The reset button is basically just a signal to the CPU/BIOS that it should wipe memory and begin the boot process from scratch. If it was not working, that indicates the CPU was hard locked and not responding to any sort of input, not just an os fault The power button sends an actual trigger signal to the PSU through the ATX connector so it bypasses any mainboard lock.

Random shit happens, see if it does it again.
My go to for random stability issues is to always run a full deep memtest to look for bad RAM and then a CPU stress test to see if it’s a random thermal or core issue. More often than not I find stability problems just with these two steps.

Debian is what you make of it, definitely. But it is also inanely stability focused to the point of being a detriment. It takes many months for simple package updates to hit Debian repos and it leads to frustration when stuff I expect to be updated is still very much not. As a server distro I recommend it, but as a play around distro it’s a bit more annoying and you have to do a ton more self maintenance on packages to get the latest and greatest.

If you control the backend, it’s self hosted. Vast majority of people use VPS’s for many hosting purposes. Stupid semantic applixation of rule 3.

Sounds like a candidate for !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

A Minecraft server is the classic.

Don’t discount just putting together a basic webpage that can be accessed at home too- something he could put together in a basic HTML editor (drag and drop) and put his favorite things on or whatever he may be focusing on (cars, animals, space, you name it).

1gb ram is crap. Hardware capabilities aside it’s just not enough to run anything usable for real hosting. Get an old office machine for 50-100 with 8gb or more of memory and it will do infinitely better.

Oh thank god. This solves my problem of no good integrated cam hardware on the market that isn’t cloudified or a huge security hole.

me when i am in a “build an unusuable standard” competition and my opponent is “literally any consumer electronics manufacturer”

Ethernet over HDMI does exist as a standard, but iirc it requires the device manufacturer on both ends of the cable to have a special implementation, and also requires a special cable that has the Ethernet data lanes included. I’m not sure any modern displays implement it anymore, it kinda died because it sucked and wasn’t that useful.

And at significantly lower transmit power too. Ubiquiti 5ac ptp rigs use like 8w, 802.11ah can make a link with under a watt. Sure it won’t be fast at all but if you’re doing a remote embedded device on a solar panel, it makes a huge difference.

That shelf sag scares me, sir. At least reinforce each layer with a slab of plywood or something.

Whatever is cheapest. When youre first starting out basically any hardware will do, it just needs to boot Linux. As you progress and find more stuff to put on the servers, you’ll discover what you’re real hardware needs are.

When I first started, it was a hand me down single core AMD Sempron machine (socket 754!) that I later upgraded to an Athlon64 and 4gb of DDR. I managed to bodge that poor thing into running a Minecraft 1.5.2 server.

Personally I would stick with the i3 machine since I am assuming it’s an office PC that can be had for cheaper than a Pi 5 (which is quite inflated in price IMO). x86 still retains better software support vs ARM and they are significantly easier to attach large cheap storage to via SATA. Power cost will be greater but I doubt an office i3 pulls more than 70w wall power at full load.

service still up = no problem
Can’t access service = problem, better ssh in

Simple as

A. Run a batch transcode with Handbrake and make all your stored files compatible with your end players.
It sounds like the more recent things you are downloading are in a codec that is not compatible with your playback devices. E.g, older torrents are frequently an H.264 stream in an MP4 container, which practically every device can play now. Many modern releases are being distributed in H.265 or AV1, as they have significant size and quality benefits, but many older devices don’t support them natively. so it is forcing Jellyfin to live transcode to h.264. Find out what older titles play without any buffer or playback lag/high CPU usage and check what codec those files are in. That is what you’ll need to batch encode everything over to.

B. Sounds like you are still relying on CPU transcoding which is absolute dog. What mini pc specs do you have? If it’s an AMD or Intel CPU/APU then it should have hardware encode/decode included in it’s integrated GPU. When using hardware transcoding the CPU load is generally minimal for 1 to 2 streams. See the Jellyfin docs on hardware acceleration here.

My default goto with any stability issue is to first force a new drive self test

smartctl -l selftest /dev/nvme0  

And then I would also run a complete extended memory test (memtest86) to ensure bad ram isn’t doing something dumb like corrupting the part of the kernel that handles disk IO. The number of times I’ve had unsolvable issues that traced to an unstable stick of memory is… Surprisingly high.

If the memtest passes try fsck’ing nvme0, if there are corrupted blocks yeah it’s possible the SSD is dying but the controller isn’t reporting it.

Actually I think I meant to write “arent worth shit” but had a tired brain fart

Black Friday sales aren’t shit anymore, I waited until last black Friday and no good drives ever went on more than like $5 discount.

With all drives being imported and tarriffs in the US being a total shitshow you should buy ASAP.

Adapter or caddy is fine. Can get them on most shopping sites for cheap.

IIRC from my old office PC slinging days, a lot of those cases with 5-1/4 bays usually had slots for mounting screws that would allow you to mount a 3.5 drive flush to one sideusijg 2 screws. Then you get a 1-3/4" 6-32 screw stand off, thread it into the drive, and use that to mount it to the other side of the 5-1/4 bay.

Did that a lot to really old reused cases where there were a ton of 5-1/4 bays but only one 3.5 bay.

Bigger hammer and a concrete surface. Three good whacks to the thin sheet metal casing (opposite the drive motor/PCB) should shatter the platters inside.
You can also buy a sharp punch that looks like this and punch thru the sheetmetal side to really get those platters broke.

Realistically if they’re already failed, nobody is going through the effort to send these disks through any kind of speciality recovery for a random john q public anyway.

Any normal computer can become a “server”, its all based on the software.
Most enterprise server hardware is expensive because its designed around demanding workloads where uptime and redundancy is important. For a goober wanting to start a Minecraft and Jellyfin server, any old PC will work.
For home labbers office PC’s is the best way to do it. I have two machines right now that are repurposed office machines. They usually work well as office machines generally focus on having a decent CPU and plenty of memory without wasting money on a high end GPU, and can be had used for very cheap (or even free if you make friends that work in IT). And unless you’re running a lot of game servers or want a 4k streaming box, even a mediocre PC from 2012 is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff on.

3 sticky notes telling me to “go get that incremental backup working”,
2 separate external hard drives,
1 month out of date