Get a old workstation off of eBay and then modify it to add the stuff you need.

Highly flexible and cheap

The concern is that your device could start serving a different task without you knowing. It might end up being used to help mask hijacked Azure accounts for instance.

The biggest thing I can recommend is least privilege and defense in depth. You want your setup to be compartmentalized as much as possible and you should aim for minimal permissions. The idea is that even if a security hole is exploited the blast radius is limited.

You are probably fine. It is just something to keep in mind.

“They’re the same picture”

Not that I am saying it is bad necessarily. Cloudflare does add a extra level of protection. In fact I would say that the chances of a compromise go way down. My concerned is that a lack of knowledge could lead to a compromise.

Then why did you expose it to the internet?

I prefer VMs as I have found that LXC containers are buggy and slow.

I never said it wasn’t possible. It just is not a good idea.

You want proper SAS as that is a interface that is designed to talk to drives. USB is not optimized for that and it comes with some overhead. The biggest issue with USB is that the addressing is easy to screw up. Devices may disconnect and reconnect at random which is normally part of USB. However, this will cause ZFS to panic as it sees this as a hardware problem.

Your setup is definitely “non standard”

I would strongly look into proper SAS or Sata. USB is not designed for what you are doing. Also writing a long comment comment about how you have been in tech for decades does not make your setup any less crazy. I can not understate that a standard setup would be way better.

Do not disassemble a UPS for any reason. That is a good way to die.

If you are just wiping it down and changing the battery that is fine but don’t do more than that.

Oh my do not do this USB can be very fragile and you array might just implode one day.

Go get yourself 2-3 servers and then load them each with some drives. From there setup Ceph and profit.

You are doing this all wrong

If you are trying to use more than 50 devices you need to rethink your setup. USB isn’t designed for that.

Maybe?

Or maybe people are just blindly upvoting

Best solution is using a mesh VPN service like Tailscale or Netbird

In short:

• It is a major security risk. At the bare minimum you want to setup a reverse proxy and a certificate with Let’s encrypt

• Your uptime is dependent on your Internet connection and hardware

Are you hosting a Static site? If so I would look into IPFS.

Don’t do that

Get a VPS and host it there.

It is also useful to stop silent corruption

Also it is easier to hit replace

My point is you can make Dockerfiles do a lot of things

Anything can be a docker container

What are you asking?

Pick up a bunch of used low cost drives and create a new pool.