Thanks!

You intrigued me in part 1, I’m looking forward to reading this. Do you have an RSS feed or mailing list I can subscribe to get updates in future?

S-Mode is an appliance mode for Windows that prevents installation of any app not from the Microsoft Store. Disable S-Mode and you can install any application like you’ve always done, including Firefox.

It’s most useful for something like /home so you have a full backup of your home directories without having to worry if some app has dumped its settings on a folder you don’t have marked for backup. But also backing up / is useful because it gives you an easy recovery in the event of say disk failure. Just restore the entire system from a backup.

Fedora should play nice with Secure Boot enabled. You also shouldn’t need to do anything with the TPM.

Depending on the model and brand, there’s probably a YouTube video showing how to disassemble it. This can help you find the keyboard connector and how to disconnect it.

If you’ve got two 3.5" bays, you could do a RAID 1 (or a mirror in ZFS terms) with them both. This works very nicely with a small SSD for booting. My TrueNAS server has a 120 GB SSD in the M.2 slot that TrueNAS is installed on, then I have an array of spinning disks that forms the main storage array.

If you are planning any sort of play environment that you might want to keep (like a Pixelfed instance) I’d strongly recommend RAID just for availability in the event of a drive failure. But more than that, backups. They are of number one importance. Before you turn up anything of any importance, figure out a backup strategy.

• What’s a good NAS OS to install?

TrueNAS Scale is the go to. Unraid is another popular option.

• Any fun things I can do besides plex transcoding with a 1080 GPU?

Local LLM. Look up Ollama.

• Would it make sense to run a Pixelfed/Mastodon server off this guy?

You could. That could potentially use a lot of space or be very annoying you having to manage and moderate the instances.

• Can I run a RAID on it without buying a separate HDD bay?

What do you mean? Are you talking about a hardware RAID card, or can you physically stuff more than one disk drive into the chassis? For the first, it’ll depend on whether it has any open PCI Express slots. For the second, what do you see when you open it up? Are there 3.5" or 5.25" bays open?

Other than a Plex port forward, I have zero experience putting services out on the public web (but would like to learn!).

Wanting to learn is an admirable goal. I’ve not done it myself, but the Linux Upskill Challenge might be a good place to start. Either that, or figure out something you might want to host yourself, then come back and ask for input when you run into trouble or have a question.

No worries!

I just switched from using Medusa and CouchPotato to Sonarr and Radarr. During the library import process, you can specify if the application should “monitor” the media which is what it means to download new content or try and replace with higher qualities. You can import entire libraries as “Unmonitored” so it will show it, but effectively ignore it unless you go back and change it. You can also just not import your library, and start “clean” if you wanted, and I believe it will just ignore the files for anything you don’t add.

I’m in the US. I can send you my address if you have somewhere I can send it. I don’t want to post it publicly for obvious reasons. :-)

Well, I can’t see a parts list in that repo, but I did find others. If the offer’s still open, I’ll definitely take a couple PCBs. Where did you buy the rest of the parts from?

I’d definitely be interested. What else would I need to build it?

I’ve got a couple keyboards with VIA/QMK and layers, I’m specifically interested in the 36 key split keyboard they mention.

Which keyboard is that?

They’re replacing their in-house engine with Unity, so SI has actually been rebuilding the whole game in a new engine. From what’s been going around, they ran into issues with Unity’s UI tools.

So… What is this? It looks like a config file generator? How is this better than Ansible?

If you mainly want to “hide” your IP, you can’t. Look at the headers of any message. It’ll still show the original source IP, which will be yours.

For the rest of the time I’d recommend getting a spam filtering service. Mimecast, ProofPoint, Barracuda, etc.

Messages sent to you go to the filter, which then forwards the message over to your mail server. Outbound you configure your server to use the filter as a smart host. These filters will also buffer messages if your mail server is offline. So if the server is down, the filter holds on to messages and retries delivery later when your server is back up (within reason).

Yes. You insert the new disk, then just tell it to replace. It’s completely fine. I did this to upgrade the capacity of the drives in my NAS.

A 780M is noticeably better than the Steam Deck GPU, which is what it’ll be compared to.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Radeon-780M-vs-AMD-Custom-GPU-0405/m2088874vsm1804237

I suspect that price is a bit high for most people. I think it’s largely coming from those screens.