DigitalDilemma

I don’t think I can agree with that, and I’m a pretty agreeable chap.

In the days when people actually cared about the html layout and readability, FP spammed everything hugely, and inserted a lot of terrible cruft. Inventing zillions of new <style> tags for everything, even when the user just wanted to italicise a word. Use a <i> tag? No! We’ll invent a whole new style class and embed it in the headers.

A few years ago I rather stupidly agreed to take over hosting of a website for someone that was dying. It had been written with FP and it took me months to de-cruft it using a lot of regexp and scrifting. (Some 8,000 images and around 2000 .html files).

It’s only true if it’s enforced, isn’t it?

Still the linux sysadmin’s language of choice!

Laughs in perl

For the arr stack, I run Jellyfin-server, radarr, prowlarr, jellyseer and sonarr in containers using docker compose. For updates, I just crontab a script once a week that does a “docker compose down && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d” in each of the compose directories.

Bit of faff setting everything up, but once it’s done, it’s very solid.

How we’ve done it recently:

1. Put domain on cloudflare or another registrar that supports an API. Generate a token with the right privs.
2. Use certbot with the cloudflare plugin, and that token, and generate whatever certs you need within that domain using the DNS01 method.

No need to have port 80 open to the world, no need for a reverse proxy, no need for NAT rules to point it to the right machine, no need to even have DNS set up for the hostname. All of that BS is removed.

The token proves your authentication and LetsEncrypt will generate the certs.

Maintaining perl scripts from the 90s is my ball park!

Mind, I did write some of them, and they’re still whirring away making it a pretty easy job. Perl’s lack of breaking features is its strongest strength.

It’s fine, but not going to be the cheapest.

Cheap to buy: Any old PC desktop, really. Most will run linux and windows fine, depending on what you want. Anywhere from free to £100. If you have an old desktop or laptop already, use that to start with.

Cheap to run: Any mini PC. I run a Lenovo ThinkCentre M53 for low power duties. Cost £40 and runs silently at 10watts, idle. (I have a secondary, much beefier server for other stuff that runs at around 100w which lives in the garage)

But plenty of people do run mac minis as home servers, often on Linux. They’re fine - just do your homework on the CPU ability, how much ram you can add, and whether you’re okay with external disks if you can’t fit enough inside.

As you say, lots of spicy food options. Our National Dish is actually a curry - chicken masala and Phall, the hottest curry, was invented in Birmingham.

Also - in the picture are baked beans. They’re invented in the USA. We adopted them, but they’re not ours.

What’s really insane is that sometimes the second identical test actually works.