As a rule of thumb, if you pay more money you get a better product. With spinning drives that almost always means that more expensive drives (in average) run longer than cheaper ones. Performance is another metric, but balancing those is where the smoke and mirrors come into play. You can get a pretty darn fast drive for a premium price which will fail in 3-4 years or for a similar price you can get a bit slower drive which will last you a decade. And that’s in average. You might get a ‘cheap’ brand high-performance drive to run without any issues for a long long time and you might also get a brand name NAS drive which will fail in 2 years. Those averages start to play a role if you buy drives by a dozen.

Backblaze (among others) publish their very real world statistics on which drives to choose (again, on average), but for home gamer that’s not usually an option to run enough drives to get any benefits from statistical point of view. Obviously something from HGST or WD will most likely outperform any no-name brand from aliexpress and personally I’d only get something rated for 24/7 use, like WD RED, but it’s not a guarantee that those will actually run any longer as there’s always deviations from their gold standard.

So, long story short, you will most likely get a significantly different results depending on which brand/product line you choose, but it’s not guaranteed, so you need to work around that with backups, different raid scenarios (likely raid 5 or 6 for home gamer) and acceptable time for downtime (how fast you can get a replacement, how long it’ll take to pull data back from backups and so on). I’ll soon migrate my setup from somewhat professional setting to more hobbyist one and with my pretty decent internet connectivity I most likely go with 2-1-1 setup instead of the ‘industry standard’ 3-2-1 (for serious setup you should probably learn what those really mean, but in short: number of copies existing - number of different storage media - number of offsite copies),

On what you really should use, that depends heavily on your usage. For a media library a 5400rpm bigger drive might be better than a bit smaller 7200rpm drive and then there’s all kinds of edge cases plus potential options for ssd-caching and a ton of other stuff, so, unfortunately, the actual answer has quite a few of variables, starting from your wallet.

In theory you just send a link to click and that’s it. But, as there always is a but, your jitsi setup most likely don’t have massive load balancing, dozens of locations for servers and all the jazz which goes around random network issues and everything else which keeps the internet running.

There’s a ton of things well outside your control and they may or may not bite you in the process. Big players have tons of workforce and money to make sure that kind of things don’t happen and they still do now and then. Personally, for a single use scenario like yours, I wouldn’t bother, but I’m not stopping you either, it’s a pretty neat thing to do. My (now dead) jitsi instance once saved a city council meeting when teams had issues and that got me a pretty good bragging rights, so it can be pretty rewarding too.

Jitsi works, and they have open relays to test with, but as the thing here is very much analog and I’d assume she’d just need to see your position, how hands move etc, the audio quality isn’t the most important thing here. Sure, it helps, but personally I’d just use zoom/teams/hangouts/something readily available and invest in a decent microphone (and audio in general) + camera.

That way you don’t need to provide helpdesk on how to use your thing and waste time from actual lessons nor need to debug server issues while you’ve been scheduled to train with your teacher.

At least in here some of the older modems, specially from ADSL-era, only had two pairs in them, so they were only good up to 100Base-T, which is roughly 7MB/s. So maybe check if that’s the case and throw those into recycling bin.

At work where cable runs are usually made by maintenance people the most common problem is poor termination. They often just crimp a connector instead of using patch panels/sockets and unwind too much of the cable before connector which causes all kinds of problems. With proper termination problems usually go away.

But it can be a ton of other stuff too. Good cable tester is pretty much essential to figure out what’s going on. I’m using 1st gen version of Pocketethernet and it’s been pretty handy, but there’s a ton of those available, just get something a bit better than a simple indicator with blinking leds which can only indicate if the cable isn’t completely broken.

Yep. I’m running 1/1Gbps wan connection over cat5e just fine. Even on very noisy environment at work with a longish run (70+ meters) we ran pretty damn stable 1/1Gbps over good quality cat7.

It depends heavily on what you do and what you’re comparing yourself against. I’ve been making a living with IT for nearly 20 years and I still don’t consider myself to be an expert on anything, but it’s a really wide field and what I’ve learned that the things I consider ‘easy’ or ‘simple’ (mostly with linux servers) are surprisingly difficult for people who’d (for example) wipe the floor with me if we competed on planning and setting up an server infrastructure or build enterprise networks.

And of course I’ve also met the other end of spectrum. People who claim to be ‘experts’ or ‘senior techs’ at something are so incompetent on their tasks or their field of knowledge is so ridiculously narrow that I wouldn’t trust them with anything above first tier helpdesk if even that. And the sad part is that those ‘experts’ often make way more money than me because they happened to score a job on some big IT company and their hours are billed accordingly.

And then there’s the whole other can of worms on a forums like this where ‘technical people’ range from someone who can install a operating system by following instructions to the guys who write assembly code to some obscure old hardware just for the fun of it.

Grub supports software raid just fine. The main issue is that you need to modify grub configuration to add bootloader on both drives, but even if you don’t it’s pretty simple to recreate needed files for second drive when the primary one dies.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the Pi supports RAID1.

I haven’t ran any Pi with hard drives, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work with software raid on linux.

You could of course use some kind of socket or connetor for supercap, but as they last far less than I thought then I get why it doesn’t make sense. This thinkstation I’m writing with in my garage I got for free at old office is from 2011 and it’s still running original cmos battery. No idea if there’s any juice left on it, but at least it doesn’t complain anything at boot and once it refuses to boot it’ll become e-waste immediately (I do metal working, fix cars etc at the garage, so internals of this thing are far from clean, I think this is 3rd or 4th hardware for 10 years in here with only the SSD moved from setup to another).

You can deflect rain while you’re at it too.

The only real solution is to make this an extended maintenance task.

This is the correct answer. No matter how reliable your power feed is you still need to reboot the server at some point for whatever reason and if CMOS battery is dead by then you’ll have the very same issue and you’ll need monitor and keyboard again. And even if you don’t mind about the RTC on board you’ll still lose the settings.

I wonder why manufacturers haven’t switched over to supercapacitors or something else than a coin cell battery, but perhaps there’s a valid reason for it. I think that supercaps can’t hold charge as long as a coin cell, but if your board is completely cold for a year or so maybe losing bios settings isn’t that big of a deal.

Personally I’d run separate 12VDC cabling instead of pulling out from POE if it’s simple to do, but if you get a splitter which will negotiate POE (assuming you don’t run some older passive-POE setup) it should work just fine. But note, that POE goes up to 57VDC, so check that you can run your POE switch/injector with 12VDC at all.

Apparently you can kind-of rewrite queries on the fly with PowerDNS scripting and answer accordingly. So maybe that’s what you’re looking for.

That’s not how DNS works. If you publicly query tfk.example.com it’ll reply with a records associated to that entry and that’s it. The client then attempts to connect to those IP addresses and no further DNS queries are made (assuming there’s no CNAME records). If you want to use DNS for that then you’ll need to add entries directly to tfk.example.com which point to your internal addresses.

So, you need to change tfk.example.com records whenever IP addresses change, most likely via some kind of API to automate things, assuming you don’t directly control name servers for tfk.example.com by yourself.

But, as you’re running a proxy anyways it doesn’t reveal internal addresses and the client needs only public addresses to connect into. I haven’t heard about traefik before, so I don’t have a clue on how it works, but ‘traditional’ proxies effectively hide everything on the ‘LAN’ side. (Yes, I know, it’s not necessarily/strictly speaking LAN).

You can pay for dyndns service which should be more reliable than free ones. I don’t have any experience with those, so I can’t give any recommendations. What I’m running is that I use few of the free ones which are updated either from my router or from a linux VM and I’ve just pointed few easy to remember CNAME records from my own domain to those dynamic addresses. It’s not the best thing in the world, but my dynamic IP tends to be pretty static as it usually changes only when my own hardware is down for a longer period of time (few hours or so, so a longer power outage or a hardware maintenance gone wrong).

I’ve never really checked, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

Not that you asked, but you can get a .eu domain for ~9€/year (assuming you live in the EU). It’s obviously more than 1USD, but I still have few for around my hobbies as it’s not that big of an expense.

The process is to go step-by-step. First direct connect to modem you have, bridged connection if possible, and test with multiple bandwidth measurements (speedtest, fast.com, downloading a big file from some university ftp…) and work your way downstream of the network. And on every step test multiple scenarios where it’s possible, preferably with multiple devices.

When I got a 1Gbit fiber connection few years back I got an Ubiquiti Edgerouter-X with PoE-options. On paper that should’ve been plenty for my network, but in theory with NAT, DNAT, firewall rules and things like that it capped on 6-700Mbps depending on what I used it for. With small packets and VPN it dropped even more. So now that thing acts as an glorified PoE switch and the main routing is handled with Mikrotik device, which on manufacturers tests should be able to push 7Gbps on optimal conditions. I only have 1/1Gbps, so there’s plenty of room, but with very specific loads that thing still is still pushed to the limit (mostly small packet size with other stuff on top of it) but it can manage the full duplex 1000Base-T. And on normal everyday use it’s running at 20% (or so) load, but I like the fact that it can manage even the more challenging scenarios.

I’ve used Seafile for years just for this. I haven’t ran that on pi, but on virtual machine it runs pretty smoothly and android client is pretty hassle free.