NaibofTabr

however, i know nothing about self hosting. My knowledge is absolutely zero […] I dont understand nothing

This is going to be a problem, unfortunately. You’ll need to define your use case first:

• How much music do you want to have access to? Hundreds, thousands, millions of files? How large is your collection?
• Do you have downloaded copies of all the music you want to listen to? Are they all in one place, well organized and tagged? If you just have downloads in the Spotify app, you won’t be able to use those files, you don’t actually own that music. You’ll need DRM-free audio files.
• Where and how do you want to be able to access them? Just from one device like your phone? Many devices? Is having access at home good enough, or do you want to be able to access your collection while you’re away from home?
• Will you be the only user?
• What kind of budget do you have to work with?

An old PC might be enough to act as a server, but there’s more involved and the answer to what you need depends on what exactly you want to do. You will not be able to build a personal version of Spotify with just an old PC, for instance.

Never use a spreadsheet to do a database job.

A long wire is an antenna that will gather electromagnetic noise from the air and turn it into random signal on the line. Shorter wires will be less responsive and therefore less noisy, and you can also mitigate the problem by grounding everything properly. It’s also possible that with the wires in that parallel ribbon, they may induce crosstalk on each other. If you want to be really careful, you could replace that big ribbon cable with an STP cable and ground the shielding jacket.

Also, a noisy/low quality power input to the Pi will produce noise in its circuits and ultimately the output. If you can, supply the power from something better than a wall wart.

You could always try Red Star OS

Hmm…

hmm…

Someone else has mentioned M-Disc and I want to second that. The benefit of using a storage format like this is that the actual storage media is designed to last a long time, and it is separate from the drive mechanism. This is a very important feature - the data is safe from mechanical or electrical failure because the storage is independent of the drive. If your drive dies, you can replace it with no risk to the data. Every serious form of archival data storage is the same - the storage media is separate from the reading device.

An M-Disc drive is required to write data, but any DVD or BD drive can read the data. It should be possible to acquire a replacement DVD drive to recover the data from secondary markets (eBay) for a very long time if necessary, even after they’re no longer manufactured.

Yes, it’s the link in my comment above.

PenDriveLinux or rufus or balena etcher (frequently just referred to as “etcher”) or just dd.

The times doesn’t pay you royalties for your book sales, and it doesn’t cost you anything.

Of course they don’t pay, but getting on the list is fantastic advertising for your book and that pays.

They also detect if someone is messing with the system and display a dagger symbol if you are found to inflate your numbers.

Jack Rhysider’s research on this indicates otherwise.

This is basically the same way you get on the NYT bestseller list - buy your own books.

Thanks for pointing this out, I missed it. The book’s listing on CrowdSupply has an update from her from April of this year, so that makes me feel a bit better.

Is she OK? I’d like to believe that, but as far as I know nothing’s been heard from her for more than a year.

Maybe it’s time to start funding software infrastructure the way we fund physical infrastructure - with tax dollars.

This assumes that

1. There’s a process to read.

2. The steps in the process are complete and thorough.

Those are bad assumptions.

Yeah, this is a loss for user privacy.

It’s costing them money, and they’re not sure they’re going to get it back.

Metronet will be supplying an Optical Network Terminal, probably like this one:

This is basically the equivalent of a modem for cable networks. It does not provide routing functions. You’re probably stuck with the ONT they supply, but it shouldn’t matter much, definitely not for anything internal.

It looks like Metronet normally supplies Eero WiFi mesh devices for home networking - are the ones you currently have supplied by Metronet? They might just replace the modem with the ONT and leave the existing Eero gear, or they might upgrade the Eero gear to support the higher speed available on the fiber network.

In any case, if you are using ISP-supplied network devices then you don’t control the router, which means you can’t set up things like port forwarding to access your home network from outside, or configure VLANs to segregate devices on your network, or control things like DHCP.

Technically there’s no reason you have to use the Eero devices from Metronet, you should be able to plug any router into the ONT WAN port and have internet service. If you don’t want to get too deep into network config, then any modern consumer WiFi router will work (but not a modem/router AIO device). If you want to have a bit more control, look for one that supports OpenWRT.

Believe it or not, I can be concerned about both.

The difference is, the place where I live has some data privacy regulations which actually get enforced, and I have some legal recourse against organizations which mishandle my data. China does not have such regulations and I do not have any recourse against organizations based there, so my risk from them is significantly higher.

Or just reinstalls it in the next update.

You’re welcome. I tried to do basically the same thing a few years back (run a WordPress site from a RPi on my home network - and also a Minecraft server) and so I tried to write up the problems I ran into - I probably forgot some, but those are the major hurdles. I learned a lot along the way.

I should also point out that if you rent hosting space (from linode or inmotion or digitalocean or many other options) then problems 1 & 4 become much easier, and 2 & 3 go away entirely (most people don’t host public websites on their home networks because of these and other issues).

Happy to help. If you’re interested in learning networking more thoroughly, I want to point you to Professor Messer especially the Network+ content. He has far more complete explanations than I could write (and it’s free!). Even if you’re not interested in getting any certs, the explanations will be helpful.