I’ve been running a pair of cyberpower systems for over a decade. I had to replace the battery in each of them once, but they’ve been working great.

I assume newer ones use some sort of Li-Ion battery tech, but mine are just plain old Lead Acid.

Whoa, really??? I guess I just assumed nothing changed in the last 5 years. I need to look into that.

Not the only use cases, but you’d need a different service if you need/want wildcard certs, certs that are manually installed and managed, or certs with a longer expiration.

I use portainer, but I don’t think I ever gave them my information. How would they even have my email?

How do you set this up to forward properly? Do you use different domains for different services? like plex.example.com?

I currently have nginx set up to forward based on port, which is fine for me, but it could be a little better.

In general, technology gets cheaper for better products over time. Short term that’s not always true, but the longer timescales you look, the better is it for consumers.

A year or two is a long time, and probably worth waiting.

Should make that screen the first slide of the PowerPoint

That would be a great platform to start with.

Price in a backup solution too, you don’t want to have all your movies disappear because of one hard drive crash, or an accidental reformat gone wrong.

RAID is not a backup.

Feels like some of that stuff, like the SSD’s are a bit overkill for a media server. Most of them still use spinning disks to maximize size vs. cost.

Additionally, the CPU/GPU needs of a media server are pretty minor, unless you need to transcode on the fly, and even then, single streams aren’t very intensive either.

So unless you’re capping the outgoing bandwidth to multiple external sources, you’re most likely just streaming the video source as-is to the destination, which just needs a stable network stream. If you don’t need to transcode at all, you don’t really even need a GPU on the hardware.

Just keeping lunch warm.

I would just write down the steps I would take, just some psudocode. It doesn’t have to work, it just has to make sense in the style of the language you’re talking about.

import random library  
import any GUI/display libraries required for the outcome desired

build array of integers [1..52] (or 0..51 if you're being fancy)
for loop 1..1000
       select random number A 1..52 (or 0..51 if you used that above)
       select random number B 1..52 (or 0..51 if you used that above)
       swap elements in the array A and B
pop first two elements from array
decode at display time what the two numbers represent in terms of playing cards

If the test requires more than that, then they’re crazy. The syntax doesn’t matter, just that you can logic yourself through the problem.
You can use the IDE, google, or whatever to fill in the specifics. If you wanted me to do that in literally any programming language, once the psudocode is done, you just spend an hour or so looking up the details.

Nah, a cable modem costs anywhere from $60-$300 depending on if you want one with a built in router/wifi. That’s a pretty good return on investment. Mine has been running just fine for over a decade, and I’ve replaced the wifi router behind it 3 times to get improvements in WiFI speed that I wouldn’t have gotten from my ISP. $11/mo would have cost me an extra $1,300+ of fees by now.

I have mediacom, and they’re pretty good about support in my area, even if they are pretty shitty about other things. They can and do send signals to be able to manage a self-owned cable modem, and they’ll send a tech to your house and diagnose issues, even if you roll your own network.

The US has some decent laws around protecting you from getting shafted by ISPs for this specific situation.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/router-and-modem-rental-fees-still-a-major-annoyance-despite-new-us-law/

Played WoW when it first came out with WINE. It was miserable. We had to mess with configs, install hacked patches, manually start jobs with scripts. And every patch broke something so you had to start from scratch again.

This was probably 2004/2005?

Right click for paste, they have \n in the clipboard

Very interesting, I like the screenshots! Will definitely check this out.

This is a good list, but I didn’t see you mention SSL certificates. If you’ve gone through all your steps, you should be able to use LetsEncrypt to get free, automatically managed SSL certs for your environment.

https://letsencrypt.org/

This video should be hardcoded to be ignored by the pipedlinkbot

Solid writeup. Good looking setup. I like how you have a great reason for every decision you made.

Crazy overkill for almost everyone, but you’re living in the future!