But of course, such based individuals will never be billionaires. Specifically because their basedness precludes them from being psychopathic enough to commit the kind of cutthroat, violent exploitation of tens of thousands of workers’ labor inherently necessary to amass such wealth.

2.5 is still really new in the networking space and nobody has hit economies of scale yet. I very much also want to build out my home LAN to be entirely 2.5g compatible since 1g is limiting for my NAS use case (video storage), 10g is overkill and not supported by my client devices, and I only need 16/24 ports. but good God the hardware just isn’t reasonable yet.

You pretty much have to bite the bullet if you really want 2.5 right now. What might honestly be worthwhile is finding a used enterprise 1g switch with the number of ports you need, and will still be “enough”, as those can be had for only a couple hundred dollars. Sit on that for 2-3 years until the 2.5g and 5g hardware market starts to fill out and you can decide how badly you need 2.5g then

…I thought you just said you’re running OwnCloud?

FYI, read this.

I second RustDesk, I’ve started using it a lot lately and it works quite well even across the internet and NAT. Works best if you have your own server that you can use as a relay rather than direct connection or using RustDesk’s own limited public servers, but even without it, it gets the job done.

That’s the other option, yeah. If you already have a valid OEM key tied to your hardware though I can understand people not wanting to fuck with it.

I’ve switched almost exclusively to using RustDesk these days for anything outside of my LAN, and have had zero problems with it running on barebones machines, zero monitor connected. It’s open source!

If you’re wanting to use the windows built in RDP, there apparently is a DLL wrapper that enables the RDP server on Home installations. See github. I haven’t had to use it though because my machines are all, well, “legal” copies of 10 or 11 pro, so i cant speak to whether it works or not.

“Less” is still not “gone” unfortunately. You do still have to be very vigilant because federation from unknown instances intentionally spreading that stuff can and will end up getting garbage on to your server’s hard drive that you might not even notice.

Let’s also add

• you need to have 24/7 moderation capabilities to filter all the child porn that trolls will immediately try to spread onto your instance

yeah, it exposes PCIe, i forgot about that. but still a single lane and requiring an additional adapter card and ribbon cable that complicates packaging a bit and adds cost. I dunno, I’m sour on Pi these days since they’ve spent years screwing over consumers in favor of business customers. I’ve chosen not to buy their stuff despite the better software support.

Pi’s have kinda garbage IO. You’re limited to USB only which is a shared bus (so if you’re saturating one hard drive, the other drives won’t be able to do shit and I dislike it) you’re also required to boot from SD card on a Pi, and OS level writes tend to kill SD cards frequently.

The Orange Pi 5 that I have technically has a PCIe NVME M.2 slot that runs at PCIe 2.0x2 iirc. I’ve not done it with mine yet, so I can’t guarantee compatibility, but that can theoretically be split using a m.2 to SATA controller adapter like that

But at that point and cost the Rockpro64 look like a legitimate option, since PCIe to SATA adapters using a 4x slot exist all over the damn place.

Honest opinion though: look for used office PC sales or government/school district clearing sales. I’ve gotten a stack of older 2nd/3rd gen intel Core machines at $50 a pop that are plenty fast for light home server use and have full fat motherboards for connecting up a bunch of SATA devices. They’re a little more power hungry- expect 50W or more at idle when you have drives spinning - but they simplify setup a lot, they package nicely since you can put the drives inside, and the power supply is built in.

Is there trim in the crease or it is a sharp corner? If there is trim and its not painted clean over, you can cheat and use paperclips. Fold the long leg out straight, so its horizontal, and the short U curl down at a 90, so it forms a hook. If you stick the horizontal wire in behind the trim itll usually wedge in without damaging the trim or paint visibly and hold enough for a cat5e.

If no trim, the sticky hangars are probably the best. Be careful not to buy cheap ones that might fall down, leave residue, or stick too hard and rip the paint off when you go to remove it.

The ARM cpu will still beat out an i3/i5 in idle and load power consumption, and the mini PC also does not have GPIO for people who care about that kind of stuff.

There’s no such thing as overkill, only extra overhead to do more things with. Hell, if you found yourself with a ton of excess resources and good cooling, you could run a distributed computing project like BOINC on some of the spare cores and help out some scientists.

You wouldn’t see much of a bump in CPU performance, 6cores to 8 cores with a 200mhz clock speed improvement isn’t ground breaking.

Going to 8gb of memory will give caching benefits.

But… That’s all well and good. However. What I found the most beneficial on a OPi 5, and the entire reason I bought it over other boards, is the onboard NVME m.2 slot. Yes, the orange pi 5 can support 2230 and 2242 M.2 NVME drives at PCIe3.0x1 speeds, and it makes a WORLD of difference in performance. Like you would not even believe how fast compiling and installing software becomes when it’s not bottlenecked by the ~500 iops an SD card can struggle through. SD cards are ungodly slow, and OS level writes tend to kill them every few months (they’re not designed to handle that kind of work). Even the cheapest aliexpress M.2 drives, which I bought a 512gb KingSpec one for like $16, blow SD cards out of the water, and will last for YEARS with a typical pi’s workload compared to the few-months of an SD card. Plus they’re big enough to even do a bit of file hosting on.

The original Pi B had a single core 700mhz ARMv6 processor and 512mb of memory. It’s fine for embedded projects using GPIO or a mini LCD screen, but that’s about it. You’d be lucky to even decode 720p video on it as a streaming box.

It might work neat as a monitoring device to keep tabs on the rest of your homelab machines and display a status output or something.

As far as security goes, 1 open port and 1000 open ports contain basically the same level of risk exposure to the internet- a hole will always be a hole. If you need to open a few more for rustdesk, just do it, and be diligent about your firewall rules.

I’ve used VNC inside my LAN before with decent results, and it doesn’t break graphics drivers like windows RDP does. However, not FOSS.

2GB of memory is fine for openWRT. Routing is surprisingly light tbh, consider that most all home/SOHO routers run integrated SoC’s with <256MB of memory.

routing speed is more dependent on CPU +cache speed

i’d eat my boot if a residential ISP let you run your own SFP fiber module. they have to pretty tighttly control those things to keep signal levels right and have wavelengths in the right spots. plus they’ll need to upstream reconfigure it somewhat frequently as the local network changes and if it’s not their hardware, they’ll get mad.