that seems to be coming up. There's a lot of these, like, home server OSes that you can sort of take a look at. Some of them are more towards the NAS side of things. Like, Synology is a NAS with the ability to run apps on it. And then a lot of these other ones are, they're not a NAS at all. They're just simply a home server that you can run apps on, and it it it does a lot of nice stuff for you. There's, like, a GUI. You can log in. You know? You're not in the terminal with all of the stuff. As much as I am a a terminal head, I like being able to just log in to a GUI and and click the buttons when I do need that or want that in my in my life. They're so there's such a massive

YouTube community of people sharing these tools that I it's, like, too overwhelming for me when I look into it. And there's just like this and then this and then this and then this and then this, and I'm just going I don't know what to pick. Just

I want something easy. Yeah. Let's talk about exposing it to the Internet. So you run all these applications, but you want access to them when you're out of the house.

But you also don't want random people having access to your applications if there's no auth. So what what's your move for that, Scott?

My move is CloudFlare tunnels pretty much exclusively.

So I have on my Synology, I have CloudFlared running as a container, and then I use tunnels pretty much for everything, which ends up being really nice and easy because if you have that Cloudflare installed, you have it installed on your computer and it's running, you're really just saying ESLint this IP to this domain.

You can put it behind a username and password if you want to have another layer of protection in front of it. So a little CloudFlare window will pop up and make you sign in, before you can have access to that resource. But CloudFlare tunnels are great because the alternative would be for you to go into your router and say, alright.

This port is going to be open to the Internet with my IP.

And I personally am not enough of a security person to really wanna manage that or think about the consequences of that. Forwarding ports is not the move. Forwarding ports is not the move. So for me, just being able to establish that tunnel and make it nice and easy, static IPs for the stuff that I'm gonna be, connecting,

and then that's it is great. A big fan of that. Yeah. So I am also using Cloudflare tunnel. So I run Cloudflare duh. That's the the the daemon that runs on your computer and will proxy traffic from a domain name. So I have a I have a domain name that every single app is a is a subdomain. So I have, like, synology.whatever.com, photos.whatever.com.

And by running that, a lot of these things like Node Assistant or whatever, they will give you the ability to install a plug in that is CloudFlare Tunnels, but I run it as a Docker container. And what that does is it allows me to proxy anything on my home network. So it doesn't have to be running on the Synology. So I run other stuff that has local servers. Yeah. Like, I have six or seven instances of WLED that control, like, the Christmas lights on my house and, the the mirror gym, all of that stuff. And I often wanna be able to access the Christmas lights when I'm away, especially because if I go to the end of my driveway, I I lose Wi Fi, so I need to be able to access it through the LTE on my phone. Yeah. So CloudFlare tunnels, you simply just go into the CloudFlare, GUI, and you say, alright. Point this subdomain to this IP address and port. And it might just be local host, which means it's running on the same machine as Cloudflare that's running on my NAS, or it's going to be another IP address that exists on your your home network.

Another one is, three d printer. I have a what is it? Flash forge printer with a camera on it, and I'm running, like, a third party firmware on it. So I'm not using their cloud service. Interesting. So and if I wanna be able to monitor the print when I'm away, I simply just expose that out via my CloudFlare tunnel.

So did did you say you have it installed on your router?

No. I have it installed as a Docker image on my NAS. Okay. I'm sorry. And, basically that. Because my NAS has access to the home network, it can then it can then proxy

outside Internet traffic to anywhere on my home network. I I have it running on my Mac mini and my NAS, and that's probably not required.

Probably not. The thing is with with running it on each machine is that you don't need to make sure that your applications are exposed to your your home network. So if you're running, like, a VDAP, you need to explicitly use the dash dash host flag, and then that will give you an IP address and a port, and then you can then forward that. So I do run I run Cloudflare on my Mac, like, my laptop here. Okay. You do. And I use that just so I can turn my local on and off. Because every now and then, I'll wanna expose something, and I'll just write I'll just type cloud flared tunnel local host, whatever the port JS, and then it it goes to local.westboss.com, and then that's exposed to the the greater world.

But then things like my my Jellyfin, my WLED, all of my local apps that are running on my home server, those are just constantly running with with the Cloudflare daemon.

Interesting.

Now access. So most of these apps will have their own auth built in. You know? Like, Jellyfin will have username and password.

Node Assistant will have username and password, but some of them don't. Like, especially if you're just building an app and you're running it yourself and you don't have any auth in front of your application, how do you protect that from the the wider Internet? So for that, I use something called Cloudflare Access. And Cloudflare Access JS essentially just you just put it in front of your tunnel. You have to configure some rules around it depending on, like sometimes you want API endpoints to be hit without having auth, like, for example, Jellyfin.

Yep. If If you want, like, a Jellyfin Android app to be able to access it, you can't sign in there. You know? You have to give, like, a API token or something.

But you just you can set it up. For me, I have it set up with, email me a token, text me a token, or sign in with GitHub. And then you white list your email address, your phone number, and, your GitHub, ID. And JS I say, if if any of these are met, then allow the person to go through, and it it works beautifully.

Yeah. That's so much nicer than exposing your your port just YOLO to the Internet. Yeah. Yeah. And hoping somebody doesn't find it. Yeah. Oh my god. Tailscale is another one. People love Tailscale. I've never used it myself, but it seems to be another super great

I use Tailscale.

I used it for, VibeCoding for my phone. There's a terminal app that connects really well, but you have to have a tail Scott connection there.

And it worked really well. I think I prefer the CloudFlare tunnels approach rather than, like, being on that VPN of the tail Scott. And I don't know if you need to do that. I'm not enough of a a pro at that, but, like, I think you need to be on a VPN of the tail scale to Yeah. Be able to connect. And that was kinda cool running, you know, open code commands for my phone for a little bit, but then I, decided to touch grass and stop doing that.

I also use, I've got both at the cottage and at my house, I have, Unifi, like, networking.

So I can use something called teleport. They have an app called Wi Fi Man, and you just turn on Teleport, and it installs a little VPN config on your Mac. Mhmm. And then you can you can access your whole home network, at any time. So if for whatever reason you needed to access something that is on your home network that you you haven't yet forwarded, you can install that. So I use that once to access to mount my Synology because I just wanted to drag some files into it as if I were low home.

Yeah. So I just turned on teleport. And and a a Tailscale will do that as well as as far as I understand.

So that's kinda where we're at right now. I really wanna build I have that itch. Like, I wanna build a computer. You know? And I'm I'm kinda curious about, like, what should I do? I kinda I think the Mac mini JS probably the move just given how fast those things are, but there's not a lot of expandability.

You know? So maybe I don't wanna spend, like, thousands of dollars on a home server. So I'm curious down below connect it right to your Synology.

Then you got the storage.

You got the speed of the Mac mini.

Yep. Yeah.

But, like,

but what's the hard drive space on your on your Mac mini? I don't know. I don't use it really. You don't use it a ton? I'm curious No idea. If that would be the move.

I certainly would want some sort of Yarn chip running.

I've thought about doing the Mac Studio thing because then you could run local LLMs on there.

But that that gets very expensive for sure.

That's the other thing I'm thinking about is that should I also be get getting something that has, like, a GPU in it so I can run these LLMs locally? And then I realized, like, my LLM budget is, like, $8 a month. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I'm really not spending all that much, so it's not a big deal to ping the APIs.

Right. But let us know down in the comments what you are what you have, what you've built. Send us photos on Twitter or Blue Sky because I love seeing everybody's rack.

If you wanna see a awful rack, I will send you a picture of mine. It is very dusty with very haphazardly crimped,

Ethernet cables. This has got the dustiest rack on Earth. Yeah. Yeah. It's just brutal.