Now that I have the Linux box running as the daily drive, it was time to start setting up some REAL automation and work flows.
First up, network storage for the household.
I had a pain point where everyone in the house struggled with getting files to others in the house. Using email and phones just don’t make sense, why not just set up network storage. So I took one my old unused WS EasyStore drives, reformatted it as exFAT, hooked it up to my Raspberry Pi, and through the magic of multiple hours of swearing trying to figure it out? How to get it so that permissions just work on all systems? It finally works. If I had just used a Linux format, it would have been fine, but since exFAT can only use the permissions of the user it’s mounted under, I had a whole other user I had to make for these projects.
I set it up, then the real test happened. Setting it up as a network drive in Windows for family members. Would they care? Apparently enough that the memes started flowing in.
Next up was getting n8n set up locally, on that same drive, not the main drive, using the same user…on an exFAT drive. That was maddening as well. It’s the price you pay when you don’t do things in the one way that the instructions want you to set it up, and have to engineer your own solution.
Now it’s time to see if I can get n8n to pay some bills around here 😨