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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2025

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  • Oh, I hear ya on the space issue - there’s almost no space in this SFF, but I like it’s form factor so I’m willing to compromise.

    Anymore I don’t find RAID very useful, except for mirroring a drive. As I say this, I do have a NAS with 5 drives, but it’s used as one of my replicators as it’s too slow for anything else. I did run Proxmox with RAID for a while, that was pretty cool, I just don’t need all it’s capability.

    These days I can get a large enough single drive for a box - I considered getting a 12TB but the price on the 8 was hard to beat and I won’t be filling it anytime soon.


  • My experience after 35 years in IT: I’ve had 10x more outages caused by automatic updates than everything else combined.

    Also after 35 years of running my own stuff at home, and practically never updating anything, I’ve never had an outage caused by a lack of updates.

    Let’s not act like auto updates is without risk. Just look at how often Microsoft has to roll out a fix for something an update broke. Inexperienced users are going to be clueless when an update breaks something.

    We should be teaching new people how to manage systems, this includes proper update checks on a cycle, with appropriate validation that everything works afterwards, and the ability to roll back if there’s an issue.

    This isn’t an Enterprise where you simply can’t manually manage updates across hundreds or thousands of servers, and tens of thousands of workstations - this is a single admin, small environment.

    I do monthly update checks, update where I feel it’s warranted, and verify systems afterwards.


  • Two requirements stand out: Media streaming (jellyfin) and multiple hard drives.

    In the video front, Jellyfin has documented what you want to look for if you’re building “new” (that is, not just using what you have lying about). Discrete video card is very much recommended for tranacoding (which will invariably happen). Check their docs here. They also cover which processor to use and why.

    Let’s consider drives now: what’s the reasoning for multiple drives? I had this requirement too, then had a Dell OptiPlex SFF (Small Form Factor) fall in my lap. Because it can only handle 2 drives (in addition to the M2 OS drive), it made me rethink things. At first I added a 4 port SATA card and four 2.5" drives I had lying around. It worked, but what I realized was my media server needed enough storage to hold my library, but it didn’t need internal redundancy. So currently it has an 8TB drive for my library, and an M2 drive for the OS (which is how this machine comes anyway). That drive is duplicated to a NAS and two other drives on different machines (to protect against drive failure).

    I run a monthly host OS backup to my NAS, just in case (but it’s a simple rebuild as my services/tools run in VM’s).

    I had a cooling issue at first, then realized it was an old machine (2017), and the cooler paste was likely hard. Cleaned it off and put on new and the fan now runs quietly, even when converting. At idle it hardly makes any noise at all.

    One nice thing is it has a relatively small power supply, so it peaks at 80w while converting, and idles about 15w.

    It lacks a discrete video card, so when it does transcoding the quality suffers a little. I’ll need to upgrade the power supply to add a video card.

    I’m really impressed with this little box - I’d buy another in a heartbeat.




  • I have repeatedly caught those “experts” contradicting their own statements during a diagnosis, a couple times in urgent care when a family member was in serious distress.

    It wasn’t intentional on their part, just an oversight, as it happens with all of us.

    I learned to carefully track statements/conditions/limits while diagnosing tech problems in team discussions under pressure. In that environment, anyone can call out a mistake or contradictory statements, as the goal is accurate diagnoses.

    Just because someone is an “expert”, doesn’t make them infallible.

    Additionally, it’s not for them to decide my course of treatment - it’s for them to help me understand the risks of different treatments, the likelihood of success, and we decide together.

    I aay this as having just gone through saying no to major surgery that the docs just assumed I would do.

    My body, my choice.


  • This kind of question is similar to proving a negative in logic.

    You’re asking why people think it’s trustworthy, implying you believe it isn’t.

    1. *Which people think it’s trustworthy? You used an ambiguous “many people” - I’d need to see something supporting this assumption.

    2. It would be more useful for you to give examples of why you don’t find it trustworthy, as this is what really matters with regard to any source.

    I don’t trust any one source, and instead try to piece together a likely truth by considering the different sources and how a story is told. I’m surely wrong as much as I’m right, but it’s the best any of us can do.