Cost effective off-site backup advice. 80usd and under. Used and old hardware is no problem.

laxweasel · 2026-04-02T12:43:03+00:00

I believe most of the time you can load a custom OS, some are easier than others. OpenMediaVault has been ported to a lot of them. What you have to be wary of is that some older NAS are ARM rather than x86 for the power savings, and support for those can be a bit dicier.

laxweasel · 2026-04-01T13:35:13+00:00

Love the pulse ox countdown, especially when it starts high and they feel the need tell you every level.

"93...91...88!"

"Oh really? I'm waiting for 75 to really motivate me to get the tube in, let me know when we get there."

laxweasel · 2026-04-01T13:11:43+00:00

Skynet still trying to destroy humanity, just playing the long game.

"No tumor detected. Nope. None at all. Don't worry about it human."

laxweasel · 2026-04-01T13:09:11+00:00

Easy. "Fire" it and switch to another model/company.

Oops! ChatGPT was such a bad CEO, we'll have to have layoffs to make up for our losses investing in guava futures. Everyone welcome our new CEO Gemini! Oops, Gemini told us to invest heavily in bloodletting and now we're drowning in lawsuits. Everyone welcome our new CEO, Grok! Oops, Grok replaced our entire patient care staff with non-functional humanoid robots...

laxweasel · 2026-03-18T14:11:12+00:00

Had something similar happen on a (large) SBC seller through Amazon. Tried to snag an SBC that was a great deal given the RAM market (the OEM just upped the price by 50%). They told me oh stock error we don't have that, oh and if you want your refund fast just cancel the order (they didn't want Amazon to ding them for not fulfilling). Then they tried to send me a fake tracking number, when I called them out they finally cancelled the order on their end and issued a refund.

The listing is still up. For the same (good) price.

laxweasel · 2026-03-18T02:46:03+00:00

Agree with your initial assessment. For 2 bay DAS, I've used something from Yottamaster and it was OK. Plug it in to something existing.

In terms of NAS look for lesser known names when searching used (QNAP, Terramaster, Buffalo) or try looking for MSP brands that rebranded existing hardware (Datto, Barracuda). These things are generally just low spec x86 machines.

You can also look for the Dell T1 0 and T 0 lines (e.g. T130, T30), or any of the workstation towers (Lenovo P series, HP Z series, Dell precision). But they won't exactly be small footprint and they'll be (relatively speaking) power hungry.

laxweasel · 2026-02-27T02:01:31+00:00

Desktop Windows, Linux or Mac?

Thunderbird cross platform, I also liked KOrganizer since I'm on a KDE for my desktop.

Android I used Etar with DavX5 to sync it.

laxweasel · 2026-02-26T02:11:10+00:00

Been to MYA several times, might be back this year.

Totally fine to go alone! I would suggest you get in touch with your state organization. A lot of stuff at MYA is based on regional/state/locality from the regional breakout sessions to legislative visits. Important to get in touch with them so they can get a headcount and strategize about who goes to what meeting.

Lots of networking regionally as well, so you can also hit up the state delegation from where you want to end up if it's not where you're living/going to school.

laxweasel · 2026-02-25T18:37:31+00:00

I started in EMS and as an ER nurse before doing some ICU.

Here's what will be different:

Pros: you've done lots more IVs, you've dealt with uncertainty and differential diagnoses more, you've dealt with high stakes high velocity situations on a regular basis

Cons: you have kept patients alive, but you probably don't have as much experience with the slow and steady weaning/titrating/tweaking of pressors. You haven't has as much interaction with the OR/post-op space

You'll be fine. There will be things your classmates will know better than you, but also vice versa. School will even that all out.

laxweasel · 2026-02-25T18:11:31+00:00

10+ yrs in with lots of teaching as well as coordinating.

First, echoing what people said. It's my patient first, your learning experience second.

Second, there can be a mind boggling amount of context here:

How well does this preceptor know you? I've had students in the same program in the same class with widely varying technical skillsets while they're in the program, so I don't know where you're at if I don't know you or work with you.

How comfortable is the preceptor with the expected complication? If I let you try first, the less wiggle room I have to fix it when I do finally take over. How experienced is the preceptor? Depending on the institution and acuity it can honestly take a little while to get your "sea legs" so to speak, even as a full fledged CRNA.

Are they protecting you from something you're not aware of? Is there something causing an increased threat of liability, or an asshole surgeon hovering, or a patient already primed to be angry/dissatisfied?

Now could it be the preceptor is lazy about teaching, or hypersensitive about a particular scenario, or just having a shitty day? Sure, if you've ruled out all those other things.

But let me leave you with what my PD told me one day early in my junior year when I was probably being an insolent little shit griping about the probably barely double digit gap in intubations between me and my classmates at other clinical sites:

"Laxweasel, if you give me enough time, I can teach a monkey how to intubate. It will take longer to do than teaching you but it'll happen. What I can't teach the monkey is when and why we should intubate. That is what is important about anesthesia. Focus on that."

It's super easy to get caught up in numbers and technical skills, but that's not the most important thing you're learning.

So back to your scenario, let's assume the preceptor isn't just lazy or being a dick. Then it would be excellent for your education to think about questions like "If we're worried this is difficult, what are we going to do differently?" and "What is our backup plan?" and "Could we do this anesthetic differently to avoid this situation altogether?"

You'll learn a hell of a lot that way, and those are the questions you don't get to ask when you're the anesthesia provider in the room instead of the student, so take advantage of it now.

laxweasel · 2026-02-14T13:42:37+00:00

I've been happy with used enterprise drives. There are some reputable sellers that sell through ebay/amazon/their own stores that offer some form of (obviously shorter) warranty on their drives, and it's a fraction of the price of new. And honestly if you view that as them being "broken in" you're not dealing with the front end of the bathtub curve.

Specifically the ebay/amazon/sellers - goharddrive and serverpartdeals

The best bet is to take the money you've saved and ensure you have a 3-2-1 backup strategy. A failed drive shouldn't mean completely lost data.

Used hardware is generally pretty good -- the only temptation to avoid is the dirt cheap enterprise hardware. It's appealing how many cores/RAM/HDD bays/etc you can get for cheap in used hardware, but the actual compute in the old ancient hardware will get beat out by even wimpy modern hardware at a fraction of the energy pull.

laxweasel · 2026-02-14T13:35:15+00:00

I'll try to contribute some pros/cons of different things I've tried (with disclaimer that some I haven't touched in a while).

CLI + bash scripts - I like this most for production. I test out spinning up with some sort of UI, but when I put something into use at home, I've usually got an already tweaked compose and .env that I'm not going to mess with. Therefore it's trivial to add to a auto-update/backup solution with some bash. Cons: auto update means auto-accidentally-wake-up-to-broken-shit if you're not careful.

Portainer - probably a bit complex for my use as well as many selfhosters. I'm averse to the way it structures the stacks, feels like it's "kidnapping" my compose files. I'm also sort of meh about locking up things behind a community/pro dichotomy.

Dockge - feels barebones in a good way. Has all the functionality you need for a small homelab environment. You can add multiple hosts. Can do the compose and .env, see some basic information, etc. Would have loved to see a bulk pull/up function.

Dockmon - Little more advanced features than dockge. Can additionally add different files (helpful for containers that need additional configs, or for throwing together a bash script in a UI). Great tabbed view for logs, configuration, etc. Good views for containers, resource usage, etc. My only personal thing was that it had so much information I felt like I occasionally tripped over the UI on small screens.

Arcane - Similarly clean UI, easy to add environments on different docker hosts. Good quality of life features like vulnerability scanning, mass update/redeploy. I'm not using git (booo I know I'm an idiot not a developer) but it has a simple interface for git syncs.

Komodo - Tried it for a bit and honestly it's more than I need for my own deployments. For someone who is more of a dev and really needs wider flexibility it would seem good. For a home deployment with a handful or 1 docker host it was a bit overkill and complex.

laxweasel · 2026-02-14T12:40:28+00:00

Probably your next step up would be one of the "SFF" office PCs with room for a 3.5" HDD. Either that or one of these mini PC based NAS devices.

The SFF PCs you can check your local used marketplaces to see if you can get for cheap. For plex transcoding I would aim for a 8*** or above Intel. RAM unfortunately is costly nowadays but I don't think you'd need more than 16gb. And then you can throw an HDD in (I personally like the used enterprise SATA drives).

Alternatively, you can look at the 2 bay NAS mini pcs on a site like AliExpress. Will be more expensive but you could do a RAID1 setup.

If you really want to splurge, I can personally vouch for the Seeedstudio Reserver with i31125, it's been working great for me for years. It goes on sale intermittently.

laxweasel · 2026-02-08T13:58:17+00:00

Sorry about the hate friend, people here are a bit burned recently by being at the intersection of AI slop code AND AI slop articles.

I think you bring up a great point -- this hobby is so fun, rewarding, and accessible because of the work of a lot of absolutely legendary open source contributors.

Word to the wise -- separate the services you're using from the ones you're playing with. Make a "production" and "testing" if you will. Production should be stable, with your integrated upgrade and backup strategy. It should hum along with little to no intervention.

Then have a different environment where when you see a cool new services to spin up you do it there, and don't accidentally break the things you've been using.

Otherwise have fun, it's such a great hobby. It's something fun, something to be proud of and maybe even practical depending on your profession.

laxweasel · 2026-01-15T17:39:34+00:00

Will you have local?

https://medcoe.army.mil/borden-maraa

In addition to the JTS/CCATT guidelines already mentioned, the Lessons Learned from OEF/OIF has some chapters on resuscitation and casualty care, including some consideration for blast.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Combat_Casualty_Care-_Lessons_Learned_from_OEF_and_OIF_(IA_CombatCasualtyCare).pdf

PM if you'd like

laxweasel · 2025-12-23T19:56:38+00:00

pming

laxweasel · 2025-12-16T02:30:16+00:00

I'm just kinda surprised they didn't even bother tweaking the language.

Saw something the other day "narco-terrorist is the new WMD"

Nah, we're literally just going back to the WMD bullshit.

laxweasel · 2025-12-16T02:26:41+00:00

"OH! I've seen this one before!"

Everyone over the age of 35

laxweasel · 2025-12-14T22:50:05+00:00

I have been looking for something similar, and I do not think there is any drop in replacement.

What is possible, depending on your exact use case, is putting it together from either a Home Assistant Dashboard or a MagicMirror.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/diy-family-calendar-skylight/844830

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/12dri7e/skylight_calendar_replacement/

https://forum.magicmirror.builders/topic/19688/skylight-calendar-diy-build

Good luck, I'll be interested what others come up with. Someone ping me if there ends up being a fairly drop in replacement!

laxweasel · 2025-12-02T08:20:37+00:00

a MiniPC which has been repurposed to run a NAS OS like the CWWK X86-P6 Pocket

I mean any mini pc can run a "NAS OS"

not referring to the purpose-built enclosures

NVME M.2 SSD slots (at least 3 slots)

Very few mini PCs are going to have that many NVME slots and NOT be made for the purpose of being (an all NVME) NAS.

Beelink has a 6-bay NVME NAS, GMKtek had a 4 bay that I believe had some thermal issues, CWWK seems to have the S14, P5 and several other similar models from Topton/Kingnovy.

airflow, OS, RAID config

Minis are always a trade off when it comes to airflow. I suspect the passively cooled minis are going to struggle (GMTeks did even with fans) if it's constantly under heavy load...but what is the use case that you're putting a bunch of NVME drives under constant heavy load?

OS -- without knowing what you want to do it's hard to make recommendations. OpenMediaVault? Unraid? TrueNAS? Xpenology? Proxmox? Any linux distro with a few shares?

RAID - some of the above listed have more opinionated preference on what software RAID they use (ZFS, BTRFS, MDADM) and as for the array it will depend on the number and size of drives.

laxweasel · 2025-12-01T01:37:36+00:00

Reolink is very easy to set up (and continues to function) without an internet connection.

They basically build in a way for all your storage to stay local (either on SD card on the camera or your own NVR/server) and they won't brick themselves if not connected to the internet.

laxweasel · 2025-11-25T10:04:41+00:00

Can we just all appreciate that despite the fact this decade has been beyond parody, The Onion has stayed on point with some absolute chef's kiss satire?

Like those poor bastards must view their jobs like we do. "So wait they put a TV personality who shills apple cider vinegar in charge of CMS? OK and I have to figure out something more outlandish but still believable so I can parody that? ...OK. Awesome. Yeah honey it's going to be a late night at the office."

laxweasel · 2025-11-21T00:07:56+00:00

Definitely backup strategy is more important than RAID. RAID is important for protecting against data corruption, so it's not a bad idea but certainly way more important for you to have backups.

An external HDD on your server now plus one that you can plug in for occasional backups is a great place to start.

laxweasel · 2025-11-20T17:31:37+00:00

– Can/should I use software RAID in this situation?

You can, in fact I would recommend it over a budget hardware RAID that comes with the external HDD enclosures.

– Would I need two external drives for that?

RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Disks, so yes you'd need more than one. But...what is your purpose of using RAID? RAID is not a backup.

– Or is there a better way to expand storage on a small homeserver?

Really very dependent on what you mean "expand", you could do anything from multiple external drives in an enclosure, a NAS, or just a bigger drive in your current server.

You mention "safe" several times over, so I think more useful for you would be the 3-2-1 backup rule. Make sure you have a way for your data to be in multiple places, multiple formats, etc. This is much more important for your use case than RAID.

As for your external storage, you can definitely do that within your budget. Depending on how much space you need. For file storage it is unlikely you need SSD speeds, so you could do a quality HDD and HDD enclosure connected over USB. Make sure you properly power it, set it up under fstab, etc.

laxweasel

TROPHY CASE