BartyDeCanter

Sure, if that’s what you want to do. Though, you’ll probably find less references and expertise here. There is a reason that even Microsoft runs Linux on most of its own servers.

And if you don’t have any friends or a bank, put it in a double ziplock, then drop it in a Tupperware of water and freeze it.

I run Debian on a Thinkpad x130e. systemd bloat is basically a myth, and of all the things to work on reducing system resource use, it’s not quite last in line, but pretty close to it. In general systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success.

Setup a PiHole and add them to the blocklist. Then make the PiHole password stupid long and write it down. Then take the paper, put it in a safe, and put it in the highest shelf in the back of your closet. Recurse safes and passwords as much as needed.

lol, I kinda do. It’s this weirdly and wonderfully idyllic town that feels like what a small town should be, while still being very progressive and queer friendly.

As for the meds, I’m trying to stock up, but mine are pretty restricted so at most I’m getting one or two spares per month. My partners are more reasonable, so they have a larger cushion.

In that level of extreme disaster, honestly not going to be caring. But I do have a layered approach to less extreme more ~~realistic~~ likely scenarios.

Neighbors and Community

The most important thing in a real emergency. We know our neighbors, chat with them on the street and in line for the weekly ice cream truck. We have several close friends within an easy walk or bike ride and are part of a local social club that we go to every week. We’ve had the emergency chat with many of them.

Power

15 minute UPS on my NAS will get me through small power bumps. I also have a large backup battery meant for camping with solar panels that lets my partner and I go indefinitely without city power for our medical devices, with enough to spare most days to keep our phones topped off. I’m currently using it a a oversized UPS for my desktop, but in a real emergency I’ll shut that down and move it to the bedroom.

Longer term, we’re planning on getting solar+house scale battery. I had one before and it got us though multiple days without power as long as we were careful.

Food, water and general supplies

55 gallon food safe drum of drinking water with the tablets that keep it safe for years. I have a todo item that reminds me to rotate it out every three years. We have two emergency bins, one with a hand crank/solar/usb powered radio and flashlight and assorted emergency supplies. The other has freeze dried hiking meals. They were the cheapest per meal per year of shelf life last time I did the math.

Medications

A real gap. I can’t get more than a one month supply of my meds, similar for my partner. While neither of us have immediate life threatening problems without them, we’d both be in rough shape in different ways. Don’t know what to do about this.

Backups

My desktop, my partners laptop, the NAS, and my VPS all have offsite backups to another country halfway around the world. I test recovery annually, and use healthchecks.io to notify me if they stop doing their daily backup. I need to finish getting my laptop backup running, but it’s been low priority as I mostly use it as a thin client for my desktop and keep a few files synced with Syncthing.

VPS

A few critical services run on it instead of my at-home NAS in case our home internet connection fails. It’s physically located several hundred miles away. Again, backed up elsewhere so I can relatively quickly recover it if needed.

NAS

Hot-swappable 4-disk raid with a spare sitting in the closet. That should get me through most issues, with the offsite backups for things that don’t. It also pings healthchecks with a few daily self diagnostics.

RaspPi

Really just running PiHole, so the only data to back up is the split dns config which lives in my notes on my desktop. Seems like a weak point, but could be replaced by the NAS, router, or my laptop pretty quickly.

Mobile devices

Backed up to their corresponding corporate overlords, except for photos and videos which go to immich on the NAS. I wish I had a better solution here.

Me

I have a notes directory describing the setup with configuration, docker files and playbooks for the various services in a local git repo on my desktop. I have printouts of the assorted recovery codes and a letter explaining all this in my filing cabinet alongside my will and advanced directives. We have enough technical friends that my partner can ask one to help, or just point an LLM at the note files and have it walk them through most things. I’ve audited the notes and git history for credentials and it’s clean. Just IPs and machine names, lists of services on each, clean docker files and basic maintenance instructions.

I think my biggest gap is what to do in a dual-failure case where I lose my home internet connection, and my desktop ssd fails. My data would be safe in the offsite, but I wouldn’t be able to reinstall Debian. My laptop would let me take care of most things for a while, but maybe I need to set up a mirror…

This ~~Sparta~~ C. We live for danger.

topgrade

Thanks! I figure all this grey in my beard should be good for something.

Oh definitely. And it really depends on your ISP. Before the ISP consolidation it took enough work that sending out those letters to every small local ISP that they wouldn’t bother for Jane Rando who downloaded a few episodes here and there. Now that (in the US at least) most people use one of two or three ISPs who all have a cozy corporate relationship, it’s harder to fly under the radar. But if you have a good privacy-forward ISP it’s not a worry.

The Piracy Eras:

1. Pre-DMCA: The golden age of piracy, no one worried about anything. Music piracy was common, video files were way to large to bother with.
2. Post-DMCA: Possible prosecution from big copyright, but also hard to track individuals down, so not a lot of worry, but a lot of angst about it.
3. iTunes Music Store: Did more to end music piracy than any legal action. Cheap enough and easy enough that a lot of people stopped bothering. Pirate Bay for video, expect multi-day or week downloads.
4. Torrent tracking/poisoning and ISP consolidation: More prosecutions against small pirates put more of a damper on it.
5. Cheap Streaming: Did to everything what iTMS did to music piracy
6. Expensive Streaming: Now. Bringing back pirates, but people are more cautious due to 4.

I’m a simple man. Default Gnome on my desktop, i3 on my low end laptop. I don’t even really use the DE-ness of Gnome, I’m just too lazy to bother switching. On my laptop I also don’t even really need i3. kmscon + tmux would probably be fine except for those few times when I have to use a full browser for some stupid logon permissions or QR code jank.