I’ve done some very dodgy things with VGA cables in an effort to route the cables through narrow bulkheads. For normal computer-to-monitor-lengths this is probably fine.

I haven’t noticed much signal degradation below 4m-ish.

At 12m, you better solder properly and wrap some extra shielding around your splice.

Source: I’ve ran plenty of VGA cables between bridge computers and a deck monitor on ships.

Normally it doesn’t matter. The only restrictions is in terms of who can buy domains of that country to begin with (some countries have restrictions on that), and what sort of content is allowed in such domains. Other than that, it’s OK.

I’d tell you a joke about brown dwarves, but it’s kinda dark…

I’d say that a good starting point would be the smallest setup that would serve a useful purpose. This is usually some sort of network storage, and it sounds this might be a good starting point for you as well. And then you can add on and refine your setup however you see fit, provided your hardware is up to it.

Speaking of hardware, while it’s certainly possible to go all out with a rack-mounted purpose built 19" 4U server full of disks, the truth is that “any” machine will do. Servers generally don’t require much (depending on use case, of course), and you can get away with a 2nd hand regular desktop machine. The only caveat here is that for your (percieved) use cases, you might want the ability to add a bunch of disks, so for now, just go for a simple setup with as many disk as you see fit, and then you can expand with a JBOD cabinet later.

Tying this storage together depends on your tastes, but it generally comes down to to schools of thought, both of which are valid:

• Hardware RAID. I think I’m one of the few fans of this, as it does offer some advantages over software RAID. I suspect that the ones who are against hardware RAID and call it unreliable have not been using proper RAID controllers. Proper RAID controllers with write cache are expensive, though.
• Software RAID. As above, except it’s done via software instead (duh), hence the name. There are many ways to approach this, but personally I like ZFS - Set up multiple disks as a storage pool, and add more drives as needed. This works really well with JBOD cabinets. The downside to ZFS is that it can be quite hungry when it comes to RAM. Either way, keep in mind that RAID, software or hardware, is not a backup.

Source: Hardware RAID at work, software RAID at home.

Now that we’ve got storage addressed, let’s look at specific services. The most basic use case is something like an NFS/SMB share that you can mount remotely. This allows you to archive a lot of the stuff you don’t need live. Just keep in mind, an archive is not a backup!

And just to be clear: An archive is mainly a manner of offloading chunks of data you don’t need accessible 100% of the time. For example older/completed projects, etc. An archive is well suited for storing on a large NAS, as you’ll still have access to it if needed, but it’s not something you need to spend disk space on on your daily driver. But an archive is not a backup, I cannot state this enough!

So, backups… well, this depends on how valuable your data is. A rule of thumb in a perfect world involves three copies: One online, one offline, and one offsite. This should keep your data safe in any reasonable contingency scenarious. Which of these you implement, and how, is entirely up to you. It all comes down to a cost/benefit equation. Sometimes keeping the rule of thumb active is simply not viable, if you have data in the petabytes. Ask me how I know.

But, to circle back on your immediate need, it sounds like you can start with something simple. Your storage requirement is pretty small, and adding some sort of hosting on top of that is pretty trivial. So I’d say that, as a starting point, any PC will do - just add a couple of harddrives to make sure you have enough for the forseeable future.

Back in the day I used Nagios to get an overview of large systems, and it made it very obvious if something wasn’t working and where. But that was 20 years ago, I’m sure there are more modern approaches.

Come to think of it, at work we have grafana running, but I’m not sure exactly what scope it’s operating under.

Not that strange. Different users may belong to different groups which may have different authentication backends. The associated authentication method is brought up once a username has been provided.

Barring any hardware issues or external factors, will it run for 10000 years? Any logs not properly rotated? And other outputs accumulating and eventually filling up a filesystem?

My jobs over the years have typically gone like this:
1st year: learn the job
2nd year: get good at it
3rd year: it’s not exciting anymore, and some annoying parts are showing
4th year: Get fed up, quit

Sounds more like what you need is a combination of a VPN and RDP. Have your machines connect to somewhere via whichever VPN protocol you prefer, and then you can access them via whichever protocol you prefer.

I’m old and crusty, so I mostly use openvpn, but wireguard will probably do as well.

Removed by mod

Looks like an URL matcher of some sorts, not limited to HTTP. Kudos for handling parentheses as valid URL characters.

I’ll image and share my swap partition, if anyone’s interested

Debian on homeservers, centos on work servers, and mint on desktops

In this day and age, shouldn’t Huntarr be replaced by Gatherarr? You know, sustainability and all…

[Obligatory comment about frog fursuits goes here]

A jumpbox. Set up a VPS somewhere, have some remote hands at home set up a VPN client to connect to the VPS, and then you connect to the VPS as well.

Alternatively, is it possible that your ISP can remote config your router and set up the port forwarding again for you?

How do we know it wasn’t the other way around?

You know what’s never happened? Someone coming home way too late after too much to drink, stumbling into the kitchen going “I could really go for an apple right now!”

STORY TIME!

Once upon a time, I worked an offshore rotation. So while I was home, I didn’t have much better to do than to hang out with my friend and his coworkers. They all worked for the local branch of a huge international corporation that shall remain anonymous, so I will only refer to the corporation by their initials: IBM.

This local branch dealt with banking systems, handling large clients in Europe, ensuring that their systems ran the way they should. And to make sure said banks could have their stuff sorted when a problem arose, there was always someone on call.

Well, it sucks being the guy on call when the one who’s the perfect guy to fix it is off, and in the spirit of solidarity, they did the only thing reasonable: Went to a local pub, and placed the on-call phone on the table, so if it rang, the expertise to get it sorted quickly was present.

I usually joined them, and more than once did I go for a piss, passing someone with their phone on their shoulder with a laptop in a bathroom sink, trying to sort out banking issues after having had waaay too many drinks.

When I come home from a humid bar crawl, I always crave greasy food and a messy kernel upgrade