I mentioned a few hanging issues on my move to Linux (again) and I’m happy to say that all of them have been fairly easily resolved and completed. Now I can move on to doing more again.
Shared Drives
As suspected, the core issue with getting the mounts to work was with the device IDs in the fstab file. I managed to sort that out and map the drives to automatically mount, which meant I could move on the adding them to sharing things with Samba again. I did end up having to rebuild the Docker drive interim, though it was unrelated to the mounting and sharing.
Docker
It seems that my Docker problems mostly stemmed from the lack of file permissions that come from using an NTFS drive in Linux versus an EXT3 drive. I’ve dedicated one of the old 1TB drives entirely to holding Docker containers, so I simply, copied things off, and reformatted the drive, then copied everything back. It plays much more friendly with the Linux based file system.
Media Streaming
i dumped Plex in favor of Jellyfin. It was pretty painless to set up and there are apps available for the TVs, which is what matters.
Synergy
The problem was indeed related to my email issue. After contacting support, and moving my email aliasing to Gmail from Outlook, I was able to receive the password reset and get my registration information. Since I already have the same static IP, once I pointed the new install at my main PC which is the Host, it connected right up. Which meant I could dump the secondary KB+Mouse I had been using.
Going Forward
So what’s next. This is all stuff I have tried a bit previously, but didn’t because I find using Windows as a server to be clunky.
- ZNC Bouncer – Occasionally I’ve run an IRC Bouncer with ZNC. I’d like to set that up again. ZNC makes IRC feel a lot more modern because it essentially connects to servers, then you can connect to the ZNC instance, as if you never left. It helps for keeping persistence and chat history.
- Audio Streaming – i have not looked too deep into this, but I would be surprised if there was not some sort of meaningful self hosted option for audio streaming. I own a shitload of digital music, and I can use DS Audio from my Sinology but I find that DS Audio is a bit too clunky and ugly for my tastes.
- OpenVPN Server – For some reason my OpenVPN server on my NAS isn’t working right, but it’s always felt a little jankey. I want to look into a modern, up to date, set up for connecting to my home network from remote places.
- Scripting – Probably the main benefit from having a dedicated Linux box again is how easy it is to run automated things with Python Scripts.
