October 17, 2025: This issue is heavy on computing topics. I document the steps I took to recover my home server. A new Meshtastic device and an old MacBook Air laptop are also discussed.
I lost my wife way too young to disease so I know the fear that you are going through. My thoughts are with you. I'll kick some to your gofundme come payday. Best of luck to Janis!
I have tried not to share that part of this experience, but yes, it is perhaps the most hopeless and helpless I've felt in this lifetime. We are literally coping with this moment to moment, always hoping for signs of recovery...but not seeing them yet. As you know, it is horribly difficult to watch a loved one go through something like this.
Janis deserves all the good luck she can get. She has been a giving, loving human to many people: students, friends, family. She did 90% of the work taking care of my mother for two years. It doesn't make sense that this happened to such a wonderful person.
As noted in my last comment, they've been able to keep my FreeBSD host (thisoldhost.com) up for over 6.75 years without a reboot. They are a solid provider and have interesting pricing.
Ooh! Spaces pricing doesn't look bad at all: $5/mo for 250 gigs. And I laughed when I read the rhyme on thisoldhost.com. TY! Mr. Ed was one of favorites growing up.
"..bout as close to Windows as you might wish to get, but with a solid Linux engine .."
Now I'm a BSD guy at heart, and Linux has come a long way but I do have to say that modern Windows servers (say Server 2016 and above) are a solid OS. They also have the one thing that all other OSs are missing, that's integration with Active Directory and GPOs. I won't go into all the reasons why this is important to corporations, but believe me on this one. But Windows Server is really robust now. I should know since $dayjob is watching over about 400 servers around the globe and making the templates for deployment. But I still run my FreeBSD boxes. I have one on a Digital Oceans VM that has an uptime of 2.471 days. But the old trope that Windows is a crap OS is no longer true, at least from the server side of thing. Now for non-server stuff that needs Windows, I always load an LTSC version, and then still end up cleaning stuff out. https://massgrave.dev/ is your friend for that. I did try running Windows Server 2022 on a laptop but trying to dig up all the drivers (servers don't expect sound cards or wifi) made that a task.
Sure, Windows isn't free, but it's not a crap OS anymore, at least from the server side.
I surely did not mean to imply that Windows was crap. It certainly isn't. Yes, I've managed Windows servers (a few, nothing like you) and they are generally rock solid, at least in my limited experience. Windows on the desktop, well, those platforms are far more variable on the hardware side and in how they are utilized.
I think it is easy to forget one of the great things that Microsoft did, and that was crafting software and firmware that would work on a wide variety of platforms. Apple builds their software to work on their own, very limited hardware suite. Not so with Microsoft. That expansion of hardware choices spawned a huge amount of innovation, independent experimentation, and adaptation. While it is sometimes easy to complain about Microsoft and Windows, that's true of any large enterprise, whether it be a private company, a nonprofit, or government. We like to poke at success.
I'll take a look at massgrave.dev and I thank you for sharing that link.
Meanwhile, I'll keep exploring Linux, although now you have me wondering about FreeBSD (https://www.freebsd.org/). I'm not going to upgrade my ThinkStation P510 to Win11 because of the Xeon CPU, and that means I need to select another OS that can function as a straight up server plus some virtualization...which I see FreeBSD has :-)
Well, on that hardware I'd be running a VMware ESXi host. I can help you with that if you wish. Then you can run various VMs as you wish. I have old ESXi 6.7 licences to get you started.
I lost my wife way too young to disease so I know the fear that you are going through. My thoughts are with you. I'll kick some to your gofundme come payday. Best of luck to Janis!
I have tried not to share that part of this experience, but yes, it is perhaps the most hopeless and helpless I've felt in this lifetime. We are literally coping with this moment to moment, always hoping for signs of recovery...but not seeing them yet. As you know, it is horribly difficult to watch a loved one go through something like this.
Janis deserves all the good luck she can get. She has been a giving, loving human to many people: students, friends, family. She did 90% of the work taking care of my mother for two years. It doesn't make sense that this happened to such a wonderful person.
You might want to check out Digital Oceans S3 type storage: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/details/pricing/
As noted in my last comment, they've been able to keep my FreeBSD host (thisoldhost.com) up for over 6.75 years without a reboot. They are a solid provider and have interesting pricing.
Ooh! Spaces pricing doesn't look bad at all: $5/mo for 250 gigs. And I laughed when I read the rhyme on thisoldhost.com. TY! Mr. Ed was one of favorites growing up.
"..bout as close to Windows as you might wish to get, but with a solid Linux engine .."
Now I'm a BSD guy at heart, and Linux has come a long way but I do have to say that modern Windows servers (say Server 2016 and above) are a solid OS. They also have the one thing that all other OSs are missing, that's integration with Active Directory and GPOs. I won't go into all the reasons why this is important to corporations, but believe me on this one. But Windows Server is really robust now. I should know since $dayjob is watching over about 400 servers around the globe and making the templates for deployment. But I still run my FreeBSD boxes. I have one on a Digital Oceans VM that has an uptime of 2.471 days. But the old trope that Windows is a crap OS is no longer true, at least from the server side of thing. Now for non-server stuff that needs Windows, I always load an LTSC version, and then still end up cleaning stuff out. https://massgrave.dev/ is your friend for that. I did try running Windows Server 2022 on a laptop but trying to dig up all the drivers (servers don't expect sound cards or wifi) made that a task.
Sure, Windows isn't free, but it's not a crap OS anymore, at least from the server side.
(Posted from my iMac.)
-Joe w7com
I surely did not mean to imply that Windows was crap. It certainly isn't. Yes, I've managed Windows servers (a few, nothing like you) and they are generally rock solid, at least in my limited experience. Windows on the desktop, well, those platforms are far more variable on the hardware side and in how they are utilized.
I think it is easy to forget one of the great things that Microsoft did, and that was crafting software and firmware that would work on a wide variety of platforms. Apple builds their software to work on their own, very limited hardware suite. Not so with Microsoft. That expansion of hardware choices spawned a huge amount of innovation, independent experimentation, and adaptation. While it is sometimes easy to complain about Microsoft and Windows, that's true of any large enterprise, whether it be a private company, a nonprofit, or government. We like to poke at success.
I'll take a look at massgrave.dev and I thank you for sharing that link.
Meanwhile, I'll keep exploring Linux, although now you have me wondering about FreeBSD (https://www.freebsd.org/). I'm not going to upgrade my ThinkStation P510 to Win11 because of the Xeon CPU, and that means I need to select another OS that can function as a straight up server plus some virtualization...which I see FreeBSD has :-)
Well, on that hardware I'd be running a VMware ESXi host. I can help you with that if you wish. Then you can run various VMs as you wish. I have old ESXi 6.7 licences to get you started.