Depending on the board in your mini-server, you may have enough SATA ports to plug in directly. I have a system similar to what you’re describing (N100 with 4x 2TB HDDs with 1.5TB data): 2 of those drives are set up in RAID1 (mirror), and once a month, I plug in one of the spares, rsync the array to it, and unplug it. Every 3 months or so, I swap the offline drive with an offsite drive. I used to use a USB dock for the offline drive, but I got a 3-bay hot-swap enclosure to make the whole process faster and easier.

The server shares the array via NFS and SMB, and it is absolutely a NAS for all my other systems.

If you expect to exceed 2TB data within 2 years, then you’ll need to replace all 4 of those 2TB drives in 2 years. You might, today, get a pair of 4 TB drives and one 2TB, use the 4TB as your main storage, the 2TBs as rotating backups, and wait until you actually outgrow 2TB to upgrade the backups.

I see you’re getting lots of advice just to use c/selfhosted as a free consultant. That’s good advice if you’re self-motivated and focused.

If you want someone to be a coach through the process, to keep you focused and moving, that’s a) a slightly different skillset and b) worth putting in the description. I mention this only because I have a bunch of aspirational projects on my to–do list that have just sat there for literally years because of perfectionism, anxiety, and maybe some undiagnosed ADHD. I’ll also counter by noting that a lot of people, this time of year, buy a gym membership on the theory that spending the money will somehow force them actually to go to the gym, only to find that spent money is not actually a motivator.

Great project. I like the 1-star reviews complaining about the lack of advertising and tracking.

If you want it to be an actual community service, then you want it to be something that outlives your residence, your tenure as event coordinator, and your interest in being the neighborhood IT guy. It’ll be much easier to transfer control of a VPS to your successor than to give them hardware that also hosts a bunch of your personal services.

You can start with a very small, nearly free VPS while you recruit users & scale up as (if) anyone bites. Probably even get the HOA to pay for it.

I got my Pi4 to be a media player - LibreElec or Kodi - for my old, not-smart TV. It plays my library of CDs&DVDs, frontend for OTA TV, and a variety of streaming services. Fanless, so it doesn’t distract from audio, low power, so I don’t mind leaving it on 24/7. You can configure it to listen to a USB IR receiver, but I control mine from phone via web. The actual media library/NAS and tvheaded run on an old desktop in another room.

My favorite thing is all the sensors you can hook up. Adafruit & Sparkfun have a wide array of sensors with breakout boards for simplicity and well documented python libraries. I started just logging temperature, humidity, then air quality, CO2 to my own database and web page, but eventually expanded to full HomeAssisstant system.

Pihole.

Tandoor: I ended up there because it has an API that I can access and cross-reference to my grocer (Kroger.com also has API) to get current pricing, calculate recipe costs, nutrient costs, or find what’s on special this week. It’s theoreticcally possible, but I haven’t sorted out how to integrate that directly into tandoor & its shopping lists.

A lot depends on how many users you expect and how much media you expect. For one or two users with that stack, transcoding media is really the only CPU load. If most of your media is already in your desired format, then that’s not a big deal.

My stack is pretty similar (no *arr, plus tvheadend, homeassistant and a kodi frontend) for two users and it sits near idle all day long. It runs on an N100 NAS system off Aliexpress with 16GB and will transcode 1080p to x264 at just about playback speed… System runs from a 100 GB nvme, with a couple half-full 4 TB WD Reds for data. 35-ish Watts, maybe an extra 5 when actively transcoding. Used to be ~150 USD,

If you want a lot of 4k content, then I’d definitely go with the GTX 1660.

Same. Eventually upgraded to a Pi 4, which doesn’t have any trouble with 1080p content. Pi 3’s onboard wifi was also problematic, and I had to run it over wired networking. Kept that for the Pi 4, so I don’t know if its wifi is any better.

Honestly, don’t know about recent versions, either. I got sick of Intuit extorting me to upgrade every few years, so I’m frozen in 2012 (which is obviously useless for taxes). According to https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=120 Quickbooks 2004 & 2007 run ok.

Didn’t realize Quickbooks was so much more complicated than Quicken; kind of assumed it was just some kind of business-reskinned Quicken.

Internet sarcasm is hard, and lemmy has a very general audience :) I’m always happy when someone gives me an excuse to do the math I was already curious about - it’s often not worth it, for just my own curiosity, but even a sarcastic or disingenuous prompt reminds me that there’s other casually curious people out there.

crypto - as in cryptography, not cryptocurrency - is just the library he’s using to generate the 128-bit random UUID. The snippet is interesting because he matched the original UUID in just over 5 hours. You’d expect to need more than 10^38 guesses to pick the same number again, which, even at 1 guess every microsecond, means something like 10^22 years.

Can’t speak for Quickbooks, but Quicken works fine in WINE; you can set up a shell script in ~/Desktop to start it, so it works just like on Windows. Quicken (and 20 years of fin data) was one of the last things holding me to Windows, and getting it transferred to linux was hugely liberating.

I made a self-hosted forgejo repository of /etc. Commit messages aren’t always informative, and I’ve never actually gone back to the repository to figure something out, but it’s there, just in case. Me cosplaying a sysadmin.

It looks like he’s split out the individual USB wires, run the power to the USB port, and the signal wires to different places on the exposed board, maybe to force fast mode in the charger. Then just buried everything in silicone for insulation and to keep wires from pulling loose.

Would you allow the converse: FoF to store data on your system? Data that could be CSAM - maybe encrypted, maybe not - ‘terrorism’ content, etc?

My problem with chains of trust is the Kevin Bacon problem. Sure, I trust my friends, but some of their friends can be a little sketchy. Plus, they don’t have any direct social contact with me, nor any personal consequences for betrayal. And nevermind the sketchy friends of the sketchy friends.

Federation has its uses, but trust is not one of them.

Copyright line only mentions 2014, so I’m guessing it’s 10 years old and only BIOS.

Looks like California, USA

From the power draw, it looks like lemmy federation got hold of it around 16:30. As of 17:20, it’s still holding up.

I understand the Mastodon federation system can be very DDOS-ey on web sites, if you’re tempted to post it there.

Cool project.

It is still a logical argument, especially for smaller shops. I mean, you can (as self-hosters know) set up automatic backups, failover systems, and all that, but it takes significant time & resources. Redundant internet connectivity? Redundant power delivery? Spare capacity to handle a 10x demand spike? Those are big expenses for small, even mid-sized business. No one really cares if your dentist’s office is offline for a day, even if they have to cancel appointments because they can’t process payments or records.

Meanwhile, theoretically, reliability is such a core function of cloud providers that they should pay for experts’ experts and platinum standard infrastructure. It makes any problem they do have newsworthy.

I mean,it seems silly for orgs as big and internet-centric as Fortnite, Zoom, or forturne-500 bank to outsource their internet, and maybe this will be a lesson for them.