This was a recent point of discussion on the 2.5 Admins podcast (https://2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-228/). Some good discussion on there.
My own thought is the best way to handle your family-member-finding-your-old-photos problem is the analog way: make some prints. It’s absolutely idiot proof, the methodology of keeping paper goods is well understood, and the technology is platform independent.
I do this with HAProxy and keepalived. My dns servers resolve my domains to a single virtual ip that keepalived manages. If one HAProxy node goes down, the other picks right up.
And this is one of the few things I’ve got setup with ansible, so deploying and making changes is pretty easy.
I can’t think of anything that specifically uses ssh, but Syncthing would do this, though for passwords I’m more inclined towards bitwarden.
With this concept in mind, I recently put together a VDI setup for a person who’s in one location for half of the year and another the other half. The idea is he’ll have a thin client at each location and connect to the same session wherever he is.
I’m doing this via a VM on Proxmox and SPICE. Maybe there’s some idea in there you could use.
In that case, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I’ve been reading a little bit before I go to bed and learning a lot that I glossed over when I set up my own mail server years ago. He and Alan Jude wrote some ZFS books as well that I keep coming back to and picking up new tricks each time.
I get pretty much anything Michael Lucas writes. The information is always great and his writing style is fun to read.
Important to note: it’s not a step-by-step guide to copy and paste and have a mail server running. It’s all about understand all the stuff that goes into it.
Hey, sorry for the late response—I missed the reply coming in.
I like docker volumes for multiple nodes because there’s no guarantee that multiple systems will have the same directory structure to bindmount, but moving volumes between nodes is relatively straightforward config-wise, which is a reason you’d use them in k8s.
As for latency in streaming: I think of latency sensitive operations as mostly things that need two-way communication. So, for example, if you wanted to play a game over a network, you’d need the controls to respond to your input immediately. Or if you’re making a voip call, you’d want the two sides of the conversation to be in sync. On the other hand, a video stream doesn’t typically download in real-time. The file fills a buffer on your computer ahead of you watching it. So the downloading isn’t happening synchronously with you watching it unless there’s a serious network bottleneck.
Take this with a grain of salt, the more I re-read, the more I realize I'm making assumptions about your setup that may or may not be true. First, I'm making an assumption that you're doing ACLs for samba shares (and I know that system better on FreeBSD than Linux). I'm also assuming based on your description you want everyone to have access, but not write access.
I think you could do an officewide group with read-only permissions on all of the shares and then set the unix group to the department.
So, for your HR team you'd do chgrp -R hr /path/to/parent/shares/hr and setfacl -m d:g:rwx /path/to/parent/shares/hr and add the officewide group's read-only perms: setfacl -m d:g:officewide:rx /path/to/parent/shares/hr. Rinse and repeat for each share.
Not sure if this is what you're after, but maybe it'll help lead in a good direction.
I can’t think of a way off hand to match your scenario, but Ive heard ideas suggested that come close. This is exactly the type of question you should ask at practicalzfs.com.
If you don’t know it, that’s Jim Salter’s forum (author of sanoid and syncoid) and there are some sharp ZFS experts hanging out there.
I’ve only ever tinkered with openmediavault, so I’m by no means an expert, but there is a ZFS plugin available. Here’s a forum post that may help: https://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php?thread/7633-howto-instal-zfs-plugin-use-zfs-on-omv/
That fruit argument is so that samba plays nicely with Apple’s SMB client implementation.
A hybrid is probably a good way forward. I had a career as a photographer for a while and I learned from that: going through 1000 photos takes very little time, but going through 10,000 takes an eternity. If you can star or mark your obviously important photos as you go along, it’ll take very little to print them at the end of the year.