2 more cents :)

I’ve been using syncthing for a while now, on different devices, and the only unreliability I’ve run into is with android killing syncthing to save battery life, which is kinda hilarious, considering all the vendor- and google-provided crap they happily waste battery on (I don’t use it, but for what I’ve heard iOS is even worse in this regard).

Specifically, I have a samsung tablet where, no matter how much I tinkered with system settings, synchthing would only run if I manually launched the app or while the tablet was charging (BTW I still use that same tablet, but it now runs LineageOS and syncthing works flawlessly).

All this is to say, you should probably look into system settings and research ways to convince your OS to do what it’s supposed to rather than tinkering with syncthing itself.

Personally, I would sell everything and get a used PC on ebay (a small “minipc” one, unless space for hard disks is needed).

Take a look at what you could buy on ebay just by selling off the nvidia card.

I’d say a good middle ground could be making that stuff only visible from your mom’s user (or even setting up a completely separate server)?

It depends on what YOU want to do, really… personally, I would be ok hosting religious nonsense if asked, as long as it’s not generally available in kids’ accounts and stuff (also, porn), but I would come clean and outright refuse if it was neonazi,racist and/or conspiracy stuff. It depends on where you decide to draw the line.

BTW: there’s also the passive/aggressive, cowardly option of sayng “I’ll rip them when I have time” and then sequester all the DVDs and only ever find the time to rip the ones you don’t mind

man this is getting real popular (kinda like “why not both?” a while ago)

IMHO Ansible isn’t much different than a bash script… it has the advantage of being “declarative” (in quotes because it’s not actually declarative at all: it just has higher-level abstractions that aggregate common sysadmin CLI operations/patterns in “declarative-sounding” tasks), but it also has the disadvantage of becoming extremely convoluted the moment you need any custom logic whatsoever (yes, you can write a python extension, but you can do the same starting with a bash script too).

Also, you basically can’t use ansible unless your target system has python (technically you can, but in practice all the useful stuff needs python), meaning that if you use a distro that doesn’t come with python per default (eg. alpine) you’ll have to manually install it or write some sort of pythonless prelude to your ansible script that does that for you, and that if your target can’t run python (eg. openwrt on your very much resource-constrained wifi APs) ansible is out of the question (technically you can use it, but it’s much more complex than not using it).

My two cents about configuration management for the homelab:

• whatever you use, make sure it’s something you re-read often: it will become complex and you will forget everything about it
• keep in mind that you’ll have to re-test/update your scripts at least everytime your distro version changes (eg. if you upgrade from ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04) and ideally every time one of your configured services changes (because the format of their config files may in theory change too)
• if you can cope with a rolling-style distro, take a look at nix instead of “traditional” configuration management: nixos configuration is declarative and (in theory) guarantees that you won’t ever need to recheck or update your config when updating (in reality, you’ll occasionally have to edit your config, but the OS will tell you so it’s not like you can unknowingly break stuff).

BTW, nixos is also not beginner-friendly in the least and all in all badly documented (documentation is extensive but unfriendly and somewhat disorganized)… good luck with that :)

With the very limited number of drives one may use at home, just get the cheapest ones (*), use RAID and assume some drive may fail.

(*) whose performances meet your needs and from reputable enough sources

You can look at the backblaze stats if you like stats, but if you have ten drives 3% failure rate is exactly the same as 1% or .5% (they all just mean “use RAID and assume some drive may fail”).

Also, IDK how good a reliabiliy predictor the manufacturer would be (as in every sector, reliabiliy varies from model to model), plus you would basically go by price even if you need a quantity of drives so great that stats make sense on them (wouldn’t backblaze use 100% one manufacturer otherwise?)

IIUC you can flash LineageOS on the shield (if you try, let us know how it goes)