@Tinnitus@lemmy.world, this is the answer.

The important part is that its giving clean power to your hardware, and it only needs to last long enough to shut down nicely. Batteries in these units are usually just car or wheelchair batteries, so you can get them cheaper just as a regular battery too.

You can also grab an older UPS with a crapped out battery for cheap and swap the battery. Last time I did that I got the UPS for $10 (local pickup) and put a new battery in for $20 from Lowes. Battery is still solid, its been about 5 years for that one.

Worth taking a look at the battery - especially an old one on a repurposed device - before considering it safe. Spicy pillows happen.

US power sucks plenty!

Texas is an extreme example, but outages happen everywhere. It was only a bit over 10 years ago when Sandy basically hit half the US and took power out in the tristate area for weeks. With climate change making things worse…

But even when things are running well, not including the random downed line or busted transformers, its still better to give your hardware clean power and avoid the small spikes.

If I can, I buy direct downloads.

If I can’t do that, I’ll buy the CD (as long as its direct or a small label).

If I can’t, or its one of the big labels, I’ll find it elsewhere. I’d rather buy merch to support the artist directly than buy anything that goes through the big labels.

Studio monitors are excellent choices, but expensive. I’ve used genelecs for pretty much every audio workstation I’ve ever done, I’m a huge fan, but you’re also talking $800 and up.

You can sometimes find a good deal on some used studio monitors, which to me is the way to go. A long ways back I decommissioned some genelecs for a studio (surprise surprise, the new studio had newer versions of the same model), and I’ve been using them since at home. Roughly 15 years now.

Dockge would be more appropriate for that.

Watchtower has different functionality, mainly keeping them up to date with images.

You want Jenkins, GH Actions, or even ansible.

Let’s see…

My servers (tiny/mini/micros) in total are about… 600W or so. Two NASs, about 15-20W a piece.

I spend a out $150/mo in electricity, but my hot water/HVAC/etc are the big power draw. I’d say about $40-50/mo is what I’m spending on powering the servers in my office.

Definitely puts off some heat, but that’s partially because it’s all in one rack, and I’ve got a bunch of other work hardware in there. It’s about 2 degrees warmer in my office than the rest of my home, but I also have air cycling all the time since it’s a single unit HVAC and I need to keep the air moving to keep it all the right temp in the other rooms anyway (AC will come on more often otherwise, even without my rack).

Bigger number sounds better for the ISP.

For nginx - https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager/blob/develop/docker/rootfs/etc/nginx/conf.d/include/block-exploits.conf

That’s what is enabled when you check that box.

So a few comments…

• I’m not a fan of Ubuntu server, in part because their distribution of docker through snap can conflict with snap from the docker repo. My preference here is either Debian or Proxmox (debian + great virtualization setup). Mint is good, though I like LMDE (Debian edition) more, in part because I prefer Debian in general.
• You may want to check out dockge. You do need to have docker running for it, but it’s a simple setup, and it has a clean interface for docker compose. Good for getting used to it imo.
• grub has no part in docker, so it’s something else hanging.
• What are the exact errors when you enter “docker-compose up”?
• what is in your docker-compose for each of these?

I’d second this, if only because it’s super easy to run things on and OP explicitly said they don’t want to tinker with it. There is a limited list, imo, of buy and forget.

That’s said, I personally think a cheap little 4th gen or higher Intel based tiny/mini/micro would do a way better job on the services side, and just store on the NAS.

For lots of services that require little CPU and ram, I use tiny/mini/micro PCs, bought used. I get them for anywhere from $100-$400, and usually all I do is drop in an SSD. That includes Linux VMs when I’m testing distros or deployment on a distro, since 32gb ram on the host is more than enough to leave 4-8gb ram to the VM.

For some heavier applications, I also have a 4RU case stacked with drives, which I use as a third NAS (VM with drives passed through), large DBs, etc. Its just a 1700x with 64GB ram, and that’s plenty.

For most things (DNS, a few web servers, git, grafana, Prometheus, rev proxies, Jenkins, personal fdroid repo, homepage, etc) I just use the tiny/mini/micro’s. Imo, you can’t go wrong with those for your services, and a big case with spare parts and lots of drives for your NAS. Especially at the price you mentioned. Just remember you can separate your services easily, so don’t focus on getting everything in one spot, you can make your requirements (and cost) go up quickly.

Agreed, I prefer trunk with native to the vlan for services, each container that the reverse proxy will hit in its own vlan (or multiples for differing sets of services, but I can be excessive).

I’d block any traffic initiated from that vlan to all others, and I’d also only allow the specific ports needed for the services. Then fully open initiated from the general internal vlan.

I say “no”, but for your case and for your mom, I’d agree with what others have said, a standalone library.

BUT! Only the Christian movies. Put them in a library called “The Christerion Collection”.

I’ve got a small fleet of tmm’s, so HA is just practical for me, but yeah that works to with a single machine. Especially if you were sharing desktop use on it.

Proxmox is a server OS based on Debian which is oriented on running virtual machines and Linux containers.

The physical server runs proxmox. The services can all be individual containers (LXC’s).

Adding to the number of servers (and migrating containers later) is a benefit of Proxmox, since you can buy another PC to be a server later, and easily expand as you go.

Proxmox.

Each service becomes an LXC. Docker containers can be migrated to LXC, or be contained within an LXC dedicated to docker.

Running out of processing power? Add another server, add to a cluster, and migrate services (LXC or VM) over.

Having run Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, slack, even Oracle Linux - Proxmox is what I run for myself (and some clients).

Wasn’t my rack, thankfully, so it was someone else’s problem.

But anyway even internal you’re just leaning on when the thumb drive will fail vs an SSD and the onboard controller. So give me that SSD and HA any day of the week, but that’s my comfort level. I even do it at home with my proxmox clusters.

So just… Waiting for failure then? ;)

As for me, give me an HA cluster and I don’t care if I need to reinstall. I don’t need to worry about an additional point of failure (USB drive) that is almost always going to fail before any of the other hardware.

It’s part of why absolutely nothing important ever runs on a raspberry Pi for me though, SD cards are no better.

Now as for my favorite example of why I don’t do it in production? Someone doing a bit of minor maintenance in the rack, accidentally pressed against a box running esxi off USB (on a gen 6 HP for rough timeline), broke the drive.

The backup? Well, it had corrupted, and wouldn’t boot.

Nope.

Just waiting for failure in my experience.