I worked on a product that was only allowed to return 200 OK, no matter what.
Apparently some early and wealthy customer was too lazy to check error codes in the response, so we had to return 200 or else their site broke. Then we’d get emails from other customers complaining that our response codes were wrong.
Yes, OP I highly recommend a GL.iNet device. It’s pocket sized and always does the job.
It’s also great for shitty wifi that tries to limit how many devices you can connect. The router will appear as one MAC and then all your other devices can route traffic through it.
If it’s just for movies, consider an Intel ARC A380.
Small, cheap, great transcoding performance, and its drivers should be shipped by default with most distros. It really can’t do games though.
You could replace the systemd service with a systemd timer. Not sure how often you reboot, but maybe once a week would be sufficient?
You could then wrap it in a script that checks for packman’s db.lock file. It would sleep as long as the lock file is present, which indicates that an update is active.
As someone who has owned enterprise servers for self-hosting, I agree with the previous comment that you should avoid owning one if you can. They might be cheap, but your longterm ownership costs are going to be higher. That’s because as the server breaks down, you’ll be competing with other people for a dwindling supply of compatible parts. Unlike consumer PCs, server hardware is incredibly vendor locked. Hell, my last Proliant would keep the fans ramped at 100% because I installed a HDD that the BIOS didn’t like. This was after I spent weeks tracking down a disk that would at least be recognized, and the only drives I could find were already heavily used.
My latest server is built with consumer parts fit into a 2U rack case, and I sleep so much easier knowing I can replace any of the parts myself with brand new alternatives.
Plus as others have said, a 1U can be really loud. I don’t care about the sound of my gaming computer, but that poweredge was so obnoxious that despite being in the basement, I had to smother it with blankets just so the fans didn’t annoy me when I was watching TV upstairs. I still have a 1U Dell Poweredge, but I specifically sought out the generation that still let you hack the fan speeds in IPMI. From all my research, no such hack exists for the Proliant line.
The problem with chromebooks is that the base specs are pretty shit. A lot of them have 4 GiB of RAM and maybe 16GiB of disk if you’re lucky.
They were designed to be thin clients to connect students to the internet, and little else. Maybe they could be hacked into something useful, but I don’t think it’ll ever make a good PC. They were always destined for the landfill.
Meanwhile, the best thinkpads were quality machines back when they came out. IMO, that’s why they’re still so versatile today. Free software can’t fix bad fundamentals.
I’m talking about all those Intel programs that come preinstalled.
“Intel device smart updates” “Intel audio control center”
That kind of garbage
Stop “non-essential work”…
But I bet they’ll still ship bloatware updates for Windows
Not sure what motherboard you have: Most consumer boards only support “FakeRAID”, which requires a kernel driver to actually function. Good luck finding a vendor who wrote a driver for Linux.
I’d definitely recommend software RAID instead, as you’ll have better support. I like btrfs, so I’d recommend you set up your new drives to use a btrfs RAID configuration. mdadm is another option, if you really like ext4.
On Linux, I run fwupdmgr to periodically check for firmware updates. Not every manufacturer supports it yet, but I’ve had good results with a few laptops. Not sure if it supports BIOS.
Also though, I generally try to leave my BIOS alone if everything is working fine. Unless I hear of a reason to update, I’d rather stay on a stable version.
Are you an emacs user?
Try org-roam. It’s a similar system to obsidian, but fully open source. You have all the note taking techniques of org-mode, and all the scripting power of emacs.
Assuming that the disk is of identical (or greater) capacity to the one being replaced, you can run btrfs replace.
https://wiki.tnonline.net/w/Btrfs/Replacing_a_disk#Replacing_with_equal_sized_or_a_larger_disk
I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 over hardware or mdadm raid. You get FS snapshotting as a feature, which would be nice before running a system update.
For disk drives, I’d recommend new if you can afford them. You should look into shucking: It’s where you buy an external drive and then remove (shuck) the HDD from inside. You can get enterprise grade disks for cheaper than buying that same disk on its own. The website https://shucks.top tracks the price of various disk drives, letting you know when there are good deals.
As an emacs user, I use M-x man. All my standard keybindings make finding what I need very easy.
Of course, it’s not so fast if you aren’t already in emacs.
“Remember: No PID”
Haven’t used it yet, but I’ve been researching authentik for my own SSO.
BTRFS should be stable in the case of power loss. That is to say, it ought to recover to a valid state. I believe the only unstable modes are RAID 5/6.
I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 mode over mdadm RAID1 + ext4. You get checksumming and scrubs to detect drive failures and data corruptions. You also have snapshotting, in case you’re prone to the occasional fat-fingered rm -rf.
For backup, maybe a blu-ray drive? I think you would want something that can withstand the salty environment, and maybe resist water. Thing is, even with BDXL discs, you only get a capacity of 100GiB each, so that’s a lot of disks.
What about an offsite backup? Your media library could live ashore (in a server at a friend’s house). You issue commands from your boat to download media, and then sync those files to your boat when it’s done. If you really need to recover from the backup, have your friend clone a disk and mail it to you.
Do you even need a backup? Would data redundancy be enough? Sure if your boat catches fire and sinks, your movies are gone, but that’s probably the least of your problems. If you just want to make sure that the salt and water doesn’t destroy your data, how about:
This would probably be cheapest and have the least complexity.
I wouldn’t trust anything like that to the open internet. It would be better to access the system over a VPN when you’re outside the network.
Surely this could be good, right?
If celebrities need to be accessible to their biggest fans, maybe it would induce them to leave the birdsite? And if this is as big a migration as the article suggests, it has the potential to snowball in network effects, giving other influential users one less reason to feel chained to a dumpster fire.