I haven’t used one in like 8 years, IIRC the X2 or X3 had an 8 core Exynos, they’ve obviously changed it since then.

Thank you, you may proceed!

Step 1: enable Remote Desktop in Windows

Step 2: download a Remote Desktop app from app store

Step 3: use the app to login to the Windows box

Step 4: profit

I’m here to collect your cat tax.

Also, for us non-Windows folks, just set up a VNC server and do the same thing.

The Shield is great for playing media, but it’s definitely not under €100 (at least the last time I checked, I’m also American). Also changing our the launcher doesn’t stop all the “phoning home” that everything does, DNS blocking will help with that though. Also, the hardware isn’t as great as it used to be.

The Odroids are little beasts, I had the X2 (?) for like 2 years, and then I decided to hook it up to my parents network as a VPN server… and when I came back a few months later it was dead 😕

They use Samsung Exynos CPUs IIRC instead of the Broadcom chips that the Pis use, so some software support is lacking, but it’s generally really good since most ARM distros work fine on them.

I hear ya, the answer to “why?” is usually “because I can” 😂

About 8 months ago I had 20x HDDs and 8x NVME drives in my server, totaling 187 TB across three ZFS pools. I could write to the largest pool (2 RAIDZ1 striped vdevs, 6 drives wide) at 250 MB/sec and read from it at over a GB/sec and that was from spinning rust with NVME “special devices”.

What was I doing with all of this? Pirating movies and TV shows and running a media server for my friends and family.

You’ve got like a whole DCs worth of stuff. I’ve downscaled the hardware in my server a lot, but it’s still just a single Threadripper 2970wx with 128 GB RAM and 50 TB of ZFS storage and 50 TB of cloud based object storage in a midtower case. I have like 20 containers running, one is a Caddy webserver which acts as a reverse proxy for all the others.

I love to do things to excess as much as the next geek, but I could never find a reason to run as much as you have.

Docker is still secure, it’s just less secure than Virtualization. It’s like a standard door knob lock (the twist/push button kind) vs a deadbolt. Both will keep 90% of bad-actors out but those who really want to get in can based on how high the security is.

VMs have a ton of overhead compared to Docker. VMs replicate everything in the computer while Docker just uses the host for everything, except it sandboxes the apps.

In theory, VMs are far more secure since they’re almost entirely isolated from the host system (assuming you don’t have any of the host’s filesystems attached), they are also OS agnostic whereas Docker is limited to the OS it runs on.

It makes deployments a lot easier once you have the groundwork laid (writing your compose files). If you ever need to nuke the OS reinstalling and configuring 20+ apps can only take a few minutes (assuming you still have the config data, which should live outside of the container).

For example, setting up my mediaserver, webserver, SQL server, and usenet suit of apps can take a few hours to do natively. Using Docker Compose it takes one command and about 5-10 minutes. Granted, I had to spend a few hours writing the compose files and testing everything, along with storing the config data, but just simply backing up the compose files with git means I can pull everything down quickly. Even if I don’t have the config files anymore it probably only takes like an hour or less to configure everything.

For a lot of smaller things I feel that Docker is overkill, or simply not feasible (package management, utilities like screenfetch, text editors, etc…) but for larger apps it definitely makes it easier once you wrap your head around containerization.

For example, I switched full-time to Jellyfin from Plex and was attempting to use caddy-docker-proxy to forward the host network that Jellyfin uses to the Caddy server, but I couldn’t get it to work automatically (explicitly defining the reverse proxy in the Caddyfile works without issue). I thought it would be easier to just install it natively, but since I hadn’t installed it that way in a few years I forgot that it pulls in like 30-40 dependencies since it’s written in .Net (or would that be C#?) and took a good few minutes to install. I said screw that and removed all the deps and went back to using the container and just stuck with the normal version of Caddy which works fine.

It took me a while to convert to Docker, I was used to installing packages for all my Usenet and media apps, along with my webserver. I tried Docker here and there but always had a random issue pop up where one container would lose contact with the other, even though they were in the same subnet. Since most containers only contain the bare minimum, it was hard to troubleshoot connectivity issues. Frustrated, I would just go back to native apps.

About a year or so ago, I finally sat down and messed around with it a lot, and then wrote a compose file for everything. I’ve been gradually expanding upon it and it’s awesome to have my full stack setup with like 20 containers and their configs, along with an SSL secured reverse proxy in like 5-10 minutes! I have since broken out the compose file into multiple smaller files and wrote a shell script to set up the necessary stuff and then loop through all the compose files, so now all it takes is the execution of one command instead of a few hours of manual configuration!

That’s a shame.

Realtek NICs just never seem to work well with any Unix-like variants. I’ve never had good luck with them in Linux, which has far better/wider hardware support than FreeBSD does.

Happy to help! This is a continual learning experience! 😉 Muximux is another “homepage” option, I forgot about that, I used to use that before I switched to Organizr.

Yep! I’ve gotten both of my 16i’s for about $100 or so from eBay.

No problem! 10g sounds great in theory and then you realize that 99% of your connected devices are limited to 1g and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Fuck UnRAID and paying to use Debian with a webGUI slapped on top of it. Also they lock you into their platform once you start using their product. Their unRAID form of redundancy is proprietary, so you can’t just slap the same drives into another server and have them work.

10g is of course only useful when all your devices have 10g ports. I have 2x 10g NICs in my server and a TP-Link switch that has 8x 1g ports and 2x 10g ports, the only time I would use 10g is between my server and my desktop, and that of course cost me like $100 just for the 10g NIC for my desktop. 10g isn’t really that useful in a home network since most things are limited to 1g. I still can’t believe that my $2700 flat screen from 2017 only has a 10/100 port on it…