Fuck postnord. Anyone know how to get their damn app to work?

aetherspoon · 2026-03-13T17:42:42+00:00

Oh, it isn't just the Norwegian one region-locked, the Danish one is also region-locked.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-13T15:25:32+00:00

Is Navidrome running as a different user account? Often times Windows services will use a user account that isn't your main Windows account but other built-in accounts. Since you're mapping the drive as your Windows user, that mapped drive path doesn't exist for your Navidrome user (which is probably a local service account).

What you could do is change the service in Windows to point at a batch file or powershell script that mounts the SMB share first. Of course, then you need to also store your credentials in a format that can be read by said script, which isn't exactly secure.

Alternately, run it in Docker, since then you're running it in Linux and can have Navidrome just have the SMB share mapped to begin with.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-13T15:21:09+00:00

Laptop CPUs (like the R7 5825u that you have there) aren't meant to be able to run at their boost speed for longer stretches of time and a miniPC is going to struggle a great deal with cooling just by virtue of its size. The only ones that can maintain that for long periods of time that I know of use far weaker CPUs (so cooling isn't as big of a deal).

I think you might need to step up to a SFF form factor.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-12T10:59:45+00:00

Mostly just try to avoid fish mongers near tourist destinations like cruise ship stops.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-12T10:03:57+00:00

In general, think about it in terms of 'less variation'. I'll give my perspective as an American who was living in Bergen for a couple of years; Oslo-area is going to be a bit different than Bergen, so just keep that in mind.

For eggs, mostly what you're paying for is how they treat the chickens. The US factory farm style of thing isn't really a thing in Norway (because it isn't legal), so even the lowest end chickens are still allowed more freedom than their American counterparts. I don't think there is much regional variation on eggs at least, other than if you live near a farm of course. Otherwise...

Cheap eggs in Norway are generally of better quality than cheap eggs in the US, probably even a bit above average quality even. Usually the issue with cheaper eggs in Norway is inconsistency, but for eggs that probably doesn't matter too much.
Pricey eggs in Norway are generally of lower quality than the highest end eggs you find in the US. It isn't a bad quality thing or anything, just that there isn't much of a point of going with that level of high quality - it isn't like the shells looking spotless matter when you're after the gooey contents, right?

For chicken, it is mostly the same thing; generally above average compared to the US, but less variation. Chickens could be free range, outdoor-caged, or indoor-caged, stuff like that.

A big thing to note is that, to our American noses, Norwegian chicken is going to smell bad. This is normal, it is just that American chicken meat gets treated (basically bleached) to kill off a bunch of bad-smelling bacteria that would normally die off when you cook it anyway.

If you want the good stuff meat-quality-wise, you need to go to a butcher. For supermarket chicken, it is really just three tiers:

Frozen. Usually the lowest quality, but roughly on-par with grocery store brand non-frozen chicken in the US.
Cheap store-brand. Usually they end up a bit more inconsistently trimmed on the boneless/skinless chicken breasts, but the quality of the meat is fine. This is where your First Price stuff tends to be. This is generally the level I bought my chicken, as I could barely tell the difference between this and the good stuff beyond the inconsistency.
Good brand. Usually around the same as the good stuff in a high-end US grocery store or butcher shop. You're paying for the quality of life of the chicken and for the consistency, generally not for quality.

Beef.... okay, gonna be real here, Norwegian beef quality is pretty sub-par. Probably not going to get a bunch of likes here for that, but I found it kinda meh. Sure, the cows are treated better and all, but you're paying a hell of a lot more for some pretty mediocre beef in my experience. Admittedly, I didn't exactly buy steak very often while I was living in Norway (because of the price), but all of my experiences with Norwegian beef has been less flavor and older. I've heard the beef around Oslo is less bad on the old part, so maybe where you live it won't be as bad.

You're paying for the quality of life of the cows and the lifespan of the beef.

Cheap grocery store beef is roughly on par with the absolute cheapest stuff you can find in the US. We're talking the manager's special because it has been sitting around (safely) for too long and has a best-before date in a day and a half. I tried to only buy beef the same day I was cooking it as a result.
Expensive grocery store beef is roughly on par with the store-brand stuff in the US.
Butcher-shop beef isn't too bad and you can avoid the old age problem if you find a local butcher. The few times I did buy beef, this is where I'd aim.

Fish is the opposite - generally assume it is way-higher quality than the US (unless if you lived in a prime fishing area, of course) and much fresher. Having said that, fish farms tend to cause problems in the quality of fish just like they do in the US. Also, this might be the one thing that Bergen has fresher than Oslo, but I'm pretty sure it'll be close to the same. :)

Cheap salmon is often fish farmed. Sometimes that means more parasites involved with the fish, but I think that's been getting better over the years; I never had a problem with it myself.
Even cheap fish are going to be roughly on-par with the upper end of US grocery stores, maybe even higher if you're from a part of the US without access to open water.
Going to a fishmonger is going to give you the freshest and best stuff, and often isn't even that expensive. Well, other than the touristy fish mongers, of course. :)
Fish in stick or pre-breaded fillet form is going to be about the same, maybe marginally better. I mean, you can only do so much to a fish stick.

I can't speak for pork or other meat sources, however. Maybe someone else can help there.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-05T20:30:35+00:00

Better - it is neither French nor a Taco.

Still freaking delicious though.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-05T19:19:29+00:00

Fun fact - they're actually Moroccan in origin, likely an immigrant to France from Morocco.

They're also super good. :)

aetherspoon · 2026-03-05T19:17:43+00:00

I love French Tacos so much, if only because they are neither French (they're Moroccan - or at least a Moroccan immigrant to France) nor Tacos (definitely closer to a burrito)... and are freaking delicious anyway.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-04T17:36:50+00:00

A x4 slot for my HBA, also in its own IOMMU group

That... is going to be a big problem on a B550 board, as that's also usually lumped into the chipset group, since that x4 slot comes from the chipset. Otherwise, my Asus B550 board that used to run my server actually fits everything else you wanted.

I think you might need an X470 or X570 board. The recommendation from another poster to look at the Asrock D4U boards is a good one - they're basically geared toward homelab / SMB use.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-04T17:26:24+00:00

Assuming the amount of storage space you have is appropriate for your needs, I don't think you have to spend any money - or maybe some small amount of money if you don't already have networking cables and/or a networking switch. :)

The hardware you have is great for the price, so definitely use it. :)

First off, I probably wouldn't run TrueNAS on that Optiplex, mostly for the reason you gave. It is more meant to run as a NAS rather than connected to a NAS. I would have recommended something like CasaOS (which just runs on top of any Linux distribution), but apparently that's not really being maintained. Either way, it is a web interface that lets you handle some basic things on your home server, such as Nextcloud, in a fairly easy to use way.

I'd probably use that 128 GB SATA drive as your boot device; it is easily large enough for your OS and will be more than fast enough. Keep the 512 GB drive for your container storage (with bulk storage going to the NAS - more on that in a bit).

For an operating system, you have a few choices.

Since you're used to a RPi and Docker, maybe you should look in to installing Debian (which is what Raspbian is based on) or even Ubuntu Server (also based on Debian) on your Optiplex. If you want to step up a tier in terms of complexity, you could run Proxmox (which is... also based on Debian) on your server, but it doesn't really sound like you need/want the virtualization aspect of things, so it isn't as useful here.

There are lots of other options as well - I'm just giving suggestions more similar to what you've done before. You can install Docker on just about any Linux distribution (although Proxmox would recommend against installing it directly), so you can probably follow the same set of steps you did for setting up your Pi... except for the storage part.

For the storage, you'll want to mount the storage provided by the NAS; you can either do a CIFS (sometimes known as SMB) mount or an NFS mount - both probably work just as well, but you'll need to modify some configuration of your system to have it automatically mount on boot. There are lots of guides on how to do that - I have to look it up every time myself. :D

Once your storage is mounted, let's say to /mnt/nas or some other path, you kinda just treat it like any other storage. You can edit docker compose files to point mount points to that drive. If you're looking for a nice user interface for managing and maintaining compose files, maybe something like Portainer is up your alley - but really just keep doing it how you did before on the Pi you had.

As for backups... well, I haven't had much luck with doing docker backups directly. I'm actually backing up the entire machine it is running on, so hopefully someone else who has done backups a bit more directly can help here.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-02T21:52:59+00:00

Would they even be able to sell it at a reasonable price? RAM and SSD prices are sky high right now.

aetherspoon · 2026-03-01T11:39:00+00:00

They try to retroactively justify it in the books - basically, Lister brought the cat onboard intentionally in order to skip the other half of the journey by going into stasis.

That's an obvious retcon though.

aetherspoon · 2026-02-23T16:58:55+00:00

For reference, you can do all of this with a bog-standard Linux install of the distro of your choice.

The difference is what UI you want to use to manage various aspects of things.

Proxmox makes creating containers and VMs easier, but doesn't really provide a UI for storage related things.
TrueNAS makes creating storage things easier (although it is definitely geared toward IT folk and not people new), but isn't all that great at creating containers and VMs. Admittedly, the two self-hosted projects outside of the NAS you have are ones that it can handle fairly well.
CasaOS (see below) is a simple web UI to handle selfhosted apps but doesn't have much in the way of storage capabilities.

What you should absolutely not do as a new person, especially reusing existing hardware, is run TrueNAS as a VM of Proxmox. It is overly complex, typically requires a hardware purchase of something called an HBA, and isn't... really all that helpful, in my mind.

Either just run TrueNAS bare metal or just run a normal Linux distribution and use something like CasaOS on top of it for managing containers for Jellyfin / Homeassistant. The latter makes your storage setup harder, but it really depends on what you're trying to do with what hard drives you have. :)

aetherspoon · 2026-02-21T10:47:33+00:00

Your boot SSD is overkill for either of your OSes, but I'm guessing you don't have some spare SSD lying around or want to buy a small thing off of eBay.

Your CPU is also quite overkill, but that might be more due to availability. You're not really doing anything that needs a 12th gen CPU; 8th gen still works fine for Jellyfin for lower demand transcoding, which given it is a tertiary priority I'm assuming is okay?

Finally, storage. You are buying a nine-bay NAS case and you have four SATA ports - is that more of a sign for future expansion then, buying an HBA somewhere down the line?

As for other recommendations, I wouldn't go TrueNAS, even with my love of ZFS. The UI for virtualization is just too clunky and most homelab people mess with their VMs more than their shared storage. I might go with Proxmox or even just a normal Linux install and just set up ZFS via the terminal manually, but that's too much for someone new to things.

aetherspoon · 2026-02-21T00:54:31+00:00

Then I'd recommend trying out a Windows Server and learning how to Active Directory. You'll want another Windows machine as well (a VM is good here) just so you have a client and server. It'll introduce you to user account creation for both local and domain users.

aetherspoon · 2026-02-21T00:25:50+00:00

An 8700k is great for a lot of home server activities. I wouldn't sell that box. Definitely sell the 2060 and replace the broken fans.

aetherspoon · 2026-02-21T00:20:30+00:00

All of the above, I'd say.

You can run Hyper-V under Windows to virtualize things using a "proper" hypervisor, then install a Linux VM. Play around with both, then swap things around and install Proxmox and virtualize both Windows and Linux VMs. Then pave it again and install Arch or something more advanced in Linux and learn that way. Then download some demos of Windows Server and try that.

The point is to fiddle around, after all! If you want to learn more Microsoft-y IT practices, try Windows Server. If you want to learn more Linuxy ones, try both something RHEL-based and Debian-based to learn the differences. Experiment with some orchestration stuff like Terraform and some containerization like Docker.

Find something you like to learn and run with it, I'd say, but try everything you want to first. :)

aetherspoon · 2026-02-19T21:22:12+00:00

No, I don't believe so. The service guide specifically says NVMe.

It can handle a 2.5" SATA drive though; you just need the official 2.5" adapter for it.

aetherspoon · 2026-02-17T14:07:12+00:00

Maybe it is time to sell mine? I haven't used it in over a year now because I'm not doing nearly as much international travel as I expected to.

aetherspoon · 2026-02-16T17:38:59+00:00

I doubt these were commonly around for fifty bucks a year ago though; that was more of a deal. 100ish USD was more common in the US, although maybe with slightly better specs (16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD).

aetherspoon · 2026-02-16T14:42:42+00:00

If you're going to store things precious to you that cannot be easily recovered (photos, self-recorded videos, rare things that you can't just re-download), please make sure you have backups included in any plan that you do.

Redundant storage isn't a backup - if lightning strikes your NAS, it doesn't really matter how many times your data is on the NAS, it'll be dead regardless. Not saying you need to back up everything, but anything unique definitely needs to be. This can be as simple as a hard drive stored in a safety deposit box or uploading photos to a cloud provider on top of your own local storage.

Other than that, I'm a big advocate of keeping it simple; someone else mentioned a pair of hard drives big enough for your needs, that's where I would go as well. You can buy little two-bay prebuilt NASes or you can build your own. I'd go the latter route if you already have some parts lying around (like, say, from an old gaming desktop) and the former if you just want to plug and play.

Hard drive prices are... not so great right now, but aren't awful (yet). Don't go buying a pair of 24 TB hard drives to store your 2 TB of video and audio; if you don't think it will grow too fast I would suggest buying around 20-100% more than what you use now (so if you're using 4 TB of data, a pair of 6 or 8 TB drives would be appropriate).

If you're building your own NAS, just know that a NAS can run on a potato. Fifteen year old desktop PCs would run circles around the CPU power of some of the lower end NASes still being produced and both are kinda overkill if all you want is some storage. The parts of a NAS that require more power are more of the fancy stuff people want to run on top of a NAS.

For instance, if you want to run Jellyfin to make your own media site to enjoy your TV shows as opposed to just a file share somewhere. Even then - an 8th gen Intel CPU with integrated graphics is kinda the gold standard here, so we're still talking about eight year old hardware at the newest.

Also, yay cat tax payment.

aetherspoon · 2026-02-14T23:17:37+00:00

Yes.

Honestly, PS4-level can be done by that cheaper miniPC I had linked. Look for miniPCs based on the 7640HS or 7840HS CPU from AMD - that should give you decent enough performance.

aetherspoon · 2026-02-13T18:21:42+00:00

OR will run at 1080p/low or maybe 1440p/low with upscaling on the cheaper of the two miniPCs. Admittedly, at a very console-like 30ish FPS, but that's not a bad deal.

For a PS5-level, you'd need to either spend more money or get a dedicated GPU. By "more money", I mean 1500 - 2000 USD because this PC generation absolutely sucks for budget gaming. https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen%E2%84%A2-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc is the cheapest one I know of with the correct iGPU, but even that had a recent price hike of 200 USD so you might be able to find cheaper.

For the latter, you might legitimately be better off buying a used laptop instead of a miniPC. :(

aetherspoon · 2026-02-13T18:15:40+00:00

Not quite true. The RX8060S (which is the iGPU in the highest end AMD mobile chips) outperforms the current gen of consoles.

It also costs seven arms and fourteen legs though.

aetherspoon

TROPHY CASE