My current setup is a NAS running on an old Acer Aspire laptop with an Intel core i5-6500u and 8GB RAM (and an Nvidia 920m but I'm pretty sure its not using that as I'm running headless Ubuntu server and haven't installed the Nvidia drivers) with a 3.5" HDD plugged in via USB.
The main things I like about this setup are that its cheap (I already own it), fairly low power, and pretty quiet. I guess the built in UPS is a bonus as well!
The main reason I want to upgrade is so I can easily add more drives, either for redundancy or just more storage. The USB can also be a bit janky, sometimes after first powering on it fails to read the drive and I have to power off the hard drive caddy for about a minute, this does seem to be an issue with the devices itself though as I've had it do it with multiple drives in multiple PC's. It would also be nice to get the laptop back even though I don't use it much.
Currently its just acting as a NAS, but I would definitely like to set up Jellyfin as well. I'm potentially interested in hosting my own private Lemmy or Matrix instance, however since that would involve exposing my network to the internet I'd need to be 100% sure I could set it up securely so I may not bother. I might also set up a Minecraft server in the future but I don't have any plans to do that soon.
With those use cases in mind I figured low power draw is probably more important than loads of computing power. I'm really tempted by the ASRock N100M with either 8 or 16GB RAM, its slightly more powerful than what I've got now while being based on much newer architecture with a lower power draw. I think it would also allow for hardware transcoding in Jellyfin that isn't supported by my current CPU? Also fanless seems like a bonus. I'd probably pair that with the Fractal Design Node 804 which would come to around £250 total plus whatever I spend on a PSU. That would let me start off with 2 drives (which I already own) and easily add more with a PCIe expansion card later, however I'm not sure what power supply would go with this. It wouldn't need much power but there doesn't seem to be many options below 500W. Also is it worth going for a higher power rating with an 80 plus gold rating for more efficiency and potentially less fan noise? I did look at PicoPSU as a low wattage alternative but by the time you buy a DC power supply for it they seem to be not far off the price of a proper PSU for something thats a lot less capable, probably less efficient and looks very Janky. The other option is to go for the N100DC-ITX instead of the N100M as it used DC power instead of needing an ATX PSU, however that would limit how many drives I can add in the future as I'd need to find a way of powering them.
I've also looked at single board computers as another low power alternative. I was tempted by the Zimaboard or Zima Blade but the CPU on those seems outdated and under powered (it would be a step down from what I already have) and that really would limit me to 2 drives maximum. I also looked at the Odroid H3/H3+ but they seem to cost just as much if not more than the N100 options and tbh I think the cases are quite ugly. I'd rather stick with x86 than ARM unless someone can convince me otherwise!
With what I've said above do you think its worth upgrading to any of those options (or any other suggestions) or should I just stick with what I've got until it dies? Power supply suggestions would also be appreciated!
I undervolted my CPU about a year ago and haven't had any issues with it till now. I've been dual booting Linux recently and noticed whenever I was in Linux it would crash/reboot after a couple of hours or less of using it. I noticed the behavior was similar to when I set the voltages too low when initially setting up the undervolt so I disabled it and haven't had any crashed since. Any idea why it would be stable on Windows but not Linux? I tried a couple of different distros as well. I'll probably just raise the voltage until I get it stable again but I'm interested to know what could cause this! If its relevant my CPU is a Ryzen 7 3800x
I use DisplayPort audio as my main output, and it seems there is a slight delay between the sink being started and me actually hearing anything (the audio isn't delayed I just miss the start). I've managed to mostly fix it by disabling suspend on idle, so now once I've played some audio once its fine.
However when I reboot I then miss the first bit of audio again. I have no idea what I need to do to fix this. If I try to manually enable the sink with with pacmd suspend 0 I still get the same issue. The only potential fix I can think of is to set a KDE startup command for pacmd play-file and point it to a very short silent audio file. Does anyone have any better ideas?
Edit: I forgot to mention, when suspend on idle is enabled there is an audible pop every time the audio starts and suspends. With suspend on idle disabled I still hear this pop on login (and the first time audio is played) which suggests something is happening when I log in
Edit 2: Apparently it still does it every time the audio stream switches to a different app, however if I start the second one playing before I pause the first it starts straight away
Apparently os-prober is a security risk but tbh I don't really understand the issue. I've read its something to do with mounting all partitions as root, but you have to run grub-mkconfig as root anyway so I don't see how that could be used to gain root privileges? Does it not unmount them afterwards? And could you avoid the risk by just disabling it again after you've generated your grub.cfg?
The other option seems to be manually adding a Windows entry to /etc/grub.d/40_custom so I assume thats the recommended way to dual boot?
I'm a complete noob when it comes to bash, I extracted some timestamps from an xml file using xmlstarlet however its formatted as a space separated string rather than an array. I need them as an array so that I can use them in a for loop. As far as I can tell you can't do that with xmlstarlet so I need to just convert the string.
I found this thread which says I can use IFS=' ' read -a arr <<< "$line" which works for a basic string but not the one I'm trying to use it with:
2023-06-19T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-18T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-17T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-16T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-15T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-14T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-13T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-10T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-03T00:00:00+01:00 2023-05-31T00:00:00+01:00 2023-05-27T00:00:00+01:00
If I use the command on this string it only puts the first part in the array so I get 2023-06-19T00:00:00+01:00
I also tried arr=( $line ) which is also suggested in the thread but that does the same thing. Is there another way I can try to convert this, or a way to export from xmlstarlet straight to an array?
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