ares35

a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can’t get rid of without literally giving them away. they’re ‘tolerable’ for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the ‘performance per watt’ just isn’t there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.

these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run ‘ok enough’ on 4th gen, just make sure they’re booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they’ll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can ‘rufus’ a win11 installer, but there’s no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.

we do that around the veggie garden, but with aol cds.

absolutely this.

it’s a hell of a lot more work and liability than just renting the server space and letting the user do ‘whatever’ with it.

smr drives are horrible. we have some here. some by accident, others for cost savings (used only for long term, large file storage)–but all of smr’s faults are really not worth it… maybe at half the price per tb it might be–for some use cases, but not at current pricing.

the last batch we got in don’t even support trim, so i guess the only way to ‘clean up’ zones is to literally dump everything off, secure_erase them, and ‘start over’.

devices on the hub share the total bandwidth to/from the host system’s usb port. data going between drives on the same hub has to travel to the host then back again.

so: transferring files to/from a single drive will go ‘full speed’, transferring files between two drives on that hub will run at about half speed, accessing data on all the drives on that hub at the same time (such as syncing a snapraid array built on externals all connected to that hub) will be painfully and brutally slow.

browser-based ‘clients’ with large directories and large numbers of files in a single multi-file upload are going to choke. you need binary bits on the parents’ end, such as a dedicated backup or sync utility.

if you could populate your server with their existing files using a physical drive, that would be better, and perhaps faster and easier, too–then a browser-based upload solution could probably handle the much smaller ‘updates’ of new stuff. have them consolidate all the existing files on one external (plus also on a second for a local backup). hell, you could do that bit via remote desktop and all they’d need to do is connect the drives and let you in. then somehow get one of those drives to you (ship, deliver, you pick up. whatever is feasible).

i understand they don’t want to pay, but would $12.00 for a full year be cheap enough to consider? ovh has a new customer deal going for 2gb ram/20gb storage vps. $0.97 a month for the first year, and you can add up to ten of those to a single new account.

i have cable, in the us, it goes out for awhile probably on a weekly basis. calling them is pointless.

if i really need internet–and i did a couple weeks ago when it happened (i don’t carry an internet-capable phone), my office is less than five minutes away and has dsl. the phone company has proven itself to be far more reliable than cable, even if they are scummy, greedy bastards just like cable and wireless companies.

if you’re in the u.s. check walmart for clearance desktops. we just picked up (to replace an older neighbor’s dead atom-based desktop) a new i3, 8gb, 256gb nvme, slim desktop. inside it had mount points and the cables for two sata (3.5in + 2.5in) and a slim optical (or a ‘creatively’ mounted second 2.5in). we were going there to pick it up at a bit over $300, as i had seen it there the previous day. surprise! it had just got marked down again to ~ $200. original price was $400.

how does whisper do transcribing technical documents. like for lawyers, doctors, engineers and what not? or speakers with heavy accents?

the cases i’ve got here with 5+ drive bays were all acquired used or were given to me (except for one. a $10-15 sale over a decade ago). it’s a case, big deal if it’s ‘old’, the stuff going in it, isn’t (usually). as long as the switch works, the cover fits, and there’s sufficient airflow options. i’m good. i’m not paying new prices of $150-200+ for a fancy name brand box made out of sheet metal just to hold a system nobody’s gonna see but me.

so, check the local used market for cases, or even older cheap systems with a suitable case.

hijacking dns is also my provider’s first action when you’re late paying the bill. by ip or doh or a long-lived dns cache and you’re still going, but anything looked-up via a ‘regular’ dns server goes nowhere. that gets you another 2-3 weeks until they deny the modem from even authenticating.

if you’re running batteries down often enough to need battery replacements that frequently, you may be going ‘too cheap’ (poor quality and/or not enough capacity) to begin with, and would need an upgrade not another ‘cheap’ solution.

grav is another option for what you were looking for. cli with optional web interface. run local and generate static sites or on a web server (like a traditional cms) https://getgrav.org

for a static site generator that runs locally (with local or git storage), check out https://jamstack.org/generators/ for lots of other options.

that’s exactly what i did for my tv and PCs that use it as a display (for media playback), with dietpi in a vm running pihole, too.