ntfy is great!

Also i know some basics on raid but I’ve only ever messed with raid0 with usb drives on a pi. I have 8 bays but 2 are currently vacant. What is the process of just adding an extra drive to a raid, or replacing one that already exists?

It depends on your RAID controller (or software RAID). I use hardware RAID (on Dell and HP servers) as it’s easy and a known technology, although these days people seem to be anti-HW RAID a bit.

When replacing a drive, you just eject the old drive, wait a few seconds put the new drive in, and most HW RAID controllers will start automatically rebuilding the array. Make sure your controller and drive bays support “hot swap” first! With HW RAID, replacing drives is great, because you can increase the capacity over time, because you can replace each drive with a bigger model, and once the last drive has been swapped over, you can expand the array and start using the extra capacity without having to move data around. With HW raid, most servers have an “Out-Of-Band” system (iLO, iDRAC, IPMI) which you can configure to alert you if a drive has died (or is about to die).

I would recommend keeping at least 1 spare of the same model HD of whatever you use, just in case.

I got burned by having a WD drive fail, and WD were being assholes about sending me a replacement (it was under warranty). Before I got the replacement, another drive started dying, and I couldn’t afford to buy another drive. In the end I lost 12TB of data 😭

And re the above - “RAID is not a backup” :) plan accordingly…

For software RAID, most Linux OSes support it automatically. I only use it as it’s easy to expand partitions (most of my Linux machines are VMs on a system with HW RAID).

This might be a useful article https://www.howtogeek.com/40702/how-to-manage-and-use-lvm-logical-volume-management-in-ubuntu/ (with a link to a previous one which is an introduction), which explains a bit about SW RAID.

I rate OPNsense. I’ve not tried pfsense, but I use Enterprise-level firewalls daily. When you’re used to Palo Alto, Cisco or CheckPoint firewalls, it is a lot harder to use, and the interface isn’t great, and had fewer features, but for free (and cheap support if you need it), it’s pretty amazing. Upgrading to new versions is seamless, and once when something happened and it broken, I reinstalled it from the .ISO, uploaded my backed up .xml config file, and it was back to normal. It’s more than adequate to use for my home internet connection and all the services I run in my DMZ etc.

This had potential: https://github.com/adulau/Forban, and i tried it at a hacker festival soon after it was released, but sadly it is rather rudimentary and hasn’t been updated in over a decade, which is a real shame. I did try and contact the developer years ago with some bug reports, but heard nothing 😢

APC do a really crappy small one for telecoms cabinets, but none for servers

I wonder if the lower discharge current capability of LFP batteries is why? That’s the one thing I’ve read fairly consistently about them is that they can’t supply the same high current as lead acids but are otherwise superior in every way. Now that you mention it, the only place I’ve ever really seen LFP UPSs for servers is in the big, central UPSs where they can run batteries in series for a much higher voltage.

I don’t think so. Cheaper batteries have that problem, but a decent brand does not. Check out this one: https://www.powertechsystems.eu/home/products/48v-lithium-ion-battery-pack/48v-105ah-5-38kwh-lithium-ion-battery-pack-powerbrick/ I bought one for my house, and have a 5KW inverter connected to it. Its specifications say that can do 120A drain continuously. I have used it to boil my 3KW kettle a few times in one day (but not often - I usually use the power for other things), and it has been fine.

e.g. most of the LFP UPSs I see max out at 1000 VA where 1500 is more typical for lead-acid UPSs.

That’s just a limitation of the product, not the technology.

There’s an old thread about someone doing it here: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/replace-apc-ups-sla-batteries-with-lithium.25424/ but sadly he doesn’t give any details, or any updates.

It’s wierd. APC do a really crappy small one for telecoms cabinets, but none for servers. I would love to replace my APC batteries with lithium ones.

Let us know what ones you chose in the end.

Sounds good. Maybe some sort of forum system, like https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown (activitypub-based) or https://karrot.world or even an instance of lemmy ? Nextcloud is good as it has a lot of plugins for sharing photos and chatting etc. Video conferencing It would be worth looking at something like https://www.freedombox.org/ as it’s all self-contained, and might be easier to set up. at least as a proof of concept?

Yes. There are a few other chat clients that you can run relays for - Tox, SimpleX, Jabber/XMPP etc, which are worth investigating.