Just for comparison, my VPS server has ~20 active email boxes (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,clamav), a few small-ish active wordpress sites (apahce,php-fpm,mariadb), radicale and some other smaller services running with 2 cores and 4GB RAM and it’s mostly just fine. Occasionally, specially during heavier updates on wordpress-sites, memory tends to get pretty full, but it’s still just fine. Tweaking memory cache for php (or running something else than php) would increase performance by a lot, but even without optimization the 5€/month VPS is quite capable to keep your internet presence around and on your own hands.

Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.

I personally would get Lenovo, but both should be just fine. Just drop the multiboot and you’re good to go ;)

Just that they are not built the way “traditional” thinkpads are. I don’t have personal experience how durable they are, but in general they aren’t as easy to repair as T-series (for example). With T-series it’s pretty straightforward to replace nearly every component separately (wifi, ram, keyboard, display…) which is either way more difficult or straight impossible to do with X1. Also spare part availability is generally better with T-series.

But to be honest, newer T14s aren’t as service-friendly either as older T-series. But if repairability is a deciding factor then I’d skip X1 and get some T-series instead.

Worth spending time researching models rather than just assuming every thinkpad is built like they used to be.

A very brief version: Look for T-series with specs you like. W works too if that branch is still around. Xnnn series is pretty good too, X1 not so much. L series is a consumer brand, a bit better today but specially first L-models were just trash.

My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

Search for O’Reilly books, the style is spot on with their covers.

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE9107-ARIN

OrgAbuseName: ABUSE

OrgAbusePhone: +1-313-516-8908

OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@hostodo.com

OrgAbuseRef: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/ABUSE9107-ARIN

They have options. No idea if they actually do anything for the reports, but it’s worth a shot.

I’m running Dahua cameras. They can pull new firmware straight over the internet, but they don’t rely on any cloud services. All kinds of flavours available and they do run on POE.

Very interesting piece of history. Thank you!

Another recommendation for storagebox from here. Cheapest option I’ve found and they are pretty reliable. I use proxmox backup server to sync my VMs there (encrypted of course).

There’s plenty more reasons than filesystem corruption to use clean shutdown and even just plain UPS without any status information to the host. I haven’t seen a full drive corruption due to power loss ever. Various levels of corruption, yes, but not ‘all the data is gone’ scenario due to filesystem being broken. But I have seen multiple hard drives which have died on host shutdown without any warning (no smart errors or such), after power loss they just refused to start again.

Just today we had multiple short (~30 second) power outages and without UPS that would’ve put considerable strain on my hardware. Gladly those are pretty rare and those were well short enough that my UPS kept the system running, without one that would’ve meant that my hypervisor would’ve crashed and that would’ve resulted on several unclean reboots for the VMs.

Also, back to filesystems, with selfhosting, some kind of hypervisor is often in the picture, so the drive activity is generally much higher than with single workstation and corruption on a single file or some part of filesystem is way more likely. Total data loss is pretty unlikely, but a corrupted VM image can be a pretty big deal, regardless if it’s filesystem or single file which is the main issue.

there’s no standardized mechanism for forcing applications to save

On Linux (and I guess BSD and other *nix variants) there is. SIGTERM is exactly for that situation. Sure, programs can choose to ignore it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen at least any FOSS software which wouldn’t respect that. Of course the program might crash and cause loss of data, but the mechanism is there.

You’re of course generally correct about modern filesystems being more resilient to power loss, but they’re not immune to problems and also you’ve omitted a large chunk of other reasons why people like to have UPS on their system, with or without monitoring them.

For me personally the hardware is least interesting part of running a homelab. I’d happily run everything on VPS if there was no constraints on money or bandwidth (among other things). But as the limitations are there running things on my hardware is a necessary evil and for that an UPS or two are practically must to have to prolong life span of hardware and prevent data losses. Of course that’s just one box to check on the stack, but when planning for a home server setup for anything I’d say it’s a pretty vital part for the whole setup.

But in the real world it doesn’t really matter if it’s the whole filesystem or an idividual file which is corrupted. Either way the data is compromised and nitpicking that the filesystem is actually just fine doesn’t make any difference.

Modern filesystems can corrupt as well with unclean shutdown. They are just less likely to do so. My server stores photos of our life over couple of decades with other nearly irreplaceable data so having the UPS and clean shutdown on power loss gives at least some confidence that the files stay where they are.

Of course I also run backups of the data, but it’s another layer on data safety setup.

I’m using Hetzner too, only via sync from proxmox backup server instead of rclone.

I’ve been using refurbished business laptops, thinkpads spesifically, for at least a decade. Both for business and for personal use. They just work and at least in here you can get pretty good deals from companies which re-sell previously leased machines. For some I’ve upgraded RAM and/or storage drive, but that 300-400€ gets you something far better than a new Acer from grocery store aisle. And reputable vendors even offer some kind of warranty even on used machines.

Other brands might work just fine too, but as I’ve had thinkpads since the brand was owned by IBM I’ve just stuck with them. T, W and X series are all pretty solid. And there’s a reason why you don’t see Acer or other consumer brands on refurbished market.

Meh. As long as it’s a local only field on /etc/passwd or whatever I don’t really care. Actually I’d be for it if browsers and other internet-thingies could send rough idea of users age to the services. Not actual age, but something like child/teen/adult -scale. That would make it super simple to reputable services to block underaged users and parents could set that to their kids accounts as they see fit.

But obviously the surveillance tool “they” are building is something totally different where the age is actually verified via some online service. For that I’m strictly against and if that becomes mandatory on Debian or whatever distro I’ll start my own with blackjack and hookers if nothing else is available.

this community is dominated by the systemd fanboys

Hey now. There’s dozens of us who had that thing force fed for us. I’ve been on Debian for decades, so even if I don’t really like systemd it’s the lesser evil than switching a distro to something without it.

Old HPEs are pretty cheap and still quite capable devices. My main switch is HP 2530-48G, which is a complete overkill for my needs, but I got lucky at office e-waste pile.

Absolutely. And 1980s was about 20 years ago.