That part has worked fine so far. My trouble seems to be that my desktop is defaulting to netbird for DNS instead of the pihole, so I lose the pihole blocking. I suppose the easiest solution is just to netbird down when I’m not using it so DNS goes back to default.

And he is :)

I haven’t come across a way to split tunnel, but it’s worth looking into. I’m managing it all by CLI anyway, so maybe there’s a command for that.

Did you find any resources or tutorials that were particularly helpful? Anything you’d recommend?

16GB RAM may be a bit low for the setup, as others have suggested, but I’m currently running Immich and Nextcloud and a handful of other small services (like FMD) dockerized in an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. I’ve experienced very few issues. In my opinion, you could find a used Ryzen 3600 or even older, and 16GB will probably serve you just fine. You could save yourself a hundred bucks or more.

That said, what you’ve got here is nice and future-proof for quite a while, even if you end up going down the rabbit hole. You might eventually need another 16GB of RAM, but maybe not until after the AI bubble pops 🙂

This! I’ve been loving flipping through DVDs and blurays at Goodwill looking for gems to put in Jellyfin. I love that they will never go away, and I still feel a little giddy when I can watch something from the NAS in my office when I’m at someone else’s house. Today, my daughter and my niece each watched different episodes of Octonauts at the same time on different devices, and both were a thousand miles from my server. ☺️ All from a raspberry pi!

If you’re looking to learn how to set up a server and start selfhosting, Immich is great. You can get a docker image that includes the postgres database and everything, and it’s not hard to pair it with a reverse proxy or tailscale/VPN if you want to expose it to the web. You also don’t have to do that, just open the local port and use it on home WiFi.

HOWEVER, if you’re daunted by self-hosting and just want a simple, secure experience, Ente is the way to go, IMHO. It’s end-to-end encrypted so your photos are private, and the server is maintained and managed by people who know what they’re doing. Headache-free for you. The cost is a bit more than Google Photos, so it’s competitively priced but you’re paying only with cash instead of personal data.