One promising item I found are some json files from Reuters…

This one provides info on the candidates and the key for state ID’s: https://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/data/2024/us-elections/production/events/20241105/metadata.json

This one seems like it will provide the ballot counts(0) and possibly any declared winners(1): https://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/data/2024/us-elections/production/events/20241105/summary-votes/president.json

Of course I won’t know anything for sure until tomorrow evening when states start releasing their counts, but I went ahead and wrote up some code to use the files. It’s something at least, and the Reuters data should be fairly timely. I hope to play around with the collected info in real time, then maybe next election I can re-use the same code.

Yeah I found the same on the AP data. I also found that reddit thread, but haven’t been able to find a valid URL for this year’s election. Maybe they don’t make it available until voting starts?

Hmm good idea, I’ll take a look into that!

Nice, I hadn’t heard of this one!

If you want to do it right, try to get a static IP (you may need to get a business account). If your provider doesn’t provide IPv6 to static IPs, go to some place like Hurricane Electric and get a free IPv6 range pointed to your IPv4 static address.

Alternatively, you might do a search for any DDNS services that provide IPv6 (I’m not sure if any do?), then that service will fllow your residential address when it changes. Either way I think you’ll have some additional costs you need to weigh against your current hosting provider.

I think I missed something in your description, but what are you running on your local server? I think most people set up postfix to relay the emails over to gmail or whoever, and there are options in postfix for backwards compatibility with Outlook or even Microsoft Mail so your wife could use whatever client she wants. If you don’t have a local mail server set up then this is probably what you want to do. This method allow a local or remote connection from any client so you could run K9 on your phone instead of a VPN.

For opening such a setup to the internet (and allowing access from anywhere), make sure you have strong passwords on your accounts, require SASL authentication, and set up fail2ban to block repeated attempts to hack your mailboxes. Don’t run anything else on the same server (or use virtual machines or strong containers) to reduce the chance of your mail server getting compromised other ways, and you should be good to go.

If you already have a router tying these two networks together then you should NOT also have two NICs in one machine tied to both networks. Pick one or the other, you can’t have both. If you think you need both then you haven’t correctly considered your network topology.

This sounds familiar. Can you verify if you’ve enabled net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf? If you have to make a change, then issue sysctl --system to reload the updates.

At that capacity, I’ll cast another vote for SSD if at all possible, but you can certainly get small HDDs pretty cheap now.

If you want the easiest and cheapest way to add more drives, do a search for “sata port multiplier”. These cards go for around $25US on Amazon or Ebay. They are NOT fast! It uses a single SATA port to run up to five drives, so all the drives split the bandwidth, but long ago I ran some of them for a few years without any problems. You simply run a sata and power cable from your motherboard to the card, then plug in your drives, it doesn’t even require a slot on your motherboard.

I’ve always relied on multiple aspects for my used drives (currently ZFS raidz2 which itself provides multiple checks, but I also do backups of the really important stuff). It doesn’t matter though, all drives new or old are going to fail and you just have to be ready for it. The worst case is multiple drives failing at once, and I had that happen several times when using a weak power supply.

So far I’ve been really happy with the refurbs from Amazon though, plus the NAS is nothing to sneeze at. I upgraded the server to a newer machine, then realized that allowed me to step up in families for my SAS cards. Basically went from a machine that could push data at 70MB/s (and was constantly behind) to a new machine pushing 450MB/s or more with almost no lag. I run a lot of stuff on my home network so it’s been nice having the new speed, and the zfs pools are providing around 92TB on one set and 22TB on another set so I have room to go crazy. If I had to buy new drives I’d have maybe half that amount of space.

Check the SMART info on the drives you receive, if they already show signs of failure then return them immediately.

For “reputable” sellers, I typically go with ones who are selling drives in bulk and have a history of more than five minutes with lots of recent good reviews. I took a chance on a good deal for a “new” drive once and received an obviously used drive where the previous person had cut out the SAS bridge (these pins are required to power on some SAS models like what I bought, so the drive was a paperweight). You’ll get some lemons, but I’ve been running mostly used drives on my fileserver for the past twenty years and had reasonably good luck from bulk sellers (and easy replacements when I got a bad drive from one of them).

Oh, you might also check refurbs from Amazon. My current fileserver is running a set of eight 18TB refurbs which were significantly cheaper at the time, but the drive model itself was only a year old so I knew there couldn’t be much wear on what I received. And Amazon has a good return policy.

I haven’t used the NOOBS install for some time, but if it’s anything like the normal raspbian image then you would have a standard VFAT partition for the initial boot, plus an EXT partition for the linux filesystem – and Windows is probably choking on that partition. You should be able to drop the SD card into either your linux or mac machine and reformat it from either of those (or at least delete all the partitions and then format it on Windows).

Did you format the card under linux (perhaps as ext4)? Last I knew, Windows couldn’t handle any filesystems other than its own even if you just wanted to blow away an existing partition.

Sounds like the term used by Amazon? I picked up eight 18TB “renewed” drives that have been in constant use for over a year now under a ZFS filesystem. Not a single error yet and the pool is about half full. At the time I bought them, they were about $100 cheaper (each) than brand new drives so that saved me quite a bit of money, but they were also a fairly new line of drives so there couldn’t have been much previous use on them anyway.

Nothing wrong with used servers, that’s the only thing I’ve ever run. Ebay has provided a ton of equipment to me.

I’ve never used TrueNAS, but my experience with ZFS is that it could care less what order the drives are detected by the operating system. You could always shut down the machine, swap two drives around, boot back up, and see if the pool comes back online. If it fails, shut it back down and put the drives in their original locations.

If you are moving your data to new (larger) drives, before anything else you should take the opportunity to play with the new drives and find the ZFS settings that work well. I think recordsize is autodetected these days, but maybe for your use things like dedup, atime, and relatime can be turned off, and do you need xattr? If you’re using 4096 block sizes did you partition the drives starting at sector 2048? Did you turn off compression if you don’t need it? Also consider your hardware, like if you have multiple connection ports, can you get a speed increase by spreading out the drives so you don’t saturate any particular channel?

Newer hardware by itself can make a huge difference too. My last upgrade took me from PCIe x4 to x16 slots, allowing me to upgrade to SAS3 cards, and overall went from around 70MB/s to 460MB/s transfer speeds with enough hardware to manage up to 40 drives. Turns out the new configuration also uses much less power, so a big win all around.

Good point, POE might be the only choice then. Although these cameras do provide x264 and x265 compression so that would save quite a lot.

You got me thinking, so I did a search and ran across this page: https://www.hanssonit.se/nextcloud-vm/ I’m not sure how old these releases are, but at the very least it might provide some hints for building your own? I’m going to keep looking to see if I can find an image built on Debian, but at least now I know some options are out there.

[Edit] I also ran across across this page which builds a VM for you using an Ubuntu machine, so I’m guessing I could probably adjust it to a Debian setup fairly easily. https://github.com/nextcloud/vm

I was considering POE as an option, and this camera does have an ethernet port (although I can’t tell yet if that’s only for configuration or if the video will also stream over it directly). I don’t really need a constant stream and this camera also provides motion options so maybe it would only send video as needed (although during a heavy storm all of the cameras would probably fire at once).

I played with Zoneminder years ago but would like to get something set up for home security. I have a full internal network plus servers and about 60TB of free storage space so there’s really no limitations to what I could set up. Ideally I’d like to just hit a local IP from a cell phone to check the cameras (and remote access isn’t really needed), so that’s where I was trying to go with my previous questions.

The software side seems easy enough, but finding compatible IP cameras has been stumping me. I see the Reolink 4K TrackMix wifi cameras on Amazon for $130, and other than a few hiccups it looks likely that this piece of hardware would work, unless anyone knows of any “gotchas” that I’ve missed? Otherwise I’ll do a bit more research and then order one of the cameras to see how far I can get with it.