Perforated galvanized plumbers strapping. While most of my equipment is wall mountable, I used exactly this sort of thing for all the power supplies.

Likely similar to whatever you’re planning to use with the plastic strap, but more metal is more betterer

Imaging software is a godsend for that sort of thing. I ended up using BartPE for something like that, and it worked great – it has a free imaging program on it. You only need a removable drive large enough for all your files since it’ll compress everything.

I have a feeling you’d end up with a bunch of big drives with small volumes on them if it did work.

Warning you, I’ve had issues with RAID combining SSD and HDD. Basically I was on an older dell server and I wanted to do mirroring and the bios straight up refused to do it because it didn’t want to mix ssds and hdds.

Is it bad that I saw a new domain name and was like “ooh, a new instance to federate with!”?

I’ve bought a few dozen of these things, shame to see them go.

I’ve been self-hosting a wide variety of things including nextcloud (which is one open source project I advocate everyone look at, especially on a web domain so they can access it from anywhere)

Go linux for hosting your open source projects. Just do it. I’m not saying that because windows is inherently worse than linux, but because everything out there is documented as if you’re hosting off of linux. In fact, you should really consider using Ubuntu-server, because most things have documentation specifically for ubuntu.

Going with windows server as mostly just s hyper-v box with your linux installations inside, that might be worthwhile.

If your IP address appears static, then you can probably just directly configure dns through the web interface of your domain provider. There’s a great script out there for doing dynamic dns using different providers such as godaddy, that could be some insurance to make sure you don’t end up with a non-working social media network.

One thing you should consider is running one virtual host as your reverse proxy that redirects different subdomains to the different individual servers running your services. The reverse proxy server running something like nginx would then deal with all your subdomains, and if you work on say your nextcloud and need to reboot it won’t take all your services down at once because your reverse proxy continues to function for all your other services.

A self-hosted ebook solution would be nice. It’s surprising the holes in kindle even tbh

I believe it can be, but what I’ve found in general with respect to my fediverse journey is that pretty much everything is built for Linux. If you want to use windows, you’ll likely have to blaze a trail for yourself.

I had one windows PC in my server farm initially, but installed Linux after I realized most things I wanted to run really wanted me to be running Linux.

I found mxroute, it works very well for me. I can’t say much about specific features since I just wanted a simple email host.

I think I set that up successfully on a vm under windows.

It’s obviously a level worse than chatgpt but it worked surprisingly well otherwise. Poorer answers but still not bad.

It does. I can vouch for it’s behavior in practice. My servers basically sit with the swap file unused, which isn’t the case when I set swappiness to a non-zedo value

There’s people who make dumb arguments that go “but what if you run out of ram?” And then someone else says “I have enough ram” and then someone else goes “but what if you run out of ram?”

I have a small amount of swap, a few gigs, and enough memory for the application. Moreover I also have my swappiness set to 0 because I don’t want stuff swapped out of memory. If I need more memory I need more memory.

I’m using a name brand external HDD for mass storage. Still using the internal ssd for everything else but I’m not interested in the cost of a multi-terrabyte SSD to do it internally.

Just have a backup plan in place because drives fail.

Liberapay works well, I donate to a few projects using it

I started with fbxl.net, the domain I’ve owned forever. It started with social.fbxl.net, then video.fbxl.net, then lotide.fbxl.net, and now lemmy.fbxl.net. I’ve also got a matrix home server and a nostr relay.

If there’s a piece of advice I can give you, it’s to plan to self host more than just one thing. Once you have one thing, you’re going to find out it’s kind of addictive having your own thing to go to and you might want to host other things. Subdomains are a nice way to give you that chance.

Second nextcloud. The apps make it an amazing swiss army knife.

Nextcloud news has become my preferred way to read many news sites.

Nextcloud music lets you stream from your server to your phone, and also lets you manage podcasts.

Nextcloud deck lets you manage tasks using kanban methods.

Nextcloud mail lets you access your mail from one spot.

There’s mastodon integration that shows your last few notifications and the last few posts on your timeline.

There’s a huge number of apps that can do a shocking number of tasks, in addition to being a Google drive replacement with as much disk space as you want to add.

Your lemmy instance starts off blank. Then you create local communities and maybe post there. To connect to other communities, you search for the URL of that community using the search function. At that point, it pulls the current posts but none of the comments, and if you subscribe then you start seeing the comments on the posts.

One thing, joining a bunch of remote instances takes some time at first since it’s a manual process. Soon you have a really solid timeline though.

If you’re using godaddy, you can use a script to do your own dynamic DNS:

https://www.instructables.com/Quick-and-Dirty-Dynamic-DNS-Using-GoDaddy/

One caveat to that would be the DMCA, where liability protection as a service provider I think is contingent on there being a DMCA process available so infringing content can be removed.

I don’t know enough about how that all works with the fediverse, however.

If you’re in the US, The Communications Decency Act Section 230 has a couple powers.

1. It removes liability to service providers for user generated content when active moderation is practiced, and

2. It removes liability to service providers for any moderation actions taken to to moderate to reasonable community standards.

Prior to CDA230, the jurisprudence centered around 2 different cases. In one, an actively moderated system had illegal content and didn’t remove it in time, and in another case, a non-actively moderated system had illegal content and didn’t remove it in time. At that time, the actively moderated system was held to be liable for the illegal content, whereas the non-actively moderated system was held not to be liable for not removing the illegal content.