ChojinDSL

I’m curious if anyone has ever done a longevity test. Rather than Io performance, I’m more interested in how quickly they wear out.

You could setup imapsync and sync your Gmail to a self hosted IMAP server and just never delete your mails.

You can also self host it via docker.

If you want to learn more about computers by using Linux, I suggest something like Gentoo. Don’t know if it’s still the case, but I started with Gentoo back in 2003 and it took me 3 days until I even had a GUI. Learned a ton in the process about Linux under the hood and how it all works together. Thanks to Gentoo I have a well paid career as a Senior Linux System Administrator.

That being said, i should mention that I grew up with DOS, so I didn’t have the same apprehension as some people, when it comes to the command line and editing config files.

This is probably true of most distros.

Did you encrypt your swap as well? I used to use hibernation back in the day but without LUKS encryption. Ever since I’ve started using LUKS encryption, I never bothered with hibernation again, allthough I would like to.

How long did you run the memtest for? Ideally it should run a couple of times, since just a single pass might not detect any errors.

But it’s weird that it happens when you try to update. Could it maybe be related to your network hardware, either LAN or WiFi? If you’re using WiFi, try LAN, or vice versa. Perhaps even a USB dongle, and disable the onboard network hardware completely.

Gitea or forgejo, for hosting your repo and managing access rights. WoodpeckerCI when you eventually need a CI/CD. (Is a fork of DroneCI and integrates nicely with gitea.)

Does anyone know if there is a way to use mythtv as a TV backend for jellyfin?

I used it back in the day when I still had analog Cable TV and a digital capture card. MythTV was a pain in the ass to setup. The UI was horrible and if you were trying to setup satellite, it could get really complicated if you didn’t know what you were doing.

That being said, MythTV is probably hands down the best digital recorder I’ve ever used. Like for LiveTV it sucks, because channel switching takes ages until it’s built a recording buffer. This might be less of an issue on SSDs now, like I said I haven’t used in ages. But MythTV had some of the best features in terms of scheduling recordings, avoiding conflicts and skipping commercials.

Once I started using MythTV, I stopped watching live TV entirely. Since I simply just recorded stuff I was interested in.

I’ve used MythTV, TVheadend and NextPVR. MythTV has the best recording features. TVheadend in combination with Kodi has the fastest channel switching, which is great if you just want to channel hop. NextPVR is decent and IMHO the easiest to setup out of the three. But is lacking in certain areas.

Not really with mdadm raid5. But it sounds like you like to live dangerously. You could always go the BTRFS route. Yeah, I know BTRFS Raid56 “will eat your data”, but you said it’s nothing that important anyways. There are some things to keep in mind when running BTRFS in Raid5, e.g. scrub each disk individually, use Raid1c3 for metadata for example.

But basically, BTRFS is one of the only filesystems that allows you to add disks of any size or number, and you can convert the profile on the fly, while in use. So in this case, you could format the new disk with BTRFS as a single disk. Copy over stuff from one of your other disks, then once that disk is empty, add it as a additional device to your existing BTRFS volume. Then do the same with the last disk. Once that is done, you can run a balance convert to convert the single profile into a raid5 data profile.

That being said, there are quite a few caveats to be aware of. Even though it’s improved a lot, BTRFS’s Raid56 implementation is still not recommended for production use. https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/[email protected]/

Also, I would STRONGLY recommend against connecting disks via USB. USB HD adapters are notorious for causing all kinds of issues when used in any sort of advanced setup, apart from temporary single disk usage.

Mailcow allows users to setup their own aliases similar to gmail with a “+” delimiter. E.g. [email protected].

Windows, in the past has been known to sometimes overwrite the Linux boot loader after a windows update, so be careful with that, since windows assumes no other os exists in the universe. Depending on your windows version, it might not be a bad idea to backup the license key. Recent versions store your computer’s information in the cloud, so unless you change a lot of components, it should reinstall without much hassle. But it doesn’t hurt to extract the key just in case. Microsoft gonna Microsoft. There are tools for this. E.g. jellybean key finder (or something like that).

Depending on the distro, it might help to disable secure boot in the uefi bios.

That being said, take it one step at a time. Don’t try to recreate everything you were doing in windows right off the bat. Get comfortable with the desktop first. Try different apps for certain tasks. If you have an Nvidia GPU, the experience can vary greatly between different distros. As others have mentioned, most distros have a “live environment” on the installation cd, which you can test to see if your hardware is recognised straight away. That being said, don’t feel like you’re married to a specific distro. Most Linux users will distro hop quite a bit, before they settle on one that just feels right. And even then they might change again after a while, if they get bored.

If you don’t know, or aren’t sure. Backup everything if you have the space. Once you’ve hit a couple of disaster scenarios, it will become apparent what stuff is really important.

Obviously, the stuff you can’t recreate otherwise is most important. But apart from that, even the stuff you can recreate from other sources might be worth backing up because of time savings. E.g. faster to restore from backup than to recreate.

Back when I was still using Gentoo, configuring your own kernel was a rite of passage. It was kind of fun to try and configure it as minimalist as possible to cut down on the kernel compile time. Also, understanding all the different options and possibilities. And thanks to use flags, you had access to all these different patch sets for the kernel, which took a lot of the pain out of trying things like experimental schedulers or filesystems.

Mislabeled files, not so much. Since there isn’t really a way to verify the content until it’s downloaded. You can adjust things like which file sizes are considered a certain quality, e.g. HD or 4k. But one approach could be that you define tags for release groups which you know and trust. And give those tags a higher score. This should lead to releases by those groups being preferred.

You can of course add multiple tags with positive and negative scores. For example I use tags to give a higher score to releases that have 5.1 audio, or which are non-hdr.

You can try to faff around with keywords and tags, e.g. give x264 or x265 a higher score rating, etc… As a failsafe you can configure a trashcan location and specify that all deleted files go there first and don’t get emptied for X amount of days.

I think on some distros this is disabled by default. I have forgotten how you can re-enable it.

UPS with usb allows you to configure a script to properly shutdown your server when a power outage happens and the UPS battery is about to run out.