I feel pretty comfortable asking questions IRL because over many years I’ve had two friends who are openly Trans. But I want to show some support for the community, so here we go:

A train leaves the station at 9pm… 😆

Love and Respect.

Aha, I see. My friends lived in North Hollywood at the time. I really don’t know the layout or anything beyond that. But the county being huge sounds familiar and would make sense if this varies a lot.

I guess things changed since two decades ago? What happened to give you guys safe water? In 2002, my friends in LA bought jugs of bottled water at the store because by the time it was piped down, all kinds of nasty shit had leached into it.

If you have anything exposed, scripts and bots are testing your server all day, every day. So long as you’ve got proper security in place, ignore the failed attempts.

You and I are lucky to have quality tap water. I live in the Bay Area and our water is awesome. Go down to LA and it’s poison.

Not at all during my lifetime.

I don’t think the majority of people here would be happy if that happened.

Check out https://www.servethehome.com/. I imagine you’ll find some useful info there.

You can rent a virtual private server (VPS). I used to have a number of these for under $10 / month. I imagine they might cost more now., but chances are you can still find something super affordable.

Wordpress.org will let you have a free site but you don’t get a custom domain. Wordpress.com has a personal plan for $4 / month. Matt Mullenweg (CEO) has revealed himself to be a crazy piece of shit, so maybe look elsewhere. I’m just trying to give you a sense of how accessible this stuff can be.

Running a VPS will require more learning, but it can be super gratifying if you enjoy nerdy computer stuff and solving puzzles just for self-satisfaction. I used to use Rackspace, Linode, and something else that I can’t recall at the moment. All were pretty reasonable. Rackspace had a ton of good setup guides for newbies that were well written. I’d occasionally land on those doing a web search for other hosting stuff and found them reliable.

Edit: DigitalOcean was the one I couldn’t remember.

IRC

I’m a fan of pfSense, myself. But other suggestions here for OSes have been reasonable. I have a netgate router feeding an eero wap with a second wap creating a bridged wifi network. Future-proofing with 10GB on a wired switch if a good idea. I got a pair of Unifi 2.5GB switches with 10GB uplink for that. The difference in performance moving large data around is massive. I have 10GB between my primary machine, the one that I run as my always-on server, and my NAS. It’s awesome. Everything else is 2.5GB.

Edit: made one bit plural

12.8TB. Mostly uncompressed rips from Blu-rays, some DVDs, some from iTunes Store. Some from the high seas, but not in a long time because the market solved that problem with streaming.

Go sucky? All right, rascist dev. Me love you long time! /s

This is the true answer, hence I don’t need to sarcastically form my own.

Mod kids and punk kids used to hang out. So you could ask a punk to put you in touch. At least, that’s what I gather after watching SLC Punk (which is really good, btw).

I don’t have opensource solutions, but CloudFlare had some news about a system that I didn’t read about (saw two headlines) last week. Dunno if it works or not.

Open source software is a minor miracle. I consider the people who give away their hard work saints. That doesn’t mean they can’t also be assholes. We have a bunch of different distributions of multiple full-featured operating systems. Credit where credit is due.

Cool, more power to you.

My Synology is compatible with an expansion unit and can support two of them. Check if yours can do the same for the storage aspect.

If you get a NAS with 10G (it’s such a nice upgrade, I made the jump last year), there’s no reason a nice NUC can’t do the job. I went that route after previously running significantly overpowered server hardware ten years ago. We have an embarrassment of riches with modern hardware.