cenzorrll

Power button

For a little perspective, if you have 7200 RPM HDDs, they each only have a throughput of about 1.5 Gbps. USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps, so you can have 3 drives attached without maxing out a single USB connection, and that’s the older 3.0, not any of the newer USB specifications that can go up to 20 gbps, and this isn’t including thunderbolt specs. If this data is mostly sent over the network you’ll never see any impact from this unless you have a 10Gb home network. Getting things onto the drives might take a little longer than a direct connection, but if storage is more of a concern (I’m assuming it is, since you have HDDs instead of SSDs) that’s a perfectly fine trade off in my mind.

You’re ISP probably provides some overpriced really crap hardware that they probably have a back door to, that I’m also not about to screw around with. I’ve always had a router behind their modem/router combo for many reasons, the first being that I have had a 100 ft Ethernet cable since 2005 that let’s me put my router where I want, I can place my wifi where it works best, not just within 6-10 feet of wherever someone 20 years ago decided to drill a hole. Second is because a ddwrt router is so much better than anything you’ll get from your provider, and you can find pretty good compatible ones on eBay or at your local thrift store for cheap.

I’ve always begrudgingly purchased rather than rented from my provider because after a year or so it is usually paid for. So far I’ve purchased four modems over almost 20 years so it’s worked out for me. As for the device itself, I don’t trust it, but I’ll still set some firewall rules just because. I have my router behind it where I do the real stuff. If I’m ever given a device that I need to connect for some sort of monitoring, like my solar panels or something like that, it can connect to my ISPs crap and do whatever sketchy shit it’s gonna do.

XMPP is ancient. So is email, the internet, and the wheel.

I’ve moved my homelab twice because it became stable, I really liked the services it was running, and I didn’t want to disturb the last lab**cough**prod server.

My current homelab will be moar containers. I’m sure I’ll push it to prod instead of changing the IP address and swapping name tags this time.

Hmmm. My pi{VPN,hole,dhcp,HA} has a little bit of overhead left…

Saturday morning: “Incus and podman seem interesting. I bet I could swap everything over while the family is out this afternoon”

Sunday evening: “Dad, when will the lights work again?”

“Damn, I’ve got this Debian server shit down. I wonder how an opensuse server would work out”

*installs tumbleweed*

True story

And yet I need 2GB of free ram and a 4 core processor to browse the web.

You put that with everything else similar into a folder, which is backed up. Mine is called “Files”. If there’s something in there that I don’t need backed up. It still gets backed up. If there’s something very large in there that I don’t need backed up, it gets removed in one of my “oh shit these backups are huge” purges.

…“We don’t just dump production applications in $HOME like crazy people”

Hey, I don’t dump them in home, I test them in home and never move them.

It sounds more like you want to have fun distro hopping, and believe me: I can tell you from experience that distro hopping isn’t fun if you have to rely on that machine.

This is 95% of my use case for VMs. Want to check out opensuse? Set up a VM and try to do something in it.

Which is what makes it an excellent server distro. And also why I don’t tend to use it on anything with a screen.

The most messing around I’ve done with my server after setting it up is update to trixie. I think I might have had to reset it two or three times in the past 6 months for the reason of “I didn’t feel like actually troubleshooting”

I can agree with this. My internet is trash, and I refuse to go with the faster provider in the area on principle (they took municipal funds to bring faster internet in the mid 2000s and didn’t do a thing until over a decade later), so I can’t feasibly share anything outside of my household users. I’m seriously considering setting up some hosted services if I can’t get fiber when I’ve nailed down my setup. I’d rather host everything at home, but I’d much rather offer my relatives access to something that isn’t selling their info to anyone with a checkbook. If I’m maintaining it and I’m the one who can accidentally lose everyone’s stuff with a bad command, I’m self-hosting it.

Debian doesn’t advertise in your terminal or install snaps instead of packages.

Canonical also pushes the boundary on what’s acceptable in the Linux community and tends to not play nicely with others if they don’t get to control projects. Not necessarily Microsoft 90s bad, but they’re kind of like that spoiled kid on the playground who will only play the games they want to play and won’t share the playground ball if they get to it first.

So for me, it’s more of a philosophical choice than a functional choice. Debian is more barebones in my experience, which is good and bad depending on your experience level.

Our new dog chewed up the Ethernet cable from my modem to my router while I was at work (well, commuting to) the other day. She found the only exposed 6 inches of it and went to town. Everything runs through the router. I had also just re-done some music library file structures and reset my downloaded songs right before leaving, assuming it would queue up and fill up the cache as I went about my day. Something I hadn’t done for over two years, but I wanted a music library so we could put calming music on for the pup that wouldn’t end up in my carefully curated library.

I have my music app set to pre-cache 10 songs, and ended up with 12 songs downloaded, so somewhere around 5-10 minutes after I started playing music on my commute was when the tasty cable was discovered. That was an excruciating day, listening to the same 12 songs over and over again.

Lesson learned about single points of failure in a new way. The worst part was I got a message about it from my fiancé when I got to work, so I knew what happened and there was nothing I could do about it. I just got to look at the world’s strongest firewall all day long.

Yes, and works on android 6, which is getting to be quite rare these days.

Rpis are great for always on things with low power use but not if you have many low power use things. But you would really be feeling that 1GB of ram, and microSDs kind of suck to run off of. I would honestly save the $25 and put it toward one of the $100 tiny/mini/micros.

I would not steer you away from an RPI if you don’t have one, they are very useful and fun, but if you’re looking for learning about self hosting, you’re probably going to end up getting something more powerful anyway

The Le Potato AML-S905X-CC has h.264 and h.265 decoders up to 4k, emmc connector So you don’t have to run off an SD card. I’ve used it as a media player and its pretty damn solid. I can’t speak to streaming games because I don’t do that, so I don’t know if it’s a different format. It does not have a powerful processor, so if the stream is encoded differently I wouldn’t expect it to be very good.

Its pretty old, around rpi3 performance, but having the decoders in there make it better than the RPI 4 for playing those types of videos.

For me, unattended-upgrade does it’s thing. Updating other packages happens whenever I think about it. Very few things are not containerized and there’s very little added beyond the base Debian install, so when I do update its maybe a dozen packages.

I would previously reboot during thunderstorms if we lost power, but now that I’ve got a UPS I probably ought to come up with a different plan.