In my state (Vermont), the Secretary of State has an rss feed that basically presents the results as an xml file. I’m using that to make some local results spreadsheets. Could be other states have similar things.

My use of Mikrotik is somewhat limited, but I’m testing I’ve found routing between VLANs to be pretty performant. The key is to offload that routing to the hardware, which not all configurations allow. Check out the Network Berg’s YouTube channel and you should get a good idea.

You’ve got some decent answers already, but since you’re getting interested in ZFS, I wanted to make sure you know about discourse.practicalzfs.com. It’s the successor to the ZFS subreddit and it’s a great place to get expert advice.

There’s a utility called logrotate that should take care of the log rotation for you.

Good luck getting it all set up.

I think you can deal with this by installing either rsyslog or syslog-ng and iptables. They all should be in the repos. Once you’ve go those set up it should supersede the equivalent systemd utilities.

I’ve never heard anyone else mention them, but I’ve had really good luck with https://www.ssdnodes.com for the past several years. I don’t recall ever using their support, but I did have a policy question before buying when I first signed up and they were pretty quick to reply. I think I found them on LowEndBox.

I haven’t noticed anyone else bring it up, but you mentioned in passing the possibility of using a RAID 0. I’d avoid that except in very specific circumstances. They’re potentially fine for a scratch disk type of scenario, but if any member of the array fails, the whole array is toast. The chances of a failure increases with was each disk added, so a RAID 0 is less reliable than a single disk. I definitely wouldn’t want to trust my family’s photos to it.

This is excellent timing for me. I was just taking a break from working on setting up whisper.cpp with a web front end to transcribe interviews. This is a much nicer package than I ever had a chance of pulling together. Nice work!

I think there’s an Odoo module that does this. Might be overkill for just that, though.

If you’re not familiar with it, check out lowendbox.com. You can very often find good deals there; not all of them are reliable in the long run, but I’ve found several hosts that have been just great.

Check into Cloudflare tunnel or Tailscale funnel. Those are two of essentially the same type of product that take out most of the work of getting you around CGNAT.

You can do this with something like Nextcloud. Just set up a folder shared by a link and you’re able to make it a drop box of sorts that anyone can upload to.

Obviously, be careful allowing arbitrary uploads from the whole internet. I’d set a time limit on the share so people can’t upload junk forever.

The folks replying here have pretty much hit the nail on the head. Adding your home network to that AllowedIPs line in the confit file should do the trick.

Someone else mentioned Tailscale, which would be another great option—with a web UI to dial in routes.

There’s not a lot of information to go on here, but my first thought is that you haven’t configured your VPN to route to the local network. So, while you may be getting a connection to the VPN server, your computer doesn’t know where to send traffic for Cockpit.

There is usually a way to push those routes to the client from your con server.

I think you can do this with key files and a systemd-timer at boot. I’m not near a machine right now to post how I’ve done it in the past, but I’ll try to remember to come back to this when I can.

It may be helpful to know that the former r/zfs community has migrated to a Discourse server at practicalzfs.com. Might be worth asking there for some expert advice.

One more option to consider would be doing HA with shared ZFS storage. Basically, if you have a zpool on each system with the same name and add it as shared storage, you can set up replication and have HA run off that. It’s a pretty simple setup and you can get by with just a couple extra disks per node rather than a whole separate machine.