DontTakeMySky

• what partitions do linux distros need to function ?

Many guides will suggest setting up separate partitions for a bunch of different Linux directories. It’s not strictly necessary to make things work properly. You can totally do it all on one partition (in addition to your windows one I mean). If you want to try something more fancy then keep a separate home partition, but honestly don’t worry about it much unless a guide or installer is suggesting it.

• is it bad idea to install linux on a single drive in its own partition ?

Nah. One big Linux partition isnt a bad thing and is a lot easier to grasp when starting out. (Though for dual boot you’ll need the windows partition somewhere still)

• what precautions should I take other than backing up my hard drive before doing dual boot ?

Backups are the main thing. Maybe a list of useful Windows software you have installed, just in case you accidentally break your install and can’t boot in to check what you had installed.

Make Windows recovery media and a windows install disk if you don’t have one. Just in case you need to go back and reinstall it can help avoid trying to do that without a working machine.

Test with a live usb first too. That way you can at least boot into the live Usb if things fail. And you will already have it prepared.

• How can I ensure my dual boot linux install won’t touch my windows partition at all if I install dual boot linux ?

I think you could mount your windows partition as read only if that’s a concern. I don’t expect any Linux distros to mess with anything though unless you’re reckless about running install scripts.

• Is there anything else I should be aware about ?

Linux guides vary between “here’s a hack to just make it work” all the way to “here’s a perfect Torvalds-Approved perfect bomb proof 100page configuration guide”. Make sure you know what you’re looking for first and don’t get too caught up on making everything perfect. Focus on keeping good backups so you can restart from scratch if you ever need to. You’ll probably end up trying a few Linux distros over the next few years anyway.

It really isnt bad. I do most of my computer at home so I really only need a small cloud box to pipe things through when needed.

And I could reduce the B2 price a lot with some deduping of my data, but that’s an ongoing and painfully slow process since I was too reckless with my local backups in the past, so $7 to avoid that process is worth it.

And for electric I suspect it’s pretty low. I’m running 3 raspberry pi, a 4 bay NAS, and one micro PC and I live in an area with pretty cheap electric already. I think my gaming machine probably takes more power in a few hours than the rest of the system does in a day.

I largely run raspberry pis so my electric costs are likely minimal (I’ve never calculated it). Besides that:

• PIA VPN: ~$4/mo

• Digital Ocean Droplet + Backup snapshots: $7/mo

• Domains: ~$25/year

• Backblaze B2 backups: $7/mo

How long are folks planning to wait before migrating to something new? I suspect this is still safe for at least a few months before things fall out of date, right?

Or I guess it allows wire guard to update freely so it’s probably safe until something specifically breaks.

Just be careful you don’t get their “smarthome” line, at least for cameras. It doesn’t require Internet to operate, but it requires Internet for configuration and management.

I’m not sure if that’s the same with their doorbells, but it was true of their wifi cameras.

I wonder if you could copy (or buy used) some crypto mining rigs for this. I’m not sure if there’s some kind of bottleneck im not aware of though.

That’s a shame. I didn’t realize it was that locked down. Ive had a lot of terrible routers but all the ones I remember allowed me at least a port forward.

I think OP can accomplish some of the same result if he can get a cheap VPS to connect through (have the laptop Wireguard to the VPS, then have a proxy on the VPS forward to the laptop over the VPN, but that’s probably not worth the hassle for a starter project unfortunately.

With most consumer wifi networks you can usually enable port forwarding. That would let you access services from anywhere.

Personally I would set up a Wireguard VPN server on the laptop and enable port forwarding only for the Wireguard port. This will let you access your laptop from anywhere, and it will protect you by limiting your attack surface (basically you only need to have a device Wireguard connection and you don’t need to worry as much about securing every other service you want to run).

Then I’d set up dynamic DNS with any DNS provider so you don’t need to keep track of a changing IP.

Then you can install whatever services you want on the laptop and you’ll be able to access them from anywhere by connecting to the Wireguard VPN. It does mean you can’t easily let a friend access a service on your laptop, but the tradeoff is you don’t have to worry as much about security while you’re learning.

Technically I run OpenHAB not HA, but I’ve struggled with this too.

I’ve been wanting to dockerize my Openhab for a while but have found similar issues with compatibility and network discoverability so I’ve avoided it. My current setup is their official Raspberry Pi os (openhabian), with a Conbee II via Zigbee2mqtt for zigbee with Hue, Tradfri and Sonoff devices an Aeotec Zstick Gen5 (no plus) for Zwave with mostly Zooz devices, way too many WiFi devices (mostly TPLink Kasa) and probably some other things I’ve forgotten.

To be honest though I haven’t fully nailed reliability. It works for months straight with no issues but every so often I get a bug that requires resetting a device or two, or an update stomping over my SSL certs, or some intermittent slowness, but it’s reliable enough. I specifically avoid any cameras or security devices (beyond some door sensors for non-security reasons) so that I don’t have the headache of high reliability.

The whole setup is a patchwork of whatever happened to work at the time and wasn’t prohibitively expensive for me. I decided a long time ago that the flexibility was worth more than paying a bunch more for a single highly reliable system.

It sucks, but it works better than manually switching on my lights all the time, so it’s good enough for me.

But would this policy actually prevent that? A vandal in a community of 100 people would only be charged 1% of the repair fees (assuming they aren’t caught), seems like a meaningless disincentive for them.

And forcing community members to self-police or be charged fees is asking for trouble.

Personally I like to keep my data on a separate system because it helps me keep it stable and secure compared to my more “fun” servers.

That said, being able to run compute on the same server as storage removes a bit of hassle.

While you’re getting started, put anything effemeral in Docker and keep anything meant to be persistent on the host directly.

Docker is great, but the number of times I’ve accidentally blown away data before I learned what I was doing… Just give it some practice before you put anything out there that you can’t remake quickly.