I’ve used Seafile for years just for this. I haven’t ran that on pi, but on virtual machine it runs pretty smoothly and android client is pretty hassle free.

The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account “user” and group “user” for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.

On this ubuntu system I’m using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you’d basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it’s easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.

I don’t know about homeassistant, but there’s plenty of open source software to interact with odb2 at least for linux. With some tinkering it should be possible to have bluetooth enabled odb2 adapter where you can dump even raw data out and feed it to some other system of your choise, homeassistant included.

If you want live data from the drive itself you of course need to have some kind of recording device with you (raspberry pi comes to mind) but if you’re happy just to log whatever is available when parking the car you could set up a computer with bluetooth nearby the parking spot on your yard and pull data from that. It may require that you keep the car powered on for a while after arrival to keep bus active, but some cars give at least some data via odb even when without the key being in ignition lock.

Most, but not all, do. So it might be as simple as setting a static address, or it may overlap in the future.

You could ask from ISP (or try it out yourself) if you can use some addresses outside of DHCP pool, my ISP router had /24 subnet with .0.1 as gateway but DHCP pool started from .0.101 so there would’ve been plenty of addresses to use. Mine had a ‘end user’ account too from wehere I could’ve changed LAN IP’s, SSID and other basic stuff, but I replaced the whole thing with my own.

If I remember correctly, 1000Base-T standard has a requirement that device has to negotiate pinout on the fly. No matter which pin is connected to which. Obvioiusly just randomly wiring a cable up has other problems, like signal-to-noise, but in theory it should work even if you make a cable that’s as unstandard as you can make it.

I’d first recommend that you think about what you need.

This is the absolutely correct option. I’ve set up way too many things without a use case and lost interest shortly after. If you have a real world use case for your project, even if it’s just for yourself, you’ll have the incentive to keep it going. If you’re just setting things up for the sake of it the hobby loses it’s appeal pretty quickly. Of course you’ll learn a thing or two on the way but without a real world use case the things you set up will either become a burden to keep up with or they’re eventually just deleted.

Personally, tinkering with things that are just removed after a while gave me skills which landed me on my current job, but it’s affected myself enough that I don’t enjoy setting things up just for the sake of it anymore. Of course time plays a part on this, I’ve been doing this long enough that when I started a basic LAMP server was a pretty neat thing to have around, so take this with a grain of oldtimer salt, but my experience is that setting up things that are actually useful on a long term is way more rewarding than spinning up something which gets deleted in a month and it’ll keep the spark going on for much longer.

I ran one for a while. In Finland legislation is a bit different, so I wasn’t worried about breaking the law or getting sued, but my ISP got in touch pretty quickly. They were professionals and understood the situation when I explained why my traffic might look “a bit” suspicious and I attempted to clean up bad actors from the traffic with filtering and whatnot, but eventually ISP got enough complaints and they were pretty much forced to tell me that either I shut the exit node down or they’ll cut my line.

As I said, they were very professional about it, and managed the whole experiment as good as I ever could have hoped, but my agreement with them has an option that if I’m letting malware and bad actors leave the network even after warnings they can shut the connection down. And that’s understandable, I suppose they have similar agreements with other providers and they received all the abuse mail my exit node was causing, so I’m still a happy customer with them even if they eventually took the hard way.

I’m still pretty sure it would be possible to run filtered exit node, but it would require far more time and other resources that I’m willing to spend on a project like that and I’m not sure if a single person is enough for it anyways.

So, yes, do your homework and be careful. Legislation plays a significant part (depending on where you live), but your ISP most likely won’t like it either.

As many others have already given their specs, I’ll add mine: 1/1G fibre 55€/month, no data cap in rural Finland. And I can get the advertised speeds whenever (plus a bit more due to how they do the limit, but that’s heavily load dependent). 10G plan is available too, but I don’t have hardware or real need for that, so I don’t know about pricing, but I’d quess less than a 100€/m. Only dynamic IPv4, I’ve been waiting for them to upgrade to IPv6 so I could have some real world experience with it.

Compucase used to have loads of models like that, in example LX6A21. Maybe search those on ebay/craigslist/whatever you happen to have around? I have couple of those laying around, but I assume shipping from Finland would be stupidly high for a 10+ year old case. Or, as you said, pretty much any older tower would be a good option. But as they’re just sheet metal and plastic used ones are just fine. You might not get USB3 on the front panel, but as it’s a server does it really matter?

> I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews for Mikrotik. Does yours run hot at all?

It’s a bit different to work with than “usual” brands, but they have all the features you could ever hope for and then some and with my experience over the years they’ve been very reliable and stable. They have a bit odd models around which have only few 1G ports and the rest are 100M and things like that, but I’ve been really happy with the 4011 I have.

The model I have now runs at about 40C and it’s been on the edge of my network for 4-5 years now without any issues.

RB4011iGS+ I have can do (according to routerboard) up to 7Gbps for less than 200€. I’ve been pretty happy with it with my 1G fiber connection and it doesn’t break a sweat while doing that. Granted, I don’t run very complex stuff on the thing, but for me it can saturate the bandwidth I have available. From the ISP side I could go to 10G, but I don’t have any hardware which could manage it, so I’m not interested (at least for now).

I initially had Edge Router X from Ubiquiti, but it stalled at around 700Mbps, so that thing is now glorified POE switch on my network and majority of the traffic goes trough mikrotik router and it’s been rock solid since installation.

to/from the router (and thus the internet) will be limited to 100mbit

Assuming of course that the uplink to the internet is 100M. And that the router with firewalls, tunnels, NAT and all can actually push whole 100M trough. That’s a pretty safe assumption with 100M, but I’ve seen devices which technically hve a gigabit ethernet connection but with real world traffic the routers CPU is a bottleneck and it’ll limit speeds well below that.

Email was one I figured I would get an answer for. I know plenty of people do it, but I’m not sure if I’d trust myself to do it right.

It’s not even about doing it right. It’s a PITA to manage when big players can just decide to block your server and then you’ll be jumping trough hoops with Microsofts spam filtering program and whatnot just go get your messages trough. It’s got very little to do if you’ve managed things right on your end, random issues with delivery just pop out of the thin air and it’s your job to monitor it, swear by your mothers name to the big players that you’ll play nicely and hope that their robotic overlords are satisfied with your time and effort.

And if you host email for anyone else it gets exponentially worse. I’ve been doing it long enough that apparently my server has a reputation now so those cases aren’t as frequent as they used to, but they still pop up now and then and it takes time to figure it out with no other reward than the issue goes away, until it returns without any way to really know why.

DNS is a quite well matured technology and it’s just as complex as it needs to be and not a bit more. It’s a very robust system which has been a big part of the backbone of the internet as we know it today for decades and it’s responsible for quite a large chunk of stuff working as intended globally for millions and billions of people all day every day.

It’s not hard to learn per se (it’s something you can explain on a basic level to every layman in 15 minutes or so), it’s just a complex system and understanding complex systems isn’t always easy nor fast. Running your own DNS-server/forwarder for a /24 private subnet is rather trivial thing to do, but doing it well requires that you understand at least some of the underlying tehcnology.

You really need to learn how to walk at first and build on that to run. It’s just a fundamental piece of technology and there’s no shortcuts with it due to nature of DNS services. You can throw whatever running on a container by following step-by-step instructinos and call it a day, but that alone doesn’t give you the knowledge to understand what’s going on under the hood. That’s just how the things are and should I have my way with things, that same principle should apply to everything, specially if it’s going to face the public internet.

lsyncd does just this. It’s intended use is to sync directories between systems over slow(ish) uplink, but it can work locally as well. It takes some fiddling to set up, but once set up it just does it’s thing seamlessly at the background. However if you’re just looking for a backup solution I’d might look for something else, like a plain rsync script.

It’s doable for sure. You just need a way to sync the data between locations so that every DNS server responds with the same records, but that’s pretty much it. I do that for a (very small) business with ispconfig, but there’s plenty of options around starting from building your own. On the question if you should it’s a bit more difficult. Running a DNS server out in the wild isn’t the most complex thing to do, but it’s also a thing where you can break pretty much everything else you’re running very easily if you mess something up.

It’s a bit difficult to say if you should. From my point of view, if you really know what you’re getting into and doing you’re not asking if you should around the internet and (in general) if you ask if you should do it then (way more often than not) the answer is ‘no’. If you know how to write zone files manually (not that you really need to, it’s just a thing you can do when you have enough understanding on DNS and things related), understand how axfr and loads of other tech works, then sure, go for it. But, and I know I’m repeating myself, if you ask if you should (to me) it’s a sign that you don’t know enough.

Documentation is not worth much if you can’t access it when needed. So yes, either print it out or store it somewhere else what you can access even if your own hardware is completely dead.

Good to know, thanks. I need to put that to a test.

I’ve heard about it, but haven’t tried it myself. If I’ve understoord correctly it requires that photos are stored on it’s own storage format instead of flat files on a network share, so it doesn’t really fit the bill. If I could run that as a front end for existing storage I would already tried it out, but for the reasons mentioned I really like to have the actual files available and Immich doesn’t really fit the bill on that part. Interesting project anyways and it absolutely could to the trick I’m after, but I don’t think I’ll spend another terabyte of storage just for that (yes, there’s quite a few photos, wife and me have been taking photos with dslr as a hobby over 15 years and we have kids and dogs).

The router doesn’t have file shares, so it doesn’t show up on file manager. You most likely need to connect to that with a browser by IP-address. But as port forwarding can have severe security issues I really suggest that you learn more on what you’re trying to do and understand the implications before poking holes to your firewall.

I’m not comfortable to provide step-by-step instructions since doing that wrong can cause all kinds of havoc on your network (and the whole apartment if you happen to have IoT-things around).