I’ve been interested in setting up a monitoring setup like this, mostly out of curiosity about what’s going on when I’m not looking. But I know what the answer is and it’s not as exciting as I’d like it to be.

I made some sort of Norwegian dish for my ex (she’s Vietnamese, comes into play later) that she really wanted and missed from when she visited Norway. It was a casserole consisting of potatoes, cream, pickled Herring, and ground black pepper. Like, I’m pretty sure that’s every ingredient that went into this thing. I’m not even sure if there was any cheese or salt.

I thought I screwed up somewhere because it was not good. She loved it because it was so bland and apparently I made it perfectly. I do not understand how she could go from eating food like bun bo hue to whatever the hell I made and enjoy it.

Mine is raspberry pi zero 2w with an external enclosure attached to solar+battery. Wi-Fi is barely consistent enough for speeds around 1/4 what they should be. I’m still working out the kinks, but thanks be to FSM for rsync and snapshots, otherwise my backup scheme would probably never be able to finish.

Agreed, I just spent a week (very intermittently) trying to figure out where all my free space had gone, turns out it was a bunch of abandoned docker volumes taking up. I have 32gb on my laptop, so space is at an absolute premium.

I guess I learned my lesson about trying out docker containers on my laptop just to check them out.

I’m doing a 5-4-3-2-1 method. 5 backups. 4 on-site. 3 attached to one machine, 2 of those are on separate external usb drives synced at different intervals. 1 in the shed.

I do similar, except nextcloud and backups beyond just syncing. I fear something corrupting my database and that syncing immediately through all my devices.

EDIT: Wow! thanks for all the detailed and super quick replies! I’ve been reading all the comments here and am concluding that (even though I am currently running only one service) it might be interesting to start using Docker to run all (future) services seperately on the server!

This is pretty much what I’ve started doing. Containers have the wonderful benefit that if you don’t like it, you just delete it. If you install on bare metal (at least in Linux) you can end up with a lot of extra packages getting installed and configured that could affect your system in the future. With containers, all those specific extras are bundled together and removed at the same time without having any effect on your base system, so you’re always at your clean OS install.

I will also add an irritation with docker containers as well, if you create something in a container that isn’t kept in a shared volume, it gets destroyed when starting the container again. The container you use keeps the maintainers setup, for instance I do occasional encoding of videos in a handbrake container, I can’t save any profiles I make within that container because it will get wiped next time I restart the container since it’s part of the container, not on any shared volume.

Did you do the nextcloudpi install?

New Mexico, maybe Arizona but probably not. Stucco house, patches of mountains, scrubby pine. I’m gonna go with New Mexico.

Your mom jokes are absolutely millennial humor

Agreed, I use a brush to get whatever doesn’t get off by soaking and spraying, then a soapy dish towel for the cleaning. Dish towel gets washed by hand after doing dishes and hang dries, or in the washer with other towels if I remember to grab it.

In our house sponges are only used for cleaning things we don’t eat off of, and those scrub daddy sponges are the worst I’ve ever used at sponging with the worst scrubber for scrubbing.

The effectiveness of the scrapey bit doesn’t change in my experience, it’s just as shitty when hard as it is soft. I’m sure there’s a low hanging pun in there somewhere, but I hate these sponges so much I don’t care to find it. Plus the sponge part is trash.

If you don’t need a laptop, I’ve been having a blast with using mini/micro/tiny business PCs off of eBay. I’ve had zero issues installing Debian on them, and they’re designed to be easy to maintain by IT departments, so Wi-Fi, storage, RAM, and even CPUs are all replaceable. They are mobile CPUs, so if you need the heavy lifting of desktop CPUs, you’d probably need to go with a larger form factor.

Check eBay for used business micro/mini/tiny PCs. They’re pretty cheap, and low power consumption. They’re mostly Intel processors, so that’s what you make of it. If I were you I’d look for i3 processors 9th gen and up, i5 and i7 8th Gen and up for transcoding. They can hardware transcode pretty much anything but AV1, vp9, and hevc 12bit but the processors are powerful enough that they can transcode those to x265/264 to a device or two using the CPU without issues.

If you don’t plan on transcoding, I’ve had no issues with a 5th Gen i5 NUC doing server things, but I do offload any processor heavy things to my 7060 micro (8th Gen i7) machine if I want it done quickly.

Those aren’t safety razors, just your normal disposable.

As mentioned many times I’m sure, I use my rpi’s as a pi-hole/VPN. It’s nice having them as dedicated devices for low power things, if my main server ever fudges up, my VPN still works and internal DNS is still resolved. If I’m not home and get complaints from the family that jellyfin isn’t working, I can either fix it remotely or wake up my dev server for them to use in the meantime.

I also have an rpi 1 as a “dedicated ssh machine” that I can ssh into in case all of my other machines have gone goofy. If for any reason my two main devices aren’t accessible, that one will be because if there’s power to the house it will turn on. It does literally nothing else, so there’s very little chance a power outage will corrupt anything. It does require that the pivpn device is working if I’m not home, but I prefer to leave that to it’s own …devices.

This one gave me the confidence to post my setup, I salute your bravery (°_°)7.

The best of luck with your future insurance claim.

Uggo = uptime

• Old Synology NAS for storage
• Optiplex 7060 running jellyfin, paperless, *arr stack, handbrake, ripper, maybe some other containers.
• NUC5 running nextcloud (nextcloudpi) baremetal and an audiobiokshelf container

That looks like “seasoning” you’d get on baking sheets and cast iron. Seasoning is polymerized oils that end up having a high temperature breakdown point, quite a bit higher than the original oil. It’s not an issue, and if you’re willing to put up with it, might actually make it easier to clean since it has non-stick properties.

Otherwise, you want to use a basic (as in acid-base) cleaning agent, ammonia, oven cleaner, etc. should work; bleach might not be a strong enough base. Oven cleaner is made for cleaning this type of thing, but it’s one of those cleaning agents where the precautions are absolutely required, not just a company liability thing because idiots.

In my opinion, if soap and water and scrubby pad don’t remove it, it’s not worth further effort.