NaibofTabr

I mean… exposed to each other, sure, but they’re all exposed to Syncthing and the public relays.

It is a fantastic idea to start your home server project on some e-waste hardware, and use it until you know specifically what features you’re lacking that you would need better hardware for.

Er, wait, are you using Syncthing for its intended purpose of syncing files across devices on your local network? And then exposing that infrastructure to the internet? Or are you isolating Syncthing instances?

Teal’c wants in

The issue is more that trying to upgrade everything at the same time is a recipe for disaster and a troubleshooting nightmare. Once you have a few interdependent services/VMs/containers/environments/hosts running, what you want to do is upgrade them separately, one at a time, then restart that service and anything that connects to it and make sure everything still works, then move on to updating the next thing.

If you do this shotgun approach for the sake of expediency, what happens is something halfway through the stack of upgrades breaks connectivity with something else, and then you have to go digging through the logs trying to figure out which piece needs a rollback.

Even more fun if two things in the same environment have conflicting dependencies, and one of them upgrades and installs its new dependency version and breaks whatever manual fix you did to get them to play nice together before, and good luck remembering what you did to fix it in that one environment six months ago.

It’s not FUD, it’s experience.

This is also a great way to just break everything you’ve set up.

I recommend getting familiar with SMART and understanding what the various attributes mean and how they affect a drive’s performance and reliability. You may need to install smartmontools to interact with SMART, though some Linux distributions include this by default.

Some problems reported by SMART are not a big deal at low rates (like Soft Read Errors) but enterprise organizations will replace them anyway. Sometimes drives are simply replaced at a certain number of Power-On Hours, regardless of condition. Some problems are survivable if they’re static, like Uncorrectable Sector Count - every drive has some overhead of extra sectors for internal redundancy, so one bad sector isn’t a big deal , but if the number is increasing over time then you have a problem and should replace the drive immediately.

Also keep in mind, hard drives are consumables. Mirroring and failovers are a must if your data is important. New drives fail too. There’s nothing wrong with buying used if you’re comfortable with drive’s condition.