Back in college, we had this huge LAN spanning hundreds of computers, and we had a central instance of a search engine that crawled all the Samba and FTP shares, so anyone could just look up whatever media or software they were looking for, and if the particular computer was online at the time (people do turn off their PCs sometimes, go figure :) ), download it.
Of course, I'm not sure if having unprotected SMB/FTP shares is something fitting into your idea of a local intranet, but it's an option. The guys maintaining the crawler even put the code online, and it should still mostly work: https://github.com/fslts/lase
I've used KeePass for ages but I'm open to change. Anyone have any good comparison of these, esp personal experience? My biggest issue with KP is syncing between computers and avoiding conflicts.
I had almost no conflicts in years with paired syncthing, just being tidy of autoclosing, and I'm the sole user of that db on my devices. Anyway, as for a comparison.. I believe vaultwarden has TOTP support, and I'm yet to find a plugin for keepas that allows me to add such functionality but surely there is something... Perhaps anyone using such plugin can share?
I do use syncthing to sync between clients but if I'm not diligent about syncing before saving and right afterwards I will get missing entries. I wish KeePass had a one-way sync option (e.g. pull changes from another DB but don't push). Then I could say each client has their own copy and syncthing would never find conflicts.
Ah, I'm always saving. Same as with any text I edit on any app. Anyway, the 1-way sync can be controlled, but on side of syncthing settings for the whole folder.
Yeah. Bitwarden developed a new android client written by Kotlin to replace old C# client. This new client is in beta testing currently. The old client supports both PascalCase and camelCase but the new client only supports camelCase. And Vaultwarden use PascalCase now, so it's incompatible with new Android client.
I dunno what everyone else is using pis for but for me it's not media centers or servers. The pi has a full gpio header with i2c and spi. I can hook up LCD screens, sensors, servos, etc without much additional components. It's like an Arduino except I get a real file system, network stack, multicore performance.
It's more than just a single board computer it feels like an ultra microcontroller.
I feel like this whole "micro PCs are better than raspis" is coming from the group of people who never really used pis for what they were intended? I don't know. Maybe I'm out to lunch here, I'm not trying to defend the pi because it is definitely a really bad choice for a lot of things but honestly despite all the bad blood they've accrued there still isn't an sbc that can really match it's utility and community support at least that I've seen.
If you want to lab around on the cheap then sure get a mini PC, if you need small form factor to do a sane standalone task get a pi. If you're trying to actually get off the ground in self hosted hardware, build a pc (or a server rig) and don't buy rpi or mini PC: that's not in the article, but it's free advice.
No shit. I have five Lenovo Tiny M720q with the i5-9500t and 32 gigs of RAM each in a XCP-NG cluster, another one as standalone Plex server (QuickSync kept on failing under XCP) plus an old Shuttle SFF with an old (2015, I think) Atom acting as standalone.
Power consumption is pretty much minimal, with NVMEs I don't have to worry about slow data rates, nor sudden disk failures.
Most of all, all of these were cheap and easy to find. My two 8 bays Synology cost me way more, without even taking the disks in consideration.
You would go for a Raspberry Pi when you need something it was invented for.
Putting a computer on your motorcycle or robot or solar powered RV. Super small space or low-low power availability things, or direct GPIO control.
A MiniMicro will run laps around a Pi for general compute, but you can’t run it off a cell phone battery pack. People only related Pis to general compute because of the push to sell them as affordable school computers, not because they were awesome at it, because they were cheap and just barely enough.
I am looking at those kind of devices for a few weeks now because I need to replace my DD-WRT Router with something more powerful and reliable.
I am aiming for those Mini PCs / Appliances with 2+ 2.5GbE network ports and went through dozens of "manufacturers" (many are just putting their label on it) and read hundreds of Forum posts, watched videos etc.
To me it comes down, that they do not differ that much and on my journey so far, these are the things I discovered:
Many manufacturers still implement previous CPU generations. This one has a recent N100, so that´s good. The newer gens are usually more power efficient and produce less heat, so you have higher chances to run them fanless without burning your house down.
If you want 2.5GbE, it is almost always Intel i225 for the older models and i226-V for the newer ones. And those seem to have issues with ASPM, which you need to turn off, depending how you plan to use them. And this adds a few extra Watts.
With many "nameless" China boxes that are actually tested by people in Forums / Videos etc. it happens often, that they have to mod them. They either add fans to them because they get unreasonably hot, or the internals are sloppy built, so that hot components do not even touch the case properly to transmit the head. So be prepared to mod them if you get one you did not found a thorough review yet.
Some build their Boxes still with DDR-4 memory, although they are on a new platform that would support DDR-5. Sometimes you see this in the product description, sometimes you see it when you bought it and opened the box.
For many offers I have seen there is no information about the BIOS/EFI and what you can do there. I have seen / read tests, where you could barely change anything in the BIOS/EFI and are stuck with what the manufacturer configured for you.
With the "nameless" boxes, the biggest issue I have is, that they do not even have proper descriptions of the built in components on their product page. The place where they advertise their product. If this information is not even there, I suspect long-time support and build quality is not better either.
Sometimes the RAM is fixed and you can not change it, but with the sloppy product pages, you sometimes can not see this or it is not that obvious, so pay attention to that if you plan to use it for a long time and might want to upgrade the RAM.
Sometimes you find the exact same hardware just relabeled. I looked at the Thomas Krenn LESv4 for example and found out that it is from Iwill. This is one example where I thought I get it from a German manufacturer and pay a bit extra to support them, but it's just a relabel from a Chinese company. That's not bad of course, just a heads up if you insist on buying something that is not coming from China... which is near impossible anyway in my opinion, because what kind of Electronics is not from there nowadays ;-)
I am following Hardkernel for a while and their new H4 Series seems to tick all the boxes for me at the moment... apart from one: The Case! But they announced a "GC-Style" Case that is injection molded and will post pictures in 2 weeks, so I will wait to see how it looks and how it is built. I love how they nerd out on their Product pages. There is hardly anything you can not find there. They use current technology and offer it for a very fair price. They also seem to pay attention that you have plenty of room to tinker with the settings in their BIOS/EFI and they seem to put quite some though into how they build their stuff, so it also consumes the least amount of energy (which should mean less heat) than others. They even have the guts to host their own Forum, which is a big thing nowadays when you have to fear one Shitstorm after another if you do something that one person does not like. Their H4+ with the Netboard (adds 4 more NICs) and a SSD in a cozy case would be sweet, so I hope the new case they will release soon fits my needs.
That's my 2 cents for today. Sorry for the long post, but since this is a topic I am doing research for myself to get me a good, fast, low energy, low heat hardware for a new OPNsense Firewall :-)
Seems like this could be pretty useful. Probably overkill for my needs, but it's nice that there are affordable fanless computers with this much power for 6W, now. We've come a long way from the Raspberry Pi B I started with!
They claim made in califoria anyway. they don't have any n100 though just slower last generation hardware. Maybe good enough, I'm looking for a jellyfin server now though.
I think nowadays you will hardly find Hardware in that area that is not made in China, no matter where the company sits that sells it. There are a few, sure, but hardly in that price range, unfortunately.
One thing oft overlooked is that alot of manufacturing of computer components is essentially illegal in other countries. Texas Instruments stopped producing in Texas because of Cancer claims/lawsuits and regulatory changes.
I have a Tplink Archer C7, which works great with OpenWRT. I also have a gl-inet device, which is fine, but WiFi reception is better with the C7.
If you end up buying a gl-inet device, first check if you can flash a recent mainline OpenWRT image on them. The modified OpenWRT they come with out of the box is often based on an outdated version.
I'm prepared to receive intimidation letters at my door! Thankfully I live in a country (Chile. Can't really hide it, since you can geolocate my server and see that indeed it's hosted there) where it wouldn't be very much valuable for [m3t4] to sue me, since they haven't signed with a law firm here from what I can see. It would be much easier for them to just try and keep their platform closed off, which would mean they kill the open aspect of the platform. It would also be a win for the Fediverse, who has not received it well. Heck, I don't like it as well.
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