Email is often impossible. you can run your own server but you won’t be able to send email to many people because gmail and other larre providers will ignore everything from any ip address you can get. you endeup with email for only people on you server and the what is the point.

just a warning there. Some do self host email but it is the most difficult to host. My life is much better now that I pay fastmail to handle my email.

Start small. The hard part isn’t installing a lot of software and getting it running. The hard part is keeping everything updated over time. So install one interesting service, and then figure out how the update process goes before installing another. Hopefully the worst thing that happens is you install services and use them only to have the computer fail in a few years after you depend on them and you can’t figure out how to get the data into the new version. There is also the very real possibility that your service is compromised by an attacker.

I name them after a female important character in whatever novel I’m enjoying when I set the system up. Back when I was single the female was important, not it is just tradition.

Since I like fantasy there are plenty of names available that are both pronounceable and nonsense.

I put all my data on a NAS with non-writable snapshots so hackers cannot destroy my data.

Just remember any backup is better than nothing. Even if the backup is done wrong (this includes untested!) odds are you can read it and extract at least some data, it just may take a lot of time. Backups that are done right just mean that when (not if!) your computers break you are quickly back up and running.

There are several reasons to backup data only and not the full system. First you may be unable to find a computer exactly/enough like the one that broke, and so the old system backup won’t even run. Second, even if you can find an identical enough system, do you want to, or maybe it is time to upgrade anyway - there are pros and cons of arm (raspberry pi) vs x86 servers (there are other obscure options you might want but those are the main ones), and you may want to switch anyway since you have. Third, odds are some of the services need to be upgraded and so you may as well use this forced computer time to apply the upgrade. Last, you may change how many servers you have, should you split services to different computers, or maybe consolidate the services on the system that died to some other server you already have.

The only advantage of a full system backup is when they work they are the fastest way to get going again.

Go to local “art in the park”, music nights, and other such local events and listen to the band playing. Unless you live in a very rural area there is likely many many bands playing someplace every day around you. When you hear something you life find the band and ask how to get their music. If they sell CDs buy one - buy one even if you only accept the music but don’t like it just to support the idea that CDs are not dead.

Because too often people are asking for a solution to the wrong problem. I can tell how to setup a car to drive from the Hawaii to Iceland, but odds are that is not your actual goal. (most often the correct answer is fly to iceland and rent a car, or perhaps just public transit in iceland. You can also put your car on a ship. It is possible to modify a car to drive on the ocean if that is really what you want to do)

Celsius is defined at the arbitrary standard pressure, different pressure values change how water acts (this is very noticeable at 100C - boiling). Kelvin steps are defined from Celsius. Even the speed of light which is constant is still defined in terms of an arbitrary time unit.

Go slow. measure 4 times. most rooms don’t need a jack so put APs where it is easy to ge wires and that will feed the other rooms.

Installed grocy on a server and magic mirror on a pi. Now we can track all the daily tasks of life which makes my wife happy

Static, hand coded html. You can be as pretty as you want to be. A good learning exercise and since it is all static it will be fast and won’t have more security issues.

That means you haven’t make them large enough yet.

Good luck getting people to care, but it is in the end your best counter.

Long term boycottes are the best thing - IF you can get large numbers to follow. Large enough that management schools are forced to teach about how ever real reform won’t be enough to save you from bad actions.

on life support thay haven’t pulled the plug yet but it is coming. They are not updating anything not urgent and so new hardware support is dead as are jails to do useful things. I’m probably moving to xigmanas in the near future.

I know, I like BSD. However because core isn’t a supported version of FreeBSD I cannot update the other things I run on my NAS. I’m more worried about an attack on those out of date services than I am about the few issues that have been fixed

only the most basic security. It is out of date according to the pkg system and so jails cannot be updated-

At least you get updates. I’m running TruNAS core which isn’t updated anymore, and I have some jails doing things so I can’t migrate to scale easially.

The good news is this still works despite no updates it does everything it used to. There is almost zero reason to update any working NAS if it is behind a firewall.

The bad news is those jails are doing useful things and because I’m out of date I can’t update what is in them. Some of those services have new versions that add new features that I really really want.

I have ordered (should arrive tomorrow) a N100 which I’m going to manually migrate the useful services to one at a time. Once that is doing I’ll probably switch to XigmaNAS so I can stick with FreeBSD. (I’ve always preferred FreeBSD). That will leave my NAS as just file storage for a while, though depending on how I like XigmaNAS I might or might not run services on that.

Odds are strongly against a 2 drive failure at your scale, though it does happen. I set my NAS up about 8 years ago, with 6 drives with raid-6 (well zfs’s version) and in that time two drives have failed years apart. When you get two hundreds of drives total in your operation you will see a dual drive failure.

Though you still really should have backups of everything you care about. Even though odds are in your favor someone reading this will lose data in their life on their NAS system.