For bandwidth intensive stuff I like wholesale internet’s stuff.

The hardware is very uh, old, but the network quality is great since they run an ix. And it’s unmetered too so it’s probably sufficient.

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

10940X

“They say”, but they’re right. Ryzen chips do have worse idle power usage, but you’re talking about 10w or so, at most.

And uh, if you were looking at an X-series CPU, I can’t see how that 10w is a dealbreaker, because you were already looking at a shockingly inefficient chip.

Debian stable is great: it’s, well, stable. It’s well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.

It’s very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.

I run everything in containers for management (but I’m also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.

I’m the same way. If it’s split license, then it’s a matter of when and not if it’s going to have some MBA come along and enshittify it.

There’s just way, way too much prior experience where that’s what eventually will happen for me to be willing to trust any project that’s doing that, since the split means they’re going to monetize it, and then have all the incentive in the world to shit all over the “free” userbase to try to get them to convert.

You keep cloning and configuring shit on a Win10 instance because you can’t find the key?

That’s silly and you should just stop doing that: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

There you go! One less problem to deal with.

completely disable Windows Update

Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

Edit: for the OP, not you.

Snapraid parity is offline, so that’s not strictly accurate.

You build the parity, and then until you do a sync/scrub/rebuild they don’t do shit, so there’s no reason to keep them spun up.

If the drive are slow spinning up, then this is probably not a fatal concern, but there’s zero details here.

See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially.

Right-ish, but I’d say there was actually a simpler problem than the one you laid out.

The immediate and obvious thing that killed OS/2 wasn’t the compatibility layer, it was driven by IBM not having any drivers for any hardware that was not sold by IBM, and Windows having (relatively) broad support for everything anyone was likely to actually have.

Worse, IBM pushed for support for features that IBM hardware support didn’t support to be killed, so you ended up with a Windows that supported your hardware, the features you wanted, and ran on cheaper hardware fighting it out with an OS/2 that did none of that.

IBM essentially decided to, well, be IBM and committed suicide in the market, and didn’t really address a lot of the stupid crap until Warp 3, at which point it didn’t matter and was years too late, and Windows 95 came swooping in shortly thereafter and that was the end of any real competition on the desktop OS scene for quite a while.

That could probably work.

Were it me, I’d build a script that would re-hash and compare all the data to the previous hash as the first step of adding more files, and if the data comes out consistent, I’d copy the files over, hash everything again, save the hash results elsewhere and then repeat as needed.

The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.

Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.

The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won’t be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.

As for data integrity, there’s a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.

The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you’re using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that’s not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the “good” hashes is on the drive, well, you can’t necessarily trust those hashes either.

So, 50 years isn’t a reasonable goal unless you have a pretty big budget for this. Essentially no media is likely to survive that long and be readable unless they’re stored in a vault, under perfect climate controlled conditions. And even if the media is fine, finding an ancient drive to read a format that no longer exists is not a guaranteed proposition.

You frankly should be expecting to have to replace everything every couple of years, and maybe more often if your routine tests of the media show it’s started rotting.

Long term archival storage really isn’t just a dump it to some media and lock it up and never look at ever again.

Alternately, you could just make someone else pay for all of this, and shove all of this to something like Glacier and make the media Amazon’s problem. (Assuming Amazon is around that long and that nothing catches fire.)

I’m using blu-ray disks for the 3rd copy, but I’m not backing up nearly as much data as you are.

The only problem with optical media is that you should only expect it to be readable for a couple of years, best case, at this point and probably not even that as the tier 1 guys all stop making it and you’re left with the dregs.

You almost certainly want some sort of tape option, assuming you want long retention periods and are only likely to add incremental changes to a large dataset.

Edit: I know there’s longer-life archival optical media, but for what that costs, uh, you want tape if at all possible.

Change your port definitions so that they’re only binding to localhost, like so:

• “127.0.0.1:8001:8001”

That’ll stop access from anywhere but the local host. You’ll have to redo your reverse proxy configuration to use 127.0.0.1 instead of whatever you’re using now, though.

Oh I wasn’t saying to not, I was just saying make sure you’re aware of what recovery entails since a lot of raid controllers don’t just write bytes to the disk and can, if you don’t have spares, make recovery a pain in the ass.

I’m using MD raid for my boot SSDs and yeah, the install was a complete pain in the ass since the debian installer will let you, but it’s very much in the linux sense of ‘let you’: you can do it, but you’re figuring it out on your own.

Buy multiple drives, setup some sort of raid, setup some sort of backup. Then set up a 2nd backup.

Done.

All drives from all manufacturers are going to fail at more or less the same rate (see: backblaze’s stats) and trying to buy a specific thing to avoid the death which is coming for all drives is, mostly, futile: at the absolute best you might see a single specific model to avoid, but that doesn’t mean entire product lines are bad.

I’m using some WD red drives which are pushing 8 years old, and some Seagate exos drives which are pushing 4, and so far no issues on any of the 7 drives.

Make sure, if you use hardware RAID, you know what happens if your controller dies.

Is the data in a format you can access it easily? Do you need a specific raid controller to be able to read it in the future? How are you going to get a new controller if you need it?

That’s a big reason why people nudge you to software raid: if you’re using md and doing a mirror, then that’ll work on any damn drive controller on earth that linux can talk to, and you don’t need to worry about how you’re getting your data back if a controller dies on you.

Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?

For me it’s just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I’d make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I’ve worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.

Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?

I wouldn’t argue with the dude; he’s got a clear case of bad-faith-itis. What you did was bad, so you shouldn’t have done it, but no I won’t tell you how to fix it.

The absolute best you could have done is cross-posted to a Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever account as well, but you can’t just always go around yanking the rug out underneath communities especially if you’re in a position where it’s not just lazy shitposting and worthless commentary.

…that said, you have moved anything you can to being posted somewhere in tandem riiiiiiight?