Background
While working on learning 3D for game development and collaborating with other students. I was responsible for the technical art. Rigging characters, and mocap animation. I was also working with other students to assist me. And it was pretty clear from the beginning that a more colaborative tool was needed. I needed students to work on files conccurently as we developed out characters and it had to be iterable.
We decided to use OneDrive and it worked quite well. My assistants could access files whenever they needed to from any machine and I could check their statuses without waiting or communicating with them.
It became clear near the end of production, that although Onedrive helped me float I needed something better. And after graduation, I only had a few months to procure the hard work many of us did.
Research
Without much experience with networking or storage I learned about NASs. and how expencive they could be. looking for my options and deliberating on building a PC server that could grow with my needs. Where a Synology NAS seemed like it could. It would be less expensive, The return on investment was higher because If I decided to break it down I could still use the individual parts for something else if I choosed to upgrade down the road. i could repurpose the GPU, CPU, Power Supply, case, etc. It had built a gaming PC before so with that I had the confidence It would be a challenge but doable.
Building the Server
I made many mistakes while building this. But was able to find my way to solutions with some sleep and time.
OS – Unraid
Cloud – Nextcloud
Reverse Proxy – cloudflared tunnel
Here are some of the docker containers I’m running,
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