I run a J5040 ITX board for my homelab needs, which has been released a few years ago and has served me well, even through I run it with more RAM than the board specs allow. The natural successors of that are the Atom N100/N105 and the i3 N300/N305 (all 1 Gen newer than J5040) and AFAIK the Atom N150 and i3 N350 (2 Gen newer), all of which are available on ITX boards. Models for the latest chips might be a but rare though, and you might have to go to AliExpress to get one, but for the N100/105/300/305, there’s a wide variety available. Just make sure to get one with enough SATA ports for all your disks, so you can use it for NAS as well.

Disclaimer: I’m quite sure this is enough for your homelab/NAS use-case, but I’m not familiar with Minecraft requirements, and you might need beefier hardware for that. However, the above boards leave enough room in your budget for RAM, NVMe and HDDs, should deliver quite some bang for the little buck you have, and will barely sip energy, making cooling easy.

I’m not much of an expert on Bluetooth, but I would expect that you can create an override for the corresponding Systemd service (bluetoothd perhaps, or some Logitech daemon) and make it depend on a Target that is reached earlier in the boot process.

Sorry that I can’t be more helpful…

Interesting option, I’m familiar with Git, YAML and yq. Thank you!

Uuuuh, thank you for the info, it’s very much appreciated!

Well, I do have a PaperlessNGX already, so I could use a custom field for SerialNo or something like that, but I just feel like PNGX isn’t really designed for this task.

Not at all, I like .md, and I’m familiar with Git. A spreadsheet is not something that I would throw into Git, but an .md…

Thanks, that sounds really nice!

HA, the term I was looking for is even on their website: “Asset Management Software”. My non-native speaker ass didn’t come up with this.

Thank you, I will check those out.

Though it sounds interesting for tinkering, I’m probably not doing down the NoCode route. You make it, you maintain it forever, and I don’t have that kind of time.

Oh yeah, I was planning to deploy Grocy anyway, but I never thought about using it for this. Thank you!

Yep, maybe it really is. I just wanted to see of there’s something nicer out there before settling.

I think I recall seeing Netbox a while ago, and I remember thinking that it would be something I’d like to use at work, but we already have idoit there (which I hate passionately).

The Forgejo guys have built this themselves, so I’m aiming to use that (I don’t just yet, because I can’t find the time).

• Blog post
• Documentation

Mint on my work PC, because my dear IT colleagues made the effort to provide standardized installations for us that are mostly carefree and can just be used; you can even get them preinstalled on a laptop or VM.

Debian on my work servers, because everyone is using it (we’re a Debian shop mostly) and there’s a standardized self service PXE boot installation for it. Also, Debian is boring, and boring is good. And another thing, Debian is the base image for at least half of the Docker images and alliances (e.g. Proxmox) out there, so common tools. The .deb package format is kinda sane, so it’s easy to provide our own package, and Debian has a huge community, so it’s going nowhere in the near future.

Ubuntu LTS latest on my home servers, because I wanted “Debian but more recent packages”, and it has served me well.

Not yet, but maybe Fedora on my private PC and laptop soon, because I keep hearing good things re hardware support, package recency, gaming and just general suitability for desktop use. There’s still the WAF to overcome, so we’ll see.

Thanks, that’s very interesting!

I have no reason to expect any different, but I would have a better night sleep if Shoutrrr were still actively maintained. I get that there may be no features to add, and I’m OK with that, but there are >50 unresolved issues that no one is taking care of, and I would assume that every software needs to be tested against new versions of libs, frameworks, OS releases etc., and I’m not OK with a project not doing that.

Sorry for being unclear, that’s what I meant. Set rules using the Ansible module, make them persistent by notifying a handler that makes a cmd call.

Yeah, ansible.builtin.iptables makes the changes and the task then notifies a handler to invoke iptables-save.

+1 for zramswap, especially if you’re tight on RAM but have a few CPU cycles to spare.

This is my day job, so I’d like to weigh in.

First of all, there’s a whole community of GLAM institutions involved in what is called Digital Preservation (try googling that specifically). Here in Germany, a lot of them have founded the Nestor Group (www.langzeitarchivierung.de) to further the case and share knowledge. Recently, Nestor had a discussion group on Personal Digital Archiving, addressing just your use case. They have set up a website at https://meindigitalesarchiv.de/ with the results. Nestor publishes mostly in German, but online translators are a thing, so I think you will be fine.

Some things that I want to address from your original post:

• Keep in mind that file formats, just like hardware and software, become obsolete over time. Think about a migration strategy for your files to a more recent format of your current format falls out of style and isn’t as widely supported anymore. I assume your photos are JPGs, which are widely not considered safe for preservation, as they decay with subsequent encoding runs and use lossy compression. A suitable replacement might be PNG, though I wouldn’t go ahead and convert my JPGs right away. For born digital photo material, uncompressed TIFF is the preferred format.
• Compression in general is considered a risk, because a damaged bit will potentially impact a larger block of compressed data. Saving a few bytes on your storage isn’t worth listing your precious memories.
• Storage media have different retention times. It’s true that magnetic tape storage has the best chances for survival, and it’s what we use for long term cold storage, but it’s prohibitively expensive for home use. Also, it’s VERY slow on random access, because tape has to be rewound to the specific location of your file before reading. If you insist on using it, format your tapes using LTFS to eliminate the need for a storage management system like IBM Spectrum Protect. The next best choice of storage media are NAS grade HDDs, which will last you upwards of five years. Using redundancy and a self correcting file system like ZFS (compression & dedup OFF!) will increase your chances of survival. Keep you hands off optical storage media; they tend to decay after a year already according top studies on the subject. Flash storage isn’t much greater either, avoid thumb drives at all cost. Quality SSD storage might last you a little longer. If you use ZFS or a comparable file system that provides snapshots, you can use that to implement immutability.
• Kudos for using Linux standard tooling; it will help other people understand your stack of anything happens to you. Digital Preservation is all about removing dependencies on specific formats, technologies and (importantly) people.
• Backup is not Digital Preservation, though I will admit that these two tend get mixed into one another in personal contexts. Backups save the state of a system at a specific point in time, DigiPres tries to preserve only data that isn’t specific to a system and tends to change very little. Also, and that is important, DigiPres tries to save context along with the actual payload, so you might want to at least save some metadata along with your photos and store them all in a structure that is made for preservation. I recommend BagIt; there’s a lot of existing tooling for creating it, it’s self-contained, secured by strong checksums and it’s an RFC.
• Keep complexity as low as possible!
• Last of all, good on you for doing SOMETHING. You don’t have to be perfect to improve your posture, and you’re on the right track, asking the right questions. Keep on going, you’re doing great.

Come back at me if you have any further questions.