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.

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.

I’m not a systemd guru, but it turned out pretty easy. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/using-systemd.html#systemd-multiple-mysql-instances Basically just make [mysqld@copy] sections in my.cnf then systemd start mysqld@copy and systemd is smart enough to pass copy into mysql.

I did it slightly different, using systemctl edit mysql@.service to define different default files for each instance, then [mysqld@copy] sections in each of those files. Seems like the port option for each has to go in a [mysqld] section, but otherwise ok.

Replication because I want to put some live data, read-only, on the VPS, exposed to the world while the ‘real’ database stays safely hidden in my intranet. SSH tunnel so the replica can talk to the real database.

I’m hung up on unrecognized charset #255. Tried rolling everything back to utfmb3; suppose I could go all the way to Latin1. I imagine there’s a lot of depth I could learn, but dropping mariadb for mysql seems like the path of least resistance right now.

eta: got the character set sorted. Had to make a new dump, confirm that everything in the dump was utf8mb3, then re-prime the replica with that data. Wasn’t enough just to change the character sets internally.

I’ve been trying to convince a VPS to run two instances of mariadb - one for local databases, one to replicate the homelab. Got mariadb@server and mariadb@replica sorted out through systemd, but now stuck on replication from mysql to mariadb. Looks like I’ll be ripping out mariadb and putting everything on mysql.

I’ve got all my internet infrastructure on one monitor - 50W for the N100, the cable modem, an ooma VOIP device, and UPS. I’d guess the server, with its WAP, 4x GbE ports, 2x spinning disks, and USB TV tuner, is 35-ish of those watts.

If you have the spare cash, I found the N100 NAS motherboard to be a great source of occasional weekend projects, and now it very definitely looks like I’ve gone overboard.

I started out just wanting a file server to store backups.then…

• DHCP and NAT because my ISP would only allow one user.
• DNS so I could refer to systems by name
• pihole
• mythtv/tvheadend so I could watch OTA tv & archive CDs & DVDs
• hostapd for Wifi
• homeassistant
• immich
• nextcloud
• tandoor recipes
• just added fastenhealth for medical records

It didn’t feel like a lot, because it took years. Among the amazing things has been all the times I’ve been able to upgrade the motherboard by just plugging the HD into the new board. Started out just using old desktop boards; the N100 was the first purpose-bought board, and also the most complicated upgrade, because it added UEFI. There definitely are projects out there that don’t have an arm option, so something x86 is more flexible.