Wasn’t sure either, looked it up quickly…

In this context it’s probably referring to Deep Packet Inspection, some technique to determine traffic type, and then blocking specific (Wireguard and/or OVPN) traffic.

Do you have any idea what your hardware is actually pulling from the outlet? Maybe it’s not that bad after all?

Mine is pulling around 55W from the wall in its “normal” state. Meaning two 3.5" HDDs spun up, and a bunch of light services running. Which is squarely in “not great, not terrible” territory.

Apart from flipping the power saver switch on the mainboard I haven’t done anything to save power. I haven’t checked if that’s doing anything either. It’s a 3rd gen core i5 iirc, which isn’t great at idle power consumption, so maybe that switch is doing something…

I also haven’t had any luck with getting the drives to spin down reliably anyways, and afaik it’s better for them to just stay spinning so I haven’t bothered much to change that.

That would only work if I’m the only one using my hosted stuff, but can’t really expect non tech ppl to deal with stuff like that.

They already struggle with the little 2fa they have to use. Introducing yet another system is too much to ask.

Still feels like I’m doing too little, but kinda hate 2fa.

And I kinda don’t want to know if complex passwords and low retries before an account gets locked out are enough.

Only if you care about security, which you should ofc.

I once did a whole bunch of research looking into turning my old gaming laptop into a Nas/Homeserver.

And buying the supporting hardware to get more than the three SATA ports it had (mcpie adapter and SATA card and a power supply) would have been more jank and expensive than buying a used desktop in a big case and using that instead.

I’d say it does make sense, the only thing I lost is power efficiency, but I’m trying to not think too hard about that :D

With the right software most consumer hardware can be a decent server, although not having ECC ram kinda sucks. Usually most motherboards have enough SATA ports for a few drives and if not, just add a PCIE card that does.

even unzipped folders

That sounds super interesting, does it keep the folder structure intact? Because having to zip a folder to be able to download a folder with its structure intact is super annoying.

Edit: Oh it’s just for uploading, still very cool though.

I’d write it down / take photos just in case… But also remember being able to swap SATA cables without anything breaking. It’s been a while since I had to fiddle with the hardware though, so that memory isn’t super reliable.