Not that I was ever interested in being military, but I was at a lunch with two older lifelong army retirees. They kept talking about how military service broke their bodies and politicians won’t cover their medical costs. These injuries were independent of any combat: It’s just expected that you sell every part of yourself when you sign up.

Who wants to be 45 years old with a limp, be unable to hear a quiet conversation, and have horrible back problems.

Yes, OP I highly recommend a GL.iNet device. It’s pocket sized and always does the job.

As someone who has owned enterprise servers for self-hosting, I agree with the previous comment that you should avoid owning one if you can. They might be cheap, but your longterm ownership costs are going to be higher. That’s because as the server breaks down, you’ll be competing with other people for a dwindling supply of compatible parts. Unlike consumer PCs, server hardware is incredibly vendor locked. Hell, my last Proliant would keep the fans ramped at 100% because I installed a HDD that the BIOS didn’t like. This was after I spent weeks tracking down a disk that would at least be recognized, and the only drives I could find were already heavily used.

My latest server is built with consumer parts fit into a 2U rack case, and I sleep so much easier knowing I can replace any of the parts myself with brand new alternatives.

Plus as others have said, a 1U can be really loud. I don’t care about the sound of my gaming computer, but that poweredge was so obnoxious that despite being in the basement, I had to smother it with blankets just so the fans didn’t annoy me when I was watching TV upstairs. I still have a 1U Dell Poweredge, but I specifically sought out the generation that still let you hack the fan speeds in IPMI. From all my research, no such hack exists for the Proliant line.

is it dishonorable to find loopholes in the rules of the honor culture

Dueling culture in 18th and 19th century Europe was commonly organized around concepts of “gentlemanly honor”. Even back then, people recognized the need for loopholes.

Consider the case of two friends who got drunk at a tavern, each one declaring how much they loved the other. Eventually, one friend goes overboard “I love you more than you know!” to which the response is “But that cannot be, for my love of you is infinite!”. Soon this becomes an argument over who loves the other more, and eventually they have to settle their friendship like gentlemen: With swords at dawn. If they’re smart and sober up in time, their seconds will work out a solution before the fight, but there are cases recorded where the friends kill each other because honor trumps love.

There were also loopholes which worked to favor the person that society already deemed more “honorable” (wealthy, connected, liked, etc). It was generally accepted that a gentleman of certain standing could honorably refuse another’s challenge to duel if their social stations were different. Think a “new money” banker’s son challenging a minor nobleman over a loan that’s due. It simply wouldn’t look good to have some commoner slaying an aristocrat, even if said aristocrat was an asshole.

In the future, I highly recommend using Kimwipes to clean off your lenses day-to-day. They’re little papers designed to wipe off lab equipment without leaving any scratches or residue, and you don’t need to spray them with any cleaner either. Just a dry wipe until the lenses are clean. If I’m careful about how I use them, a wipe can be reused 2-3 more times before disposal.

Since I started using them, I’ve never had problems with the antiglare coating coming off.

On Linux, I run fwupdmgr to periodically check for firmware updates. Not every manufacturer supports it yet, but I’ve had good results with a few laptops. Not sure if it supports BIOS.

Also though, I generally try to leave my BIOS alone if everything is working fine. Unless I hear of a reason to update, I’d rather stay on a stable version.

Assuming that the disk is of identical (or greater) capacity to the one being replaced, you can run btrfs replace.

https://wiki.tnonline.net/w/Btrfs/Replacing_a_disk#Replacing_with_equal_sized_or_a_larger_disk

I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 over hardware or mdadm raid. You get FS snapshotting as a feature, which would be nice before running a system update.

For disk drives, I’d recommend new if you can afford them. You should look into shucking: It’s where you buy an external drive and then remove (shuck) the HDD from inside. You can get enterprise grade disks for cheaper than buying that same disk on its own. The website https://shucks.top tracks the price of various disk drives, letting you know when there are good deals.

Haven’t used it yet, but I’ve been researching authentik for my own SSO.

Oh, judicial duels have always been bad, tending to favor the wealthy who can afford training. The pistol duel was once considered egalitarian because you were just as likely to miss your opponent regardless of how much you trained. For most of the 20th century (until the 90s) Uruguay had legalized dueling. It was mostly used by politicians and the powerful to muder journalists and lawyers who “defamed” them.

But if we are already living in a period where the rich act with impunity anyway, I want a world where there’s a nonzero chance that we get to watch Elon Musk take an estoc to the face because of a twitter argument.

Grand journeys to far off lands. The kind of journey where someone who is “exotic” and personable can make a life for themselves by being the court foreigner.

Also: Judicial duels. They are unjust, unethical, and unproductive, but damn if I don’t want to see white collar criminals have to fight the selected champion of all the folks they ripped off. Of course, being a billionaire would probably buy you a pretty good champion yourself, so we’d also have to bring back old concepts of honor to compel them to represent themselves.

BTRFS should be stable in the case of power loss. That is to say, it ought to recover to a valid state. I believe the only unstable modes are RAID 5/6.

I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 mode over mdadm RAID1 + ext4. You get checksumming and scrubs to detect drive failures and data corruptions. You also have snapshotting, in case you’re prone to the occasional fat-fingered rm -rf.

For backup, maybe a blu-ray drive? I think you would want something that can withstand the salty environment, and maybe resist water. Thing is, even with BDXL discs, you only get a capacity of 100GiB each, so that’s a lot of disks.

What about an offsite backup? Your media library could live ashore (in a server at a friend’s house). You issue commands from your boat to download media, and then sync those files to your boat when it’s done. If you really need to recover from the backup, have your friend clone a disk and mail it to you.

Do you even need a backup? Would data redundancy be enough? Sure if your boat catches fire and sinks, your movies are gone, but that’s probably the least of your problems. If you just want to make sure that the salt and water doesn’t destroy your data, how about:

1. A multi-disk filesystem which can tolerate at least 1 failure
2. Regular utilities scanning for failure. BTRFS scrubs, for example.
3. Backup fresh disks kept in a salt and water resistant container (original sealed packaging), to swap any failing disk, and replicate data from any good drives remaining.
4. Documentation/practice to perform the aforementioned disk replacement, so you’re not googling manpages at sea.

This would probably be cheapest and have the least complexity.

I wouldn’t trust anything like that to the open internet. It would be better to access the system over a VPN when you’re outside the network.

Barony is fun as hell. Engine is FOSS, but the default game assets require purchase.

You’ve laid out one potential development cycle: FOSS from the get-go, and open collaboration welcome.

However, that’s not the only way that a FOSS game might be developed. The code could be freely licensed, but the upstream developers refuse to accept outside patches. In that case, there’s one “original” and then if you don’t like it, build your fork.

Alternatively, a game could be developed entirely in-house under proprietary licenses, and then only made FOSS upon commercial release. Contributor patches could improve the project, but conception of the game would be entirely the domain of its original developers.

Yeah, I believe there’s some kind of bridge mode you must enable on the host’s interface.

As others have said, a reverse proxy is what you need.

However I will also mention that another tool called macvlan exists, if you’re using containers like podman or docker. Setting up a macvlan network for your containers will trick your server into thinking that the ports exposed by your services belong to a different machine, thus letting them use the same ports at the same time. As far as your LAN is concerned, a container on a macvlan network has its own IP, independent of the host’s IP.

Macvlan is worth setting up if you plan to expose some of your services outside your local network, or if you want to run a service on a port that your host is already using (eg: you want a container to act as DNS on port 53, but systemd-resolved is already using it on the host).

You can set up port forwarding at your router to the containers that you want to publicly expose, and any other containers will be inaccessible. Meanwhile with just a reverse proxy, someone could try to send requests to any domain behind it, even if you don’t want to expose it.

My network is set up such that:

• Physical host has one IP address that’s only accessible over lan.
• Containerized web services that I don’t want to expose publicly are behind a reverse proxy container that has its own IP on the macvlan.
• Containerized web services that I do want to expose publicly have a separate reverse proxy container, which gets a different IP on the macvlan.
• Router has ports 80 and 443 forwarding only to the IP address for my public proxy

They would not even need to open source the servers. Just making the server available for users to run (even under a proprietary license) would be enough.

Ooh! Thanks for the tip! Been looking for some affordable drives for my next system.

I bought a LFF Dell Poweredge back in the fall, and have been waiting on a good deal for 3.5" disks. My current machine is a SFF HP Proliant, and I hate how much a 2.5" drive with good capacity costs.