What’s you use case here? If you just need more ports for data drives and have a free pcie slot a used SAS HBA cards and use breakout cables to give you a bunch more data ports. These are very durable cards.

Is bit keeper even still around anymore?

Ah gotcha. See if if your raid controller can be flashed/switched to IT mode(HP might call it something else) as then you won’t have to deal with the raid controller’s raid settings and doing anything weird. Then you can just rely on snapraid to manage the drives.

When you say raid 0 on the data disks do you mean just having the disks present as single disks and not putting them into arrays? As seeing raid 0 and data storage makes me very nervous.

And yeah I’d take a disk out of your boot array and then that into a raid 1 so you can use the extra for storage/ redundancy elsewhere.

Caddy + crowd sec + some kind of auth solution is what I’m aiming for though I haven’t got authentik working with it yet so I haven’t opened it up yet. I wouldn’t want to do jellyfish without the auth solution though as there local stuff isn’t so robust.

VPN in and a few local users would be the most secure if you haven’t got too many folks connecting.

The real alternative is to go all in on trains as electric trucks. Rubber on tarmac friction is so high that driving electric trucks long distance is super inefficient and giving them the batteries to match the ranges done by diesel trucks eats too much into cargo capacity to make them really worth it.

Sounds like a good idea.

I’d avoid super short USB drives if you can as they tend just to be SD cards in disguise.

If possible for dB stuff I would recommend using actual drives as lots of reads and writes will very quickly wear out most removable storage devices.

Is the privacy of their code that much of an issue in this case given its a public repo? Its going to get scraped by the bots regardless.

Proxmox and truenas for all my physical boxes and then Debian for all my VMs and LXCs. I’m not all that adventurous when it comes to OS choice as I found things that worked years ago and I’ve stick with them ever since as I’ve not seen anything that really looks like it does anything interesting/new that makes it worth switching.