Over the past few years, I've done a lot of things with Linux. This year, I decided to take an old, old PC of mine - an MSI Trident 3 - that I lent to my little brother for his college years into a little low-power backup and general-purpose server for my household.
What I didn't expect is that this little pet project has since grown tremendously.
My wife and I have been using this neat little 2tb external USB hard drive (mechanical, btw. days are numbered lol) as a backup and sort of holding ground for things that we use and need it for. I most recently used it to stage a clonezilla backup of my windows 11 install to roll back my main PC after ROYALLY screwing up my distro and not being fussed with recovering it. Another story for another day!
Simple Beginnings
We replaced my wife's 500gb NVME with a FAR FAR faster 2tb NVME in... I want to say October? I hung on to the NVME because I sort have been noodling around the idea of having a home server setup for a while now, but just itching to get a chance to use it.
My brother returned my old MSI Trident 3 (Which, btw, has shaped up to be one of the best PCs I've ever purchased in my entire life.) I slapped the NVME in there and shoved Kubuntu on it. Got a few things set up, users for the family, permissions and whatnot. Installed and configured a Samba server and put it downstairs in the entertainment center. It's so tiny.
Not my image, but just shows you how small this thing is. It's perfect in every way.
Samba de WHAT?
Samba fucking sucks. I mean that with my entire heart. Actually, I should probably be more specific and say that Windows interfacing with Samba fucking sucks.
This thread pretty much chronicles the entirety of the issues I had, but for some reason on Win11 whenever I was copying large amounts of data over the network with SMB...... My network adapter would just completely quit. Like kaput. We're talking
REAL BAD. I was on a Discord call and kept wondering why sporatically my latency was hitting 5,000+ms.
Well, turns out...
Pranked. Absolutely pranked. Bamboozled, if you will. Just bodied.
Whatever. I left my PC to do its thing for a while and warned my wife that if she was transferring a large amount of data to the backup server to just kinda be on the lookout for this lol. It's 2024. The SMB protocol has been around since 1983. Microsoft's implementation has been around since like what. 95? 96? 20 fucking years and it's still puzzling. insane.
Spiraling
Every time I ssh into this little box I get a new idea and it's both cool and terrifying. Like I'm thinking of kicking up a game server. I have a Plex server on it (which seemed logical since this is like a centralized backup and what better place to make legal backup copies of my optical media that's probably not going to last another 10 years???)
I think I understand how people end up with server racks inside their houses now.