Matt Nickel

Hello, first post…in march while Covid sick I ordered the parts and I set up a brand new computer with unraid, with the purpose of: 1. Getting all of our multiple external drives that we had collected over the years consolidated 2. Hopefully having our computers (both Mac and Pc) backed up in the background. 3. Our pictures from all our phones easily moved into one folder. 4. Plex server functionality 5. Sweet gaming PC 6. Remote access for some of the above mentioned uses, but mainly remote access to a folder so that I could eliminate Dropbox. I am a contractor and between quoting and marking up plans, I accumulate a fair number of PDFs that I don’t wish to lose. I accomplished a lot of it just by following tutorials! I installed a Windows VM and passed the video card through (At this point I was feeling like a super smart computer hacker). I transferred all my external hard drive‘s into the folders I created. Separated them all up so that I could have a folder for pictures, folder for my wife's shares, a folder for media, etc. I installed some dockers and can access my Plex server from my home Network. I have photo prism on and can put my pictures on there (although this is not really the functionality I was looking for and perhaps there is better software that would sink across our phones and laptops). And as mentioned prior, I can play games. So in that regard, I am happy. Unfortunately I don’t understand the language of computers or rather Linux. I would consider myself a techie guy and usually can figure things out fairly quickly. But Linux an unraid have me wanting to pull my nonexistent hair out! I have spent days trying to make WireGuard work. I cannot get to seafile to work. Nothing wants to back up easily. My wife’s McIntosh can access the server locally but in no way shape or form can I get a back up working. My pc has issues too. When trying to access shares and sign in on any computer the only one I can get to work is the admin sign in… My personal sign in just never works! I know this is from my lack of understanding the whole language and structure of this system. When googling topics some of the language used around port numbers and IP addresses just confuses me as some of the people demonstrating are obviously hiding their information so that they don’t expose them selves…so I never really know what number of mine they are referring to. Now on my server when I even try to install a docker I’m getting warnings that accessibility is an issue and it’s a read only file system. So I go back to my shares and I am unable change any settings. There is a warning from the action centre but then when I try to update that there are further errors that prevent me from updating it and I feel like I’m going back in circles. So while I can use the Plex server and drag and drop files from my computer into my share folders on my local network (even then sometimes the home server doesn’t want to show up until I access the “recent” folder), I still haven’t made any headway on figuring out how to run a VPN, accessing any folder remotely, or backing up our computers in an easy way. I’ve certainly spent way more time trying to figure this out than I ever did unplugging and plugging external hard drives. I’ve lost tons of information on corrupted external hard drives in the past and that’s why this seemed like such a great option but I feel like I’m in over my head and completely discouraged! If only I had a buddy here that could walk me through it I’m sure I’d be able to pick it up.