Majority of the data (video) is already compressed as MPEG-2 so I’d think it doesn’t compress very well. But if you don’t have enough storage it’s always an option to re-encode video with something more modern and achieve smaller file sizes from that. But that also removes at least DVD menu and other ‘format dependent’ options.

That would get you an exact copy of the disk with everything on it. And also, while 200 DVDs sounded a lot, it’s “only” 860GB (assuming 4,3GB/disk which I think is the most common for movies), so it’s not stupidly expensive either. Obviously you’ll want a RAID setup and most likely backups for that, so it’s more than just a single 1TB drive, but still quite manageable.

Ah, you’re correct. I somehow misunderstood the assignment, OEM installation is a bit different and I don’t think there’s a Debian version of that readily available. You could of course write scripts to manage that, but that’s a quite a bit more difficult than just set up preseed for the installer. Or you could just include instructions on how to set up your accounts afterwards, but that’s not the same either.

Debian (and I suppose a lot of derivatives) can use preseeding. That gives you pretty much full control to the whole installer where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users, partitioning, installed software and so on.

I’ve been using refurbished thinkpads for at least a decade and in my experience they have pretty decent value for money. I’m using local shop (taitonetti.fi, I don’t think they currently ship outside Finland) which ships their machines mostly with OEM windows, but that’s not a big deal for me.

I’m not too familiar on how well the x64 - ARM conversion works, but in general gaming tends to be more dependent on single core performance and I’d assume that emulating single core functionality with multiple cores doesn’t really work, or at least with performance you’d need.

I don’t think there’s one at least in official repositories. But if you’re missing libc6 one might argue that your system is not in any functional state anyways.

I have absolutely zero experience on pacman, but I could argue the very same with dpkg/apt with the same arguments. The Debian kind, not the abomination Ubuntu ships with today.

as far as i know apt and dnf have no equivalent easy redo all

It’s similarily possible (dpkg --get-selections, some sed/cut/awk wizardry to cut unnecessary stuff from the output, xargs to apt install --reinstall on that and you should be good to go, maybe there’s even a simpler way to achieve that) with Debian.

But that’s just me. I’ve been with Debian for quite a while. Potato was released 2000, but I think I got my hands on it 2001/2002 and I’ve been a happy user since. And even if I’ve worked with pretty much any major distribution (RHEL, CentOS, SuSe, Ubuntu and even Slackware back in the day) around I still prefer Debian because that’s what I know and learned over the years on how to fix things if something goes sideways.

Is my current set up secure, assuming strong passwords were used for everything?

Network security is a complicated beast to manage. If general public can access your services over the internet, that’s a threat you need to mitigate. Strong passwords is a good start on that, but it doesn’t take into account if there’s a flaw or bug on the service you’re running. Also if you have external users, they might reuse their passwords and leak for those might cause a threat too, specially if there’s privilege escalation bugs on the software you’re running.

And so on, it’s a too wide field to cover in a short comment here, but when you’re building your stuff, and what is maybe the most disticntive feature on a good professional between a not so good one, is to think ahead and prepare for every imaginable scenario where something goes wrong. Every time you add a way to access your network, no matter how minuscle, think what happens if that way gets compromised and what it might mean on the very worst case.

Maybe you want to add another access point to your network since your terrace isn’t properly covered. That’s nice to have, but now everyone around 100 meters around your house/apartment might have access to your stuff if they can break your wifi security. Maybe you set up a reverse proxy or tailscale on the stack. Now the whole internet can at least probe your stuff and try to find vulnerabilities, try to use stolen credentials and even try to social engineer their way into your stuff. Or maybe you made an mistake and left something open that shouldn’t be.

I’m not trying to scare you off out of anything. Go ahead and play with your stuff, break things, learn how to fix them, have fun while doing it. Just remember to think ahead about worst case scenarios, weigh their risks, think ahead and then go on. Learn about DNAT, reverse proxies, VPN and network layers and whatever you come across on your adventure but keep in mind that shit will hit the fan at some point. And learn to accept that, learn from your mistakes and do better next time.

In case you’re not aware: Back in the day Ubuntu took off because Debian was maybe a bit too strict on their approach on being stable and rock solid for quite a few of different architectures. There was a time when you could just edit few files and migrate a running system from Debian to Ubuntu, just with way more up-to-date software packages and that’s about the time frame I moved from Debian to Ubuntu too. For quite a few years it was pretty smooth, updates just worked, software versions were up to date and the general experience was more polished than what you could get from Debian at the time.

But that ship has sailed. Ubuntu changes stuff so frequently that the package maintainers can just barely keep up, snapcraft is a steaming pile of shit in my opinion and the stability is faint ghost on what it used to be. Maybe becuse it’s not that compatible with Debian anymore and thus can’t benefit from the original source, maybe for some other reason.

Whatever the case might be, running ubuntu gives you an ubuntu experience, which is very much not the same than debian experience. If you want more streamlined distribution I’d recommend Mint (Debian edition), if you want the rock solid system but with less refined experience where you might need to tweak thing or two manually then go with Debian.

And, mostly for the nitpicking commenters, I know, I grossly simplified things around and cut some corners. I know it’s not as black and white comparison. This is just my generic experience over quite a few years with Linux on Desktop.

Hetzner provides managed web hosting too. For emails I think you need to look for some other provider.

I’ve been a happy customer with joker.com (Germany) for at least 10 years.

I think it’s easier the other way round, find all symlinks and grep the directory you want to move from results.

Something like ‘find /home/user -type -l -exec ls -l {} ; | grep yourdirectory’ and work from there. I don’t think there’s an easy way to list which symlinks point to any actual file.

Exactly. You can build rules with ufw and view them on iptables. Maybe the one thing ufw does better out of the box is persistent rules and simpler “firewall on/off” switch, but specially on this particular question I don’t think they matter.

And me.

They are excactly what the name implies. Testing is generally pretty good, but it’s still testing. And unstable is also what the name implies. People, myself included back in the day, run both as daily drivers, but if you want rock stable distribution installing unstable revision might not be the best choise.

Debian. I’ve had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I’ve worked with ‘set and forget’ setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you’ll still have options to fix it assuming you’re comfortable with plain old terminal.

1. VM running on a proxmox host. Tips: make sure you know your backups are in a state you can restore data from them.
2. Nightly backup via proxmox to Hetzner Storage box with 2 day retention. I’d like a local copy too but I don’t currently have hardware for it.
3. Don’t know. Personally I have a DNAT rule on firewall and my instance is directly open to the internet. You might not want that and I might not recommend it, but right now, for me, it works. I’d need to look in a VPN solution for android I could replace the current ‘open for all’ situation.

Actual shortage. Performance drops significantly when zfs doesn’t have enough memory. It might have been an option to tweak configuration for zfs pools, add SSD for caching and so on, but I needed to change drive configurations anyways for other reasons so for me it was easier to drop zfs and switch to software raid.

How much RAM your system has? Zfs is pretty hungry for memory and if you don’t have enough it’ll have quite significant impact on performance. My proxmox had 7x4TB drives on zfs pool and with 32 gigs of RAM there was practically nothing left for the VMs under heavy i/o load.

I switched the whole setup to software raid, but it’s not offically supported by proxmox and thus managing it is not quite trivial.