Yes, but there’s 2 sides to that story. It’s a free UPS and that’s really nice. But then I’ve seen old batteries degrade and swell. People call it the spicy pillow syndrome. And with two of my older devices, batteries got recalled by the manufacturer. So I’d advise against running these things 24/7 unattended. Either know what you’re doing or rip it out before it burns down the building. As a minimum that includes a location made of concrete or bricks and mortar and no burnable stuff in the vicinity. And regular checks on the state of the battery, maybe both visual inspections and whatever the mainboard reports.

I personally would advise against gsuite and office356 as well as it’s currently debated whether they can be used in accordance to the GDPR. That’s not stopping institutions and organizations… Both are very popular products, but I’d be cautious and not put any sensitive stuff or personal stuff or pictures there. And not hand out logins to other people, especially not minors.

I don’t think the BSA compare to the major German scouting associations. Different organization structure and substantially different ideology and activities. Also none of the big controversies surrounding the BSA. But I suppose idiots are everywhere, at least that’s my general life experience 😅 It is very unfortunate once they start to ruin things.

Idk. Really depends on what you put there. And Nextcloud does file sync. Even if the server becomes unavailable, you’d still have your directories and calendar on your devices. Just collaborating and uploading stuff won’t work.

And creativity and problem-solving are core scout skills, so I guess bulding that thing for no money would be an interesting exercise in that. Though you’re right. At some point you’ll have to think about maintainability and reliability. I guess that wouldn’t stop me from starting the project, but everyone has to decide for themselves.

(And yes, a proper VPS would be a preferrable solution for a multitude of reasons.)

Asking for a discount is a great idea. Some companies do this. And in rare occurences the boss is an old boy scout themselves and they’ll give you a 100% discount on some smaller things…

Good luck, though. I believe first-hand experience with living a self-determined life - including online services - aligns nicely with scout ideals. And trying to convey the media-literacy that allows people to make informed choices.

And I can see some benefits with having documents available to everyone, templates, and collaborate on the paperwork…

Glad to hear other groups in the area have success with Nextcloud… Another idea would be to somehow unite and share the hosting bill for a slightly bigger Nextcloud… But I still think the old laptop idea might be promising to get started… depending on the network situation in the building and whether you can configure port forwards and all the things that need to be done. Just make sure to have some kind of backup strategy if you put documents there. Can’t be too hard, as Nextcloud is made for syncing data… And I wouldn’t put personal information about kids there unless the admin knows what they’re doing. But there’s plenty other stuff to put there.

Given someone already pays for electricity and internet at the location, I’d say the cheapest option would be to ask all the members if someone has an old laptop to donate, maybe even with a broken display or whatever, main thing is it still somehow runs. Rip out the battery, Install Linux, Nextcloud (maybe Yunohost), and put it somewhere without public access. That’d be entirely for free, minus the work to set it up and maintain it.

My smaller VPS costs somewhere around 70€ a year, guess that could be worth it as well as long as it contributes something meaningful.

And be prepared to be disappointed, 99% of my scout group never used the selfhosted services I tried. I guess that’s somehow okay. They were focused on the real life activities and no one had any interest to do office work or remember logins… Was always the same 2 people who did paperwork and they didn’t need a cloud, so I scrapped it. Your story could be different, I’m not saying it needs to turn out that way.

Lol. I suppose it’s a promising way to learn how someone thinks and reacts, see if they’re focused on solving issues or focused on drama… And how deep they are into Linux lore. And whether they understand it or parrot someone else’s talking points.

Idk. I rarely have long nerd discussions, but once I’m done with the latest Star Trek show, I occasionally ask people about their stance on SystemD, some instant messenger or whether we should stick to C99. And either we skip that, or maybe I’ll hear some interesting, unique perspective shaped by what they do.

And Linux has quite some pragmatic people as well, first of all Linus Torvalds himself, who has kind of a down-to-earth approach towards ideology.

I’ve not yet talked to a SystemD hater in real life, that seems to be more predominant between random people on the internet. And I myself prefer writing SystemD unit files over what I had to do before that was a thing.

Yeah, people stare if I hop on the commuter train with the the large one that fits camping gear and supplies for 2 weeks. And I don’t own anything in between.

People who carry it around and don’t just use it as a desktop replacement… With an open lid it doesn’t quite fit into my bag pack.

At least the Arch Wiki is always there for us…

Seems it caught up a bit since. Now some posts from more than 2h ago are there. But “/api/v3/federated_instances” on LW still reports it’s something like 10h behind.

Is thus necessarily the receivers fault? I mean if LW builds up a queue of content to federate out, that could be blamed either on lemmy.world or on sh.itjust.works ?

I think you’ll want to factor in the exact use case at that scale. Does speed matter? Is “a ton” really a ton? Last regular computer mainboard I bought has 6 SATA ports. And I think that’s a fairly common amount. If I look at current harddrives, best price per gigabyte should be somewhere around 14TB drives. So given a RAID5, that’s 70TB of storage, or 80TB if you go for 16TB hdds.

I think once you go considerably beyond that, and you don’t want to lose your data, you should think about buying proper hardware. I mean people do all kinds of crazy stuff, and at some point I extended my storage by simply plugging in 2 large external USB disks. And that worked surprisingly well… But these solutions aren’t super reliable. And neither are the cheap port expanders from Amazon.

I know. Guess I mainly wanted to say your given solution isn’t the entire story and the potential tool should decode the parameters as well, they might or might not be important. I’m often at the computer and I regularly do one-off tasks this way… But I’m aware it might not be an one-off task to you and you might not have a Linux terminal open 24/7 either 😉 Hope some of the other people have what you need. And btw… since I clicked on a few of the suggestions: I think the thing called URL encoding is a something different, that’s with all the percent signs and not base64 like here.

Well, the URL is a bit weird.

echo "aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG90ZG9nYmlsbHMuY29tL2hhbWJ1cmdlci1tb2xkcy9idXJnZXItZG9nLW1vbGQ" | base64 -d

gives me “https://www.hotdogbills.com/hamburger-molds/burger-dog-mold”. (Without the ‘s’.) And then there are about 176 characters left. I suppose the underscore is some delimiter. The rest is:

echo "c2lkPTY4MTNkMTljYzM0ZWJjZTE4NDA1ZGVjYSZzcz1QJnN0X3JpZD1udWxsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV90ZXJtPWJyaWVmaW5nJnV0bV9jYW1wYWlnbj1zZmNfYml0ZWN1cmlvdXM" | base64 -d

“sid=6813d19cc34ebce18405deca&ss=P&st_rid=null&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=briefing&utm_campaign=sfc_bitecurious”

And I suppose the stuff after the last slash is there for some other reason, tracking or some hash or whatever. But the things before that are the URL and the parameters.

But the question remains whether we have some kind of tool to do this automatically and make it a bit easier…

There’s base64 -d on the command line.

https://dontasktoask.com/

The question is unclear to me. You mean phone apps to access it? Other server projects with the same idea and they’re Free Software?

I’ve moved my instant messenger onto a VPS and that has a good uptime. And I’m somewhat okay if my Nextcloud and calendars don’t sync. Most important data is synced anyway.

Other than that I’ve called my ISP a bunch of times to give me a new router, they refused, I canceled the subscription and made a new one and got a new router. And that one is better. And in doubt I’ll call a family member.