It's been a couple weeks now since I got my homelab setup complete and for the most part it's been working great. I did run into a few issues since last time, including one that I thought I sorted out but I'm not sure why it didn't work.
Issue one
The first issue I faced was that my syncthing server wasn't starting at startup. I thought I had already fixed that in systemd but for some reason even when I told it to wait for the storage mount, it wouldn't and so it crashed at startup. I ended up adding a startup command to my .profile and so far that seems to work well enough.
Issue two
There's been some oddities with Syncthing and the directory permissions on my storage, but I eventually got that sorted out. I didn't realize Syncthing ran as the logged-in user instead of as root or another user so I had to change some permissions on the storage directory tree to get everything sorted out. Occasionally there will still be some issues when adding a new directory that's been shared from one of my other devices, but that's usually sorted out by creating the necessary directory and additional hidden directory that's used to store scanning metadata.
Issue three
When I had everything in my room when I was setting it up, I was able to access the server via the device name. Now that I've moved it to the closet where the network panel is and plugged the ethernet into my Google Fiber mesh extender, it seems that I'm unable to resolve the server by the machine name. Unfortunately it seems my router is fairly locked down as well so I'm unable to make the changes I need to totally fix that, so the workaround is to use the IP address of the server which leads me to my next problem.
Issue four
Google, why won't you let me set static IPs on the devices inside my network? Thankfully they seem to use a somewhat sane approach of trying to re-address a device on the first IP that it was assigned when the device connected to the network but I hate to rely on that. I suppose I could put the router in bridge mode and then use my own, but that's a job for another day whenever this finally annoys me enough. If anyone has a real fix to the static IP thing, let me know.
Issue five
Last but not least, I underestimated how underpowered this iMac was. It's honestly more than enough for what I've asked of it so far but I do believe I've got it about at its limit when I'm streaming on Jellyfin and trying to do anything else at the same time. I can RDP to the server just fine most of the time and although the initial connection is slow, I'm usually able to work afterwards just fine. I do have a late 2014 MacBook Pro sitting around that I could use instead, but I do worry about having it plugged in all the time and the risks that could pose to the battery that's over 10 years old.
Wrapping up
Overall, I'm really happy with how things have worked out and I've learned a ton along the way. As of right now I don't really have any other plans for it, although I may try to set up a way for me to offload some pictures and files from my phone so that I can reduce what's on the device and reduce my dependency on the iCloud plan I have. I do want to get some sort of cloud backup in place as well, but as of right now I have two copies of the data I have backed up and the NAS is in RAID1 so as long as I can get a replacement drive quickly if one dies then I shouldn't have any issues. Even if both drives die for some reason, I have the backup on my gaming desktop and can rebuild it.
Anyway, if you have any suggestions or interesting things to try out, drop a comment down below and let me know!