Mint is a good recommendation. I’ve used it for most of a decade because I just want my system to work.

Some of the trust comes from eyes on the project thanks to it being open source. This thing got discovered, after all. Not right away, sure, but before it spread everywhere. Same question of trust applies to commercial software too.

Ideally, PR reviews help with this but smaller projects esp with few contributors may not do much of that. I doubt anyone has spent time understanding the software supply chain (SSC) attack surface of their product but that seems like a good next step. Someone needs to write a tool that scans the SSC repos and flags certain measures like the # of maintainers.

PS: I have the worst allergies I’ve had in ages today and my brain is in a histamine fog so maybe I shouldn’t be trying to think about this stuff right now lol cough uuugh blows nose

Is there really anything they couldn’t collect?

This doesn’t seem that much worse than American rules that have already been in place for a long, long time.

Do you really want to be like the US, though? I think maybe that’s not a great idea. (Source: am from US)

Totally agree. Have been there and done that quite a few times too.

Load average of 400???

You could install systat (or similar) and use output from sar to watch for thresholds and reboot if exceeded.

The upside of doing this is you may also be able to narrow down what is going on, exactly, when this happens, since sar records stats for CPU, memory, disk etc. So you can go back after the fact and you might be able to see if it is just a CPU thing or more than that. (Unless the problem happens instantly rather than gradually increasing).

PS: rather than using cron, you could run a script as a daemon that runs sar at 1 sec intervals.

Another thought is some kind of external watchdog. Curl webpage on server, if delay too long power cycle with smart home outlet? Idk. Just throwing crazy ideas out there.

What a great use of my tax dollars.

Good to know. Well I have 16G now that should give me plenty to spare.

I will have to try that once my ram upgrade gets here.

At least they have usernames now…

I have a couple Lenovo tiny form factors: an M700 8GB w/ J3710 running Pihole on Ubuntu server—which is total overkill in both CPU and mem; and an M73, 4GB w/4th gen i3 running jellyfin server on Mint 21.3. Certain kinds of transcoding brings it to its knees but for most 1080p streaming it’s fine. Memory is a bit tight; 8G would be better. It has a usb3 2T drive for video files that runs more than quick enough. Serial adapters are available if you want to use the console.

The latter has been running for I think a couple years. The former I just set up.

But I’ve been shopping for newer gear for the Jellyfin server. I think you could get a Dell, HP, or Lenovo 6th gen TFF with 8G and 256-512G internal SSD within your price range.

I see some EliteDesk G800 G3 (6th gen Intel) tinys with no disk for $50-70 shipped on eBay in the US. I think those look the coolest by far :)

You could find one with no disk, no ram and config as you please and probably still come in under budget.

E-

My eventual plan for the Jellyfin server is a SFF, probably an HP with enough space to fit a couple of big HDDs, plus 16G ram and a newer CPU that can transcode on the fly without lag.

You’re not alone in any of that.

As was the style at the time

My bad. 2 TB.

I am clearly not paranoid enough. For a while I was running an open source router inline between the network AP and the fiber to Ethernet box and running nids but the goddamn thing kept crapping out every few days so i took it back out until I can find a more stable solution.

I have plans if I can ever get around to it. I want the smart TV, printer and other shitty things on a separate network from the more trusted devices. I don’t know how yet but I would like to set up 802.1X for the trusted stuff.

Well damn that’s clever. I will have to try that.

It could do whatever since it is open source and uses ESP-IDF. Adding features like that or coding an entirely new firmware would be well within hobbyist capabilities.

Not quite. It has 1TB sd card storage. That’s far, far better. And it has wifi and USB not just FireWire. Ram is less sure but how much ram do you need for playing tunes?

Capacitive touch wheel.

Or sitting behind the defense table.