RaddyKewl

Apple devices play nicely together. They have Bonjour networking, and just automatically find other Apple devices on the network. When I use non-Apple devices, my Macs don't automatically pick them up, and I have to go searching for them, and configure a lot of settings. That was the whole reason for wanting an Apple NAS. Does anyone know if my Synology router would support RAID? Does Synology support Bonjour?

I have the Synology RT2600ac router, and it has a USB 3.0 port. I know I can plug external storage into it. Would it be fast enough to use as my main storage for video editing, and streaming? Does the Synology router support RAID and work with Bonjour? Like I just want all of my Macs to have the NAS drive mounted full-time. I also want to be able to access media from the NAS with my AppleTVs. This is my current network:

I'm heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. Macs, Apple TVs, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. I'm needing to come up with an expandable NAS for my home network. I know I can build a NAS PC and make it a Hackintosh, but that would be running an Intel chip, and I'd like to be running on Apple Silicon, as it's more power efficient. I know Apple Silicon is a system on a chip and doesn't have SATA ports or M.2 slots. What I'd like to do is pick up a used M1 Mac Mini, and run it as a headless RAID server. But since it's SoC, there's no native way to connect those drives. According to the specs of the M1 Mac Mini, it has two USB-4/Thunderbolt-3 ports. Can I connect multiple drives (perhaps 4) to the Thunderbolt ports, and set them up as a RAID? If so, would multiple drives on the Thunderbolt Ports cause a bottleneck? My main goal is data redundancy rather than speed, but it still needs to be usable for video streaming and editing.

I have a 2020 Mac Mini, with 512 GB of onboard storage. I set up my system where my programs are on the onboard storage, and I set up an external USB drive for my Users folder, which contains all of my personal data. I've had them both since early 2021, and now the external drive is failing. I've only used 318 GB so far on the external drive, not even a full terabyte of the 5TB this is supposed to hold. The drive has been stationary, mounted to my wall, since I got it. It's already out of warranty from WD. And the one time I didn't get Geek Squad Protection, is the one time I have a drive failure. The drive has been running slow and I just noticed it start clicking in the last few days. I've had many WD hard drives over the years, internal and external, laptop and desktop. None of them have ever failed. What would cause a drive to fail after only 21 months? Since I'm gonna have to replace it, I'm thinking about plugging my new storage device directly into my Synology Router using it as a NAS. My whole house is hardwired with ethernet, and I don't believe the performance hit would be much worse than the external drive connected via USB directly to the Mac. This would also allow my other computers and Apple TV devices to connect to the NAS. I was hoping I'd be able to get several more years of use out of this 5TB drive. Eventually I'll need that much storage, as I work with photos and video, but I don't wanna buy a 20TB drive just for it to fail before I get much use out of it. Would also be interested in building a RAID NAS for some redundancy. What would you all recommend for types of drives and the direction I should go? Also, can I put my MacOS Users folder on a network drive? Attached are the drive diagnostics from DriveDX.

Yeah I seen the video where Linus used this in his home, but I don't know if I have enough space left in my crown moulding to run more. How bendy is optical HDMI?

I've dedicated one room in my home to be my studio. I have connected several input devices including computers and gaming systems into an 8x8 HDMI Matrix, that is currently only outputting three displays and one HDMI capture. That leaves me 4 HDMI Outputs sitting idle. I have a TV in my bedroom and the living room that sometimes I would like to game or use my computer for recreational or business purposes, without having to sit in a computer chair in the studio. I live in a small modular home, built in 2002. The house sits on a crawlspace, and getting under the house is not feasible for running cable. I've already run ethernet cable behind the crown moulding, and there's no space behind the baseboards to run cable. The walls are thin and they're all on the same level, but I live near many neighbors where there's a chance I could have network interference. I'm looking for recommendations for solutions to get HDMI signal from my Studio Room to both my Bedroom and my Living Room. I don't want to have to unplug and replug a receiver between inputs or rooms, I just want to switch inputs on the matrix, turn on the devices, and go. The Studio is about 20 feet from the Bedroom TV with 4 walls in between. The Studio is about 25 feet from the Living Room TV with 3 walls in between. The walls are made of drywall.

Can both batteries be charged simultaneously while installed inside and operating the remote?

I just seen this video, and it got me thinking… this shouldn’t be too hard, and it would save me money, time, and headaches of AA batteries. Does anyone know of any pre made kits designed for the Logitech Harmony 665? Something that would fit in place, Dremel if I need, I can solder in and it has a nice replacement battery door with a usb charging slot built in? Preferably with the logic board that prevents over charging and allows “play and charge.” If a kit like that doesn’t exist, could someone recommend a battery and the logic board that isn’t going to catch fire, and would physically fit in the Harmony 665, with or without slight modification.

I'm already using a free Cloudflare plan for cacheing and DDOS protection. It looks like they offer that round robin DNS service. Their site mentions some advanced services can detect when servers are down, and I assume they're referring to their own services. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/glossary/round-robin-dns/

I was planning to upgrade to business internet for this (as stated in my initial post). Electricity costs are miniscule. Is it possible to point the DNS entries to both IP addresses? If not, is there software I can run similar to Dynamic DNS that would somehow make it link to both as a failover option? For this, I'm currently on Google's G Suite for my email, but I'll likely drop them since they're plan to start charging me for the service. I use my standard GMail account for most of my email anyway. Do these services allow me to use my own domains and allow SSL? I'm already planning to get the DSL for failover, since my current internet is unreliable. It constantly goes down while I'm working and when I wanna relax and watch TV. I would just switch to DSL, but it's much slower than cable when it's working. I also plan to setup a home VPN sometime in the future, so I can access my network remotely, and eventually to allow future employees or contractors to access my servers from their homes. Since I'm already getting the extra connection, I might as well use the connections for webhosting as well. It'll save me money in the long run.

I run four low traffic websites. Three are running Wordpress, one is running Yourls. They’re for my business portfolio, personal blog, Twitch streaming, and a URL shortener. I get such little traffic and I don’t expect it to go up any time in the near future. I can’t justify paying a few hundred dollars a year on hosting, for such little use. I know there’s free hosting out there, but many ISPs block those hosts at the DNS level for spam and abuse violations. I’m currently on Comcast Internet 600Mbps , 20Mbps . The speed is decent, but I lose connection a couple of times per day. I recently purchased a Synology router with load balancing and fail over, and I intend to add AT&T DSL to make my connection more reliable. Unfortunately there are no fiber-to-the-home options in my area. I have found a mini workstation (similar to the corporate computer provided by my employer) that should be more than powerful enough to run my four sites. HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Mini Business Desktop (Intel Quad Core i5-6500T, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SSD) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086RF1SLK/ I currently have residential internet with Comcast, and my IP has been the same for years (even after several modem power cycles). I might even bump it up to a business account, just in case they block ports or traffic, and so I don’t run afoul of their terms and conditions. I don’t know how IPs are handled with AT&T, but I would likely get a business account with them as well. Since my router supports load balancing and fail over, is there a way to setup my home internet server to use both connections (mainly for the fail over aspect) to maintain uptime on my websites. I’m currently on Dreamhost, and I’m actually quite impressed with them. They have automated updates for all of my sites. They handle automated renewals of SSL with Let’s Encrypt. I would kind of like to have that level of ease of use, after the initial setup. Basically I want a Ron Popeil webhost. Set it and forget it. (Hoping I’m not aging myself with that reference.) To accomplish all of the above, what direction should I be heading? What OS? What webserver software? If load balancing a website is possible, what terminology and software should I be researching? Any other advice? Any fatal flaws in my logic? I’m confident I could eventually do all of the setup by following various tutorials. But I’m not into doing a lot of tedious work, so I’d consider hiring someone to do that for me. Though I’m not ready to move forward on that right away. This is a longterm plan, I’m just researching right now.

I’ve tried patching and upgrading in the past, but the installer crashed. Might be because I’m only running 4GB of RAM.

This one is actually DDR3. Do those weird configurations you mentioned affect DDR3?

I have: Late 2009 iMac 10,1 OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 Core 2 Duo, 3.06 GHz Socket 775 4GB RAM 500GB HDD Obviously I’d max out the memory to 16GB. Thinking about swapping in an SSD for my boot drive. This takes a Socket 775 CPU. The fastest one in that form factor is a Xeon X3380. Does anyone know if I could swap the Xeon CPU into an iMac, or does Apple lock it down, only allowing the CPUs they initially offered? If it is possible would the performance increase be worth it? Would I run into issues with thermals? Is the overall upgrade worth it? This is my old, casual use computer. Browsing the web (lots of tabs open at once), watching videos, etc. I have an M1 Mac Mini for my creative endeavors.

I just disabled NAT on the Netgear router and now the Synology router is sharing the internet connection to all the other devices. The Synology router was only detecting the internal IP provided by the Netgear router, now it's detecting the public IP provided by Comcast.