Pretty much any mikrotik is a fantastic piece of kit to have.
It is so unbelievably versatile.
I love the various mikrotik routers, switches and APs I have. I use them all the time for little ad-hoc networks and projects and stuff.
You will learn a lot about networking when using them.

But Unifi is a hell of a lot easier to use, and I have not found anything I can’t do on unifi (but I don’t do bgp, mlag, etc at home).

Oh, and on the “fail often” thing…
Get a basic/old/free pc/laptop and install Proxmox on it.
Loads of tutorials out there, but the basic installer will get you to a “I’m learning” stage.

Create a VM, install Debian, play around.
Then: create a new VM, install Debian, create a snapshot, play around until it does what you want, restore the snapshot, do the steps that got you from vanilla to what you want. Create snapshots along the way as checkpoints. Snapshot, tinker, restore snapshot, advance.

Proxmox is amazing for learning VMs and server things

Raspberry pis are an easy intro to actually using computers (instead of using something like windows).
Raspbian is great (based on Debian) and there is a HUGE community for it.

So yeh, it’s a great started for $25, as long as you have a PSU and SD Card. And an hdmi cable + monitor + keyboard at your disposal (and a mouse if you are installing a desktop environment (IE something like windows, whereas headless is a full screen CLI).
And don’t get your hopes up for a windows replacement.

But… Why not run a Virtual Machine? If you have a windows machine, run VirtualBox, create a VM and install Debian on it?
That’s free. You can tinker and play.
And the only thing you are missing from an actual raspberry pi is that it isn’t a standalone device (IE your desktop has to be on for it to be running), and it doesn’t have GPIO (ie hardware pins. And if this is your goal, there are other ways).

If you really really want a computer that is on all the time running Linux (Debian, a derivative (like raspbian) or some other distro) - aka a server - then there are plenty of other options where the only drawback is lack of GPIO (which, in my experience, is rarely a drawback).
And that is literally any computer you can get your hands on. Because the raspberry pi trades A LOT for its form factor, the ethernet speed is limited, the bus speed is limited (impacting USB and ethernet (and ram?)), the SD card is slower and will fail faster than any HDD/SSD. The benefit is the GPIO, the very low power draw, and the form factor - rarely actually a benefit.

I’d say, play around with some virtual box VMs. See what you want, other than Fear Of Missing Out (things like PiHole? They run on Debian, or even in a docker container). Then see if you actually want a home server, and what you want to run on it.
It’s likely you won’t want a raspberry pi, but a $150 mini pc that can actually do what you want.

I’m amazed it’s France before Germany.
But I’m also so happy that this is happening.
The greatest war in history and all the horrors behind it should never be forgotten/hidden/suppressed/rewritten.
Everyone commited atrocities in that war. Nobody is without stain.
Document it all, and make it all widely available

Yeh, bath/shower ones seem affordable.
But for a standalone sink, they seem to be significantly more.

I’m amazed at the comments explaining incoming water temperature fluctuations and pressures…

No no, thermostatic tap/faucet mixes waters depending on the output temperature. Ignores all of the variables except the thermal mass (I guess reaction speed) of the thermostatic system.

I think they are normally like 10x the price of a standard mixer tap tho.
So, it’s a budget choice

Yes, but they’ve put a fancy canopy thing over it to make it look like a seewiz

This is my favourite movie

I like the extra challenge that it’s over water!

There is a statue in Glasgow that always has a traffic cone on its head.
The council regularly removes it, and its always replaced.
It’s had different variations over the years, from pride to independence to EU flags.
The council proposed a renovation of the statue including raising the plinth to make it harder to replace the cone. It was shot down with massive public outcry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestrian_statue_of_the_Duke_of_Wellington,_Glasgow

Steam took the cap off the toothpaste tube.
Microsoft is giving the toothpaste tube a good squeeze!

But they felt it. The whole building. Felt it.
And the clapped until their hands bled.

Maybe it’s about redaction of the files

Maybe Ukraine couldn’t retake the areas occupied by Russia, but they could deliver a Pyrrhic blow to Kremlin.

They have delivered a pyrrhic victory.
Russia thought they could take Kyiv (Ukraine?) on 3 days.
The fact that Ukraine has resisted so hard, have redefined the modern battlefield, have conducted huge deep strikes…
Ukraine is winning.

The reason Ukraine may not be “winning” is because the Russian war machine is huge. Like really really big.
The reason that Ukraine is “winning” is because the Russian war machine is outdated and corrupt.

The western opinion of Russia has been devastated. Russia tested themselves, and failed.
Russia is holding on by their nukes.

Ah, fair.

A NAS as bare metal makes sense.
It can then correctly interact with the raw disks.

You could pass an entire HBA card through to a VM, but I feel like it should be horses for courses.
Let a storage device be a storage device, and let a hypervisor be a hypervisor.

especially once a service does fail or needs any amount of customization.

A failed service gets killed and restarted. It should then work correctly.
If it fails to recover after being killed, then it’s not a service that’s fully ready for containerisation.
So, either build your recovery process to account for this… or fix it so it can recover.
It’s often why databases are run separately from the service. Databases can recover from this, and the services are stateless - doesn’t matter how many you run or restart.

As for customisation, if it isn’t exposed via env vars then it can’t be altered.
If you need something beyond the env vars, then you use that container as a starting point and make your customisation a part of your container build processes via a dockerfile (or equivalent)

It’s a bit like saying “chisels are great. But as soon as you need to cut a fillet steak, you need to sharpen a side of the chisel instead of the tip of the chisel”.
It’s using a chisel incorrectly.

I would always run proxmox to set up docker VMs.

I found Talos Linux, which is a dedicated distro for kubernetes. Which aligned with my desire to learn k8s.
It was great. I ran it as bare-metal on a 3 node cluster. I learned a lot, I got my project complete, everything went fine.
I will use Talos Linux again.
However next time, I’m running proxmox with 2 VMs per node - 3 talos control VMs and 3 talos worker VMs.
I imagine running 6 servers with Talos is the way to go. Running them hyperconverged was a massive pain. Separating control plane and data/worker plane (or whatever it is) makes sense - it’s the way k8s is designed.
It wasn’t the hardware that had issues, but various workloads. And being able to restart or wipe a control node or a worker node would’ve made things so much easier.

Also, why wouldn’t I run proxmox?
Overhead is minimal, get nice overview, get a nice UI, and I get snapshots and backups

I’ve never installed a package on proxmox.
I’ve BARELY interacted with CLI on proxmox (I have a script that creates a nice Debian VM template, and occasionally having to really kill a VM).

What would you install on proxmox?!

Yes. I was laying on the sarcasm heavily.
I presume that’s what these oracle services provide.
Essentially hosts the us governments GDP NFT, so you can right click and download it just like every NFT crypto bro hates you doing.
Whether its actually the US Government hosting the file, or these oracle services hosting it… It doesn’t matter.

Why not just host the files on a government website with appropriate file hashes (so users can verify the file is still the same), let the internet archive and the national archives take a snapshots of the files and pages and hashes etc… ? That’s a well regarded site archival system, and the governmental archival system. Has redundancy, pedigree and public acceptance.
Fuck it, publish just the hash on some block chains so the “fingerprint” of the report is immutable. But call it what it is.

The report isn’t “published on the Blockchain”.
It is linked from some blockchains.
There is still a file hosted by some servers.
You can’t download your favourite blockchain, take it to the top of Mount Rushmore with no internet and inspect the US GDP figures without first downloading the file linked in the block chain.

Blockchain oracles are entities that connect blockchains to external systems, allowing smart contracts to execute depending on real-world inputs and outputs. Oracles give the Web 3.0 ecosystem a method to connect to existing legacy systems, data sources and advanced calculations.

https://cointelegraph.com/learn/articles/what-is-a-blockchain-oracle-and-how-does-it-work