The Culture. Part of me seriously doubts he’s actually read it himself, like you’re saying.

I haven’t gotten that far yet, currently on Inversions. I think Veppers comes later.

Possibly…the counterexample is tech CEOs jetting off to Burning Man, tripping balls for a week, and coming up with app ideas for things nobody actually needs.

Musk has used a lot of drugs, including psychedelics.

Currently I’m in the middle of what’s apparently one of his favorite book series…communism, post-scarcity, and frequent gender changing are featured front and center.

The “everybody should take psychedelics” argument maybe carried some weight in the 60s when the “squares” were the ones in the way. (Though I still kinda doubt that because look who so many of those “free love” boomers turned into).

But the Republicans of today are not the same as they were then. They are partying, smoking weed, and doing a whole lot of other drugs including psychedelics. It’s possible to eat drugs, realize some profound things, become incredibly self-actualized, and be so addicted to power that it doesn’t really matter anyways.

Or just be so narcissistic that you just ignore the things you read in a book or think about on your acid trip and just carry on…

I don’t doubt the research into psychedelics, and their power on an individual level to help people work through things in a therapeutic way. I am starting to doubt the idea that “if everyone just tripped one time the world would be a better place”.

Yes, what you’re saying is the idea, and why I went with this setup.

I am running raidz2 on all my arrays, so I can pull any 2 disks from an array and my data is still there.

Currently I have 3 arrays of 8 disks each, organized into a single pool.

You can set similar up with any raid system, but so far Truenas has been rock solid and intuitive to me. My gripes are mostly around the (long) journey to “just Docker” for services. The parts of the UI / system that deals with storage seems to have a high focus on reliability / durability.

Latest version of Truenas supports Docker as “apps” where you can input all config through the UI. I prefer editing the config as yaml, so the only “app” I installed is Dockge. It lets me add Docker compose stacks, so I edit the compose files and run everything through Dockge. Useful as most arrs have example Docker compose files.

For hardware I went with just an off-the-shelf desktop motherboard, and a case with 8 hot swap bays. I also have an HBA expansion card connected via PCI, with two additional 8 bay enclosures on the backplane. You can start with what you need now (just the single case/drive bays), and expand later (raidz expansion makes this easier, since it’s now possible to add disks to an existing array).

If I was going to start over, I might consider a proper rack with a disk tray enclosure.

You do want a good amount of RAM for zfs.

For boot, I recommend a mirror at least two of the cheapest SSD you can find each in an enclosure connected via USB. Boot doesn’t need to be that fast. Do not use thumb drives unless you’re fine with replacing them every few months.

For docker services, I recommend a mirror of two reasonable size SSDs. Jellyfin/Plex in particular benefit from an SSD for loading metadata. And back up the entire services partition (dataset) to your pool regularly. If you don’t splurge for a mirror, at least do the backups. (Can you tell who previously had the single SSD running all of his services fail on him?)

For torrents I am considering a cache SSD that will simply exist for incoming, incomplete torrents. They will get moved to the pool upon completion. This reduces fragmentation in the pool, since ZFS cannot defragment. Currently I’m using the services mirror SSDs for that purpose. This is really a long-term concern. I’ve run my pool for almost 10 years now, and most of the time wrote incomplete torrents directly to the pool. Performance still seems fine.

Now that Truenas Scale supports just plain Docker (and it’s running on Debian) I think it’s a great option for an all-in-one media box. I’ve had my complaints with Truenas over the years, but it’s done a really great job at preventing me from shooting myself in the foot when it comes to my data.

I believe raidz expansion is also now in stable (though still better to do a bit of planning for your pool before pulling the trigger).