Craigslist and facebook marketplace will usually get you some racks cheap. it’s also bot too difficult to build one either out of metal or wood.

In addition some things don’t work without tinkering. Last year I told a buddy to install steam on his linux partition and give it a go. He couldn’t get steam to play any games. It was a snap, had him install the apt version and he was good. I’ve heard others debug similar issues and he likely had to pass in the gpu path like in a docker.

Also it’s super annoying with popups. Firefox updates weekly. That means weekly you get notified to restart firefox to update. Dismiss the notification? Well, it’s back after a new scan for updates in an hour.

Eventually you do close firefox to let it update. And the progress bar sits there, so you have to manually force it to run despite all the assurances it’ll happen automatically.

Honestly it’s decisions like these that are pushing people away from using Ubuntu anymore. It’s becoming more and more like windows.

Top that off with ads in the terminal and I left completely.

Basically not to. Open one for a VPN like Wireguard to accept incoming connections, and that’s it. Use the VPN to connect to your home network and access your services that way.

Not NEW, but, check out local auctions. Local universities and govt offices are frequently selling lots of newish laptops (5ish yrs old) for $10-$50 apiece.

I’m no plumber, but I’ve done a lot of DIY around the house. I wouldn’t be concerned with the ptrap, probably. I’d be concerned with brand new plumbing with nonstandard adapters hanging over a bunch of exposed electrical.

That’s why we have mice copy/paste bindings on most systems too. Highlighting text auto copies, and scroll wheel click pastes. Not all do this, but many do and have for a while.

Great, I recommend having two Adguard Home instances.

Yep, if you have somewhere to put a docker container or VM you can have redundancy.

Right, I never said two raspberry pis, I meant two instances. Like one pi and a container run elsewhere.

Right, I didn’t have any issues running it on a pi for years too. The problems came when I started messing with things. So, really my advice is to help save people from ideas like mine.

I decided one day to take a bunch of old laptops and create a proxmox cluster out of them. It worked great, but I didn’t have a use for them, I was just playing. So, I decided to retire the pi and put the pihole on the cluster. HA for the win!

I did that and came woke up a few days later to my family complaining that they had no internet. I found the pihole container on a different node and it wouldn’t start. Turns out with proxmox you need separate storage for HA to work. I had assumed that it would be similar to jboss clustering which I’m familiar with, and the container would be on all the nodes and only one actice at a time, with some syncing between nodes. Nope.

What’s worse is the container refused to move back to the origional node AND wouldn’t start. The pi was stored away at this point so I figured it would be easier to just create a new container, but duh, no internet. Turn off dns settings on the router, bam have internet.

Eventually set up the old pi again, and it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong with proxmox. But while I was figuring it out it was nice to have the backup.

Now I always have two running on different hardware, just in case.

I recommend having two. Otherwise your home internet goes down everytime you update or reboot or it crashes.

QA Automation, but recently transfered to the CI/CD team. In both positions I ‘write code’, but rarely have anything in common professionally with my wife’s friend’s husbands when they try to put us together to be friends.

Windows 10 Home

Just checked my wife’s laptop. Local account, secure boot off, windows 10. It had a message telling me to setup a microsoft account to ‘finish encrypting the device’. I clicked turn off, and it’s currently decrypting the hard drive. Blech.

I really like Unexpected Keyboard. Doesn’t have swipe or gifs. But I love that all the symbols are available on the main keypad. You just click-swipe for each one.

Or to hang on a home server rack displaying dashboards.

Cloud-based. If a product won’t work if my internet dies, or I can’t access my data without internet or a subscription, I won’t buy it.

This may be old advice, but I’ve always heard never resize down. It can work if you’re lucky and there’s no data in the space you’re shrinking, but if there is data there, it’ll often fail.

If the hdd is the same size or bigger than your ssd, I’d recommend cloning the ssd to the hdd. This will wipe your hdd, but should keep windows fine. Then do a clean install of linux on the ssd.

You can add overseer for jellyfin, emby, plex based on your preferance, and it connects to sonarr and radarr. Overseer is good for finding recommendations and adding them to your queue. The reason I’m talking about it is you can specify your language and your region for recommendations to help you find good content. As for downloading it, in prowlarr when you search for an indexer to add (public or private) you can filter based on language. Unfortunately when I did it just now for de-DE the 30 or so indexers that popped up are all private. I don’t know their quality, but that is at least a list to start with investigating how to join.

I do know the BIG english ones have a lot of content including content in other languages or dubbed and marked as multi-language or multi-subs. My recommendation is to google around for big public indexers reguardless of language, add them and search for the content you want while also working to get added to the local private ones.

I only had issues with the latest tag when dealing with the community apps. Some of them would randomly break and I’d have to roll back. Once I manually configured the docker settings using normal file mounts things were plenty stable. I think the issues were with the k8s community charts not with the underlying software. And that was fixed by just configuring it manually like however the dockerhub docs suggest.

I would still have the occasional issue where a container would freeze and a force stop wouldn’t work, and spinning up a new one wouldn’t work because the ports were still used. But I traced that back to a bad ssd with write timeouts. I still think truenas’s k8s wrapper is buggy. Even if a container crashes hard, I shouldn’t have to reboot the system to fix it. I switched to unraid and have been blissfully happy since.