Part of the reason I ask: I bought a Synology (4-bay, 1 TB each in Synology's RAID 5–like format) a while back with the intention of using it as a hybrid NAS & server. But have been repeatedly struggling to get it to do actually run the applications I wanted to run. And then started trying to get some of the things I wanted to run on my Synology to instead run on a Raspberry Pi...same problem. The weird architecture and distro makes some things not work smoothly. So have been thinking about getting a Mini PC with a standing x86_64 processor running a standard Linux distro to be a proper server, and using the Synology more exclusively for file storage & sharing.

Some of the things you listed there are definitely things that were on my radar to get around to running myself anyway (e.g. Immich, Watchtower). Others I had never heard of, but was already considering looking for an equivalent (Affine, Jotta—though for notesI was hoping Nextcloud would have a suitable app), and others I didn't even think of (Linkwarden looks very interesting).

Since you've got a Synology already, I'm curious what value you see in the Mini PC running a Samba server? I'm also curious why you go with the Synology as your reverse proxy. Just the ease of the included tool? Does it also handle TLS termination, or how does that work in your setup?

[–] cRazi_man@europe.pub 3 points 1 day ago

I started with just a Synology NAS as well and struggles with Docker containers constatantly causing problems and not starting up (or shutting down). Turned out that the Synology hardware didn't have the muscle to run so many services (I had a lot fewer services back then, but it still kept stumbling). The mini-PC seperates the computing portion to be able to do the heavy lifting. Used 7th gen mini-PCs are going to be cheap as they flood the market in coming months as companies ditch machines that can't upgrade to Windows 11. Although be warned that these might not do the video transcoding you want.....check on your requirements.

Mariushosting.com is the single best resource I've found for Synology docker deployments. Here's a more complete guide once you have a mini-PC.

Unpopular opinion: AI helps quite a bit when you get stuck (Claude has been the best in my experience), but you need to know how to use it (i.e. let it diagnose problems to point you in the right direction to read about solutions....don't try to just execute everything it says because it doesn't understand your setup. It's great to feed it log outputs to allow diagnosis).

Once I got into it, I started looking for more and more self-hosted solutions that would be relevant to me. You can fire up a Docker container, check it out and delete if you don't like it.

Mini-PC running a Samba server: this is to share the storage connected to the mini-PC. Drives in the Synology are already easily shared through the Synology interface, but I am using these for bulk media storage and backups so don't usually need to access these directly. I use the server PC storage for small amounts of live network storage.

why go with the Synology for reverse proxy: It's very easy to do through Synology's baked-in solution. I'm conscious that I don't know a lot about security yet, and my reading tells me that the Synology solution is safe. I didn't want to take the risk of exposing services to the open internet through DIY solutions till I know more.