Ceph. I have some Raspberry Pi’s that I’m going to set up a cluster with. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I half expect the performance to be relatively terrible, but maybe it won’t and I can try to build something on top of the cluster in a sort of hyper converged setup.

It’s completely overkill for a small home lab but that’s what makes it fun.

Metal Arms: A Glitch in the System

In Proxmox they have VirGL-GPU and Virtio-GPU. They allow VMs to pass work to the GPU without being dedicated to one VM. I don’t think gaming was the intended use case and don’t know what kind of performance you would get. My uninformed guess is that it would not be great.

Yeah this is the answer. I was about to list off some movies but realized I actually watched and finished those. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish anything after Endgame besides the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Just use Debian. Why use the inferior downstream distros when you can go right to the OG? You are already halfway there.

Debian doesn’t have a corporate sponsor so there is no risk of getting spammed or giving someone your personal information.

My recommendation for that price range is to buy a used business-class laptop. Emphasis on the business-class. These are the Dell Latitudes and the HP ProBooks. Try to find something less-than five years old (businesses tend to phase out older laptops in the three or four year mark). Buy from a reputable re-seller that offers support in case you get a lemon.

It won’t be the fastest or sexiest laptop out there. But it will be long lasting and reliable.

Build something that you want. Find that niche that isn’t well served by existing projects and fill the void. Either by making something entirely new or adding a feature to something already out there.

Maybe something I should look into again.

Yes! I’ve used that before.

I spun up a trial version of Windows Server and tried to get it working. It seemed to want a Domain environment and I didn’t want to go down that road. There probably is a way to do it without setting up a Domain but I didn’t feel like messing with it at the time.

I have a Windows VM on my server. If I need MS Office or any Windows-only program I just use Remmina to RDP in and get stuff done.

Windows has pretty good touch support over RDP so I can even do this from my phone or tablet if I need a full desktop on the go (using a VPN).

Check out these guys: https://www.linuxserver.io/

https://hub.docker.com/u/linuxserver

They have a pretty good catalog of pre-built Docker containers. You don’t have to use their version of things but there is a lot of software that I was previously unaware of that I learned of through them.

Yeah, I always remember the first game the best. It was an RPG first and a shooter second. The vehicle sections, while terrible did provide a sense of scale that the other games lacked.

For some reason my DNS tends to break the most. I have to reinstall my Pi-hole semi-regularly.

NixOS plus Docker is my preferred setup for hosting applications. Sometime it is a pain to get running but once it does it tends to run. If a container doesn’t work, restart it. If the OS doesn’t work, roll it back.

Does it increase your attack surface? Yes. With proper precautions is this level of risk negligible? Also yes.

You will be opening a port to the outside world. Anyone can try to use it. But if you are using key authentication it will be fine.

Yeah I think the distro is less important. Really it’s choosing a lightweight DE + web browser will determine if a machine that old will work.

Check out Looking Glass.

https://looking-glass.io/

Why not just run TrueNAS Scale? It’s a NAS built on top of Debian?

I’ve been with Porkbun for over a year now. No complaints.

I waited for the speaker support. Seems pretty stable in my sample size of one.

I like Apple’s hardware but their software is not ideal.

I have an M1 Macbook Air that is honestly the best laptop I’ve ever used. I will run this thing until it dies. I’m running Asahi Linux so I don’t even have to deal with MacOS anymore.

As for my smartphone, while I am concerned with privacy and control over my devices… I think privacy is more important. While I do not trust Apple with my privacy, I trust them over a literal advertising company.