…matic. ok I’ll stop, sorry

guh! I thought it’d be nice to have my one source of truth for all my data I care about. I can reference it from anywhere, and it’ll back up to The Cloud. Plus, music server.

It was more of a pain than I expected!

buying the right stuff

I searched for a NAS and bought one. Well, I thought I did. You’ll have to forgive me for thinking this first result was a NAS, given the search terms and all the rest of the results:

I guess I should have noticed it was very cheap. Alas: it was a hard drive enclosure. Well. Returned it and bought a QNAP TS-216G-US.

Luckily I did the HD just fine: a 1TB Western Digital NAS SSD¹²³.

Got a UPS with AVR while I’m at it, since our @&*$%#! grid means we lose power more often these days.

dive into bizarro software world

I didn’t really think about it, but buying a QNAP NAS is really buying a QNAP El Cheapo Computer running QNAP OS, which means you get more-or-less whatever software they have made available for QNAP OS.

Setting it up is more of a thing than I’d guessed! you connect through guessing its address on your LAN, then you can set up “MyQNAPCloud”? You have to choose all sorts of setup things like do you want a “thin volume”, “thick volume”, or “static volume” on your hard drive? Gah

Then you’re in its knockoff-Windows GUI, f’ing everything has a splash screen Wizard, and you go through their App Center stepping over 19 different Backup/Sync apps, 11 “Entertainment” apps such as “Kazoo Server”, a lil category called “Surveillance”, …

Luckily “HBS Hybrid Backup Sync”, the preinstalled backup app, let me set up the following syncs easily:

1. from Google Drive to NAS (real-time)
2. from Dropbox to NAS (real-time)
3. from NAS to Glacier (nightly)

access my files

On my local network at home, I can go to 192.168.1.76 and find the NAS. I don’t know why it’s .76. I don’t even remember how I found it the first time when I plugged everything in and then went “now what?”

I can get there via myqnapcloud.com. Then that gives me a “smart URL” that’s https://qlink.to/(my nas name). Most importantly, I can access it like a HD, I think, on my local network or once I set up a VPN. More on that later.

(I’m sure there’s some way I can ssh? I hope? geez I didn’t even get this far yet)

jellyfin again

Jellyfin lets you stream your music from anywhere. Plex does too, but they’re getting worse over time and charging Yet Another Subscription, while Jellyfin remains free. Alas, free also sometimes means pain in the ass.

(I originally wanted to buy from Terramaster, the #3 NAS company, because they don’t lock you in to their HDs like Synology, and they advertise Jellyfin built-in. but I figured QNAP, the #2 NAS company, would be just as good, and how hard can installing software be? alas)

Anyway someone made an app you can install for QNAP Janky OS, and it seems to work, hooray

The last bit I can’t figure out is how to get it to serve jellyfin over https or install tailscale. The jellyfin-qnap maker wrote a series of incantations that did not work, though it’s probably my fault, because I did the usual “forget about certificates for 6-12 months, let all knowledge leave my brain, then try to learn about them again.”

ach, vpn

I can skip all this https nonsense if I use a VPN!

• Attempt 1: there is a Tailscale QNAP app! But doesn’t work for my NAS version! Gah.
• Attempt 2: there’s the “QVPN” app which lets you set up an OpenVPN connection. Or a L2TP/IPSec connection. Claude guided me through all these settings, all the ports to open, all the troubleshooting, it didn’t f’ing work.
• Attempt 3: install Tailscale from container. The only setting I had to change (thanks Claude) was to run it in “Network mode: Host.” It worked! As soon as I logged in, the logs gave me a little URL to go to to log in to my tailscale account. Then it’s a machine on tailscale just like any other. Hell yeah. So I can access it when I’m not at home, use Jellyfin without fear of exposing a public http port, and even mount it as a regular hard drive.