Professional software engineer, musician, gamer, stoic, democratic socialist

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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    • Has a simple backup and migration workflow. I recently had to backup and migrate a MediaWiki database. It was pretty smooth but not as simple as it could be. If your data model is spread across RDBMS and file, you need to provide a CLI tool that does the export/import.

    • Easy to run as a systemd service. This is the main criteria for whether it will be easy to create a NixOS module.

    • Has health endpoints for monitoring.

    • Has an admin web UI that surfaces important configuration info.

    • If there are external service dependencies like postgres or redis, then there needs to be a wealth of documentation on how those integrations work. Provide infrastructure as code examples! IME systemd and NixOS modules are very capable of deploying these kinds of distributed systems.











  • Retro ROMs are usually small. Videos can get quite large though, on the order of ~100GB per movie if you are storing 4K Blurays.

    I personally bought a couple > 20TB HDDs off of serverpartdeals.com and installed them in my gaming PC so now it also functions as a small NAS. Because it’s only on when I’m using the PC, the electric bill is not too bad. But it’s worth doing the math to see what your average kW/hour usage is. Wattage monitors are pretty cheap.

    If you specifically want a lower-power NAS in a separate machine, this will require a bit more research, and they can get pricey. I highly recommend using ZFS though.

    If you’re OK using a cheap, low-power mini PC as a home server and/or gateway, I can recommend the BeeLink EQ12. Mine is currently running 24/7 attached to a Hasivo 2.5Gb switch with PoE powering my WiFi AP.

    There are also options for connecting large external HDDs to a mini PC, but you would be compromising throughout via some SATA adapter.