You probably have heard all the LG smart tv shenanigans... I took the wifi card out of mine today and it was pretty straightforward. So here's your reminder if you've been meaning to do it.

The family flew over the week. Multiple flights, three devices streaming from the movie server. No issues.

***Update

I did not expect my post to attract so many comments, so here is an update.

Why would I travel with this:

I made this a while back and we have used it on our car trips that are usually around 5-6 hours long. I do not want to download and load content on 3+ devices just to hear one of my kids whine that he wants to watch something that his sibling is watching, but I did not install on his tablet. We used to use Disney + and I used to download movies to each tablet (it was great). The only reason I created this is because Disney kept logging us out (even when the tablets were in airplane mode and not connected to the internet). I hated having to log all devices back in, wait on emails with confirmation numbers and go through the whole shit show of this happening up in the air with no internet to re-connect the Disney account.

Hardware:

I am using a super old 500gb HDD from an old laptop that I disassembled a long time ago. Energizer UE30029PQ for the battery pack, and for the router I am using gl mt3000. This battery pack can easily support this for 15+ hours of streaming. I did not know that it was such an overkill when I bought it, but it is great that I do not have to have it plugged and use the pass through when we are in the car.

Software:

I am only using the router's shared network device option to share the folders with movies and tv shows. I have used the SMB protocol within the router settings. The kids have android tablets with Kodi installed on them. That way they can get posters and a nice presentation. Our other devices use VLC. The kids have access to the one folder with kid movies, while the other devices have access to everything.

There are probably 100 more ways of accomplishing what I built, but I did not want to run a server on a Pi as I am not familiar with Linux. Also, I did not want to run a server from my laptop as we almost always travel without it. This has serviced us well. If I had to change anything, I would probably get a SSD (or a large flash drive) to replace the HDD, but I do not want to spend the money with the current hardware prices.

Hopefully, the above answers some of the questions that I could not answer within the comments.

PS.

Different airline companies have different rules for battery packs. The one we flew with allows for the battery pack use as long as it is not in use during taxi, take-off and landing. The charging of the battery pack itself is not allowed.
I was not aware of this, but apparently creating a Wi-Fi network while flying is not allowed. Note taken. I will not use this while flying any more. I just wanted to put this out here, so others are aware of this. Still, this will be our go to during our long car trips.

It’s wild what people throw away these days! Even being on the older end I’ve found a lot of HDDs I’ve been able to add to my storage, RAM, etc. The ASUS RoG laptop just needed a $25 battery off Amazon and still has decent enough specs for casual gaming for my son.

Absolute Insanity

Found some hdds in the dumpster where everyone can throw things away. I took it and found EVERYTHING!!!

IDs

Driver license

All stored passwords and emails in a text file

Bank statements

Iban cc infos etc

Social security number

And that he moved her 3 months ago with his 4 year old child called paul.

Nsfw stuff i dont wanna open ever again

Now that i have his data i could destroy his life only because you are to fucking lazy do wipe your data.

My cyber security heart needs now a peace maker thanks man.

I inform him per letter with a small copy of his data that he is a fucking idiot and how he protect and delete his data the right way.

Hope he has pooped his pants after that and never did that again

ok genuine love for everyone here but lets be honest for a sec. the number of people who buy a 40u rack, two r730s and a populated disk shelf to run pihole, jellyfin for an audience of one, and a minecraft server nobody logs into is kind of the whole joke at this point.

i did it too. had a poweredge screaming in my closet pulling ~180w idle to do work my n100 mini pc now does at 12w. the rack was definately cool for photos. the power bill was not. my "lab" was 90% idle 100% of the time.

theres two hobbies in here sharing one name. one is "im learning enterprise gear for my career / i actually run heavy workloads", totally valid, the loud expensive stuff makes sense. the other is "i like buying servers and photographing them", which is also fine, but lets not pretend thats about uptime or efficiency. its a collection. its lego for adults with a monthly power tax.

what bugs me is a newcomer shows up asking what to buy to start and the answer is always more. buy the rack, buy used enterprise, get 10gbe. beacuse more is the fun part i guess. when the honest answer for like 80% of them is one mini pc and two drives does everything they listed and fits in a drawer.

idk, not trying to gatekeep the other way either. just feels like the sub measures itself in rack units and watts when the actual flex should be doing more with less. my whole stack is a $150 mini pc now and i do not miss the noise

anyway downvote away, i can hear the r730 owners warming up

Look I don't know what it's like for the rest of you in other parts of the world. But we are getting close to 7¢ a Gig for most HDD space that's at or above like 8tb. And SSD space is running at about 22¢ a GB. Is this the norm everywhere for the rest of you? If so. HOW TF do y'all afford a new home lab rn? I want out of all my subscription services. But buying enough drive space that would give me a decent library and then enough for redundancy alone would take me about 2.5 years of monthly streaming services to see a return on investment. And that's before the machine it's running on. I hate streaming services SO MUCH but storage is KILLING ME.

Today, that exact same RAM is $450. https://a.co/d/0dwj9b9q

Have had the Evo about 15 years now, and the Mustang is the wife’s project. Rack has 3 tiny Lenovos, some unifi networking gear, my NAS, and a HP dl360p g8 for proxmox fun.

I've seen it in other subreddits. Post after post where someone (AI) built something. I'm sorry but I'm not interested in that tool you asked AI to build. This is r/homelab. I want to see racks, NUCs, gutted laptops with Proxmox on it. Heck, clustered over WiFi, why not.

But this subreddit is (IMHO) not a collection of AI tools that OP can't debug, let alone maintain.

Can "I built this tool" and all equivalents be forbidden in r/homelab?

TL;DR: I finally did something about this loop for my own personal accounts by getting a Yubikey and putting it into my main Google account. If you have suggestions for getting out of this loop another way, feel free to discuss. Im curious what others do.
--------

Story: Monday, our Apartment buildings fire alarms all start going off like crazy at 12AM. I groggily wake up, get myself in order, grab the TrueNAS from the server rack, kiss my homelab goodbye and leave. Thankfully, false alarm. No fire, just a power outage that then somehow triggered the fire alarms to go off. whatever.

While I was driving around aimlessly after being told it was a false alarm, I was thinking to myself:
If everything I owned burned down, how would I get back into my accounts? Which led to me making this meme in my head and trying to figure out where the break from it was but I couldnt find one. it was just a revolving issue.

Last night I pulled the trigger on a Yubikey and after getting it added to my main google account, I did a dry run on an old wiped phone I had as if it was a brand new phone I got and needed to log into my gmail account. Sure enough, i was able to get into my Google account with the Yubikey and then from there could get into google password manager which has my bitwarden master pass, then the 2fa for that is in my google authenticator.

One thing relies on the other, then on the next then on the next etc, etc, etc. ugh.

Anyone else run into this issue? What do you guys do?

Edit: Wow, this was an interesting post. But I guess what came out of it was that there is no singular answer to how to break the cycle. You can either do what I do and use a Yubikey as a FIDO/2 key or you can physically copy your password onto a backup piece of paper, put it in a fireproof safe or have some recovery setup through bitwarden using external trusted family members in the off chance you're locked out.
Ultimately, it comes down to just having an external copy of your password or whatever to gain access to your account. Just do it in a manner that works best for you while keeping it secure.

Now...for all the people saying just memorize it.....if that works for you, more power to you. But I will certainly not be doing that. Im happy with my randomly generated password and I will keep it that way. Keep crying.

So my process (for anyone curious) is:
- Have yubikey attached to my Google account
- When i go to sign in, choose "try other method"
- Click on "Passkeys"
- Choose "Other passkey"
- Then I plug in my Yubikey, it authenticates against that and asks for the pin I setup, put in the pin
- Then im able to get back into my account without needing to know my password or using 2FA.

Thank you for your time and answers.

I use a isp supplied modem because they like to blame problems on user hardware. Modem died out, not connecting to wan over coax after 5 minutes of use. Called them out. They connected to my network and straight up said "ahh, here's why it's not working, this number should be a 192.168 number, and your using all 10's". Talking about my gateway IP. I use 10.10.10.1 for gateway, DHCP the .175-255, with static ips set below.

I try to explain my network to him and he replies "can I just finish diag'ing this?". Alright. I walk away. Come back to him having reset my router with an excuse "it's gonna take a while for the new numbers to set, call us if there are any problems after a few hours".

Obviously none of this is the issue, the modem still has a red light and I have to wait for another technician because cox won't swap the modem out without technician verification.

Man oh man. No recommendations just a rant.

I got one of these little ThinkCentres but it booted to an amazon screen? Does anyone know what these are?

I’m asking here because i have a good feeling atleast someone knows.

Im looking for suggestions on what others would do with this so I can have some cool ideas to try out. Also if theres anything I should know as a server noodle please let me know so I dont blow up the house or something!!

I am newbie when it comes to servers but I have done as much research as I could cram in a couple weeks! I got remote control protocol and all working but no clue how I can set up multiple users that can access it together and stuff. I actually dont know enough to ask questions..

I think its a bit of a dated hardware but hopefully its still somewhat usable for ai and deep learning as the gpu still has tensor cores (1st gen!)

Hey guys just jumped on this thing of homelabing i am a comp sci major so dont know much about electronics so i have been trying to learn electronics for the past 3 - 4 months. i have started this homelab (a simple raspberry pi 4B 8Gig and 1.5tb hdd) a month back and have setup immich jellyfin and vaultwarden on it with a custom dashboard to see it all working.

i have setup a 5v fan for cooling too with a temp control via the raspberry’s gpio.

i am having fun with it but now i actually want to get my hands dirty so wanted inputs from people doing this for a while.

So about a week ago, I was scrolling through some government auction sites in my area just to see if anything would find my interest. I usually bid on two-way radios, servers, and network equipment, whether I win or lose.

From what I can remember, I was scrolling and found what I thought was a single Dell OptiPlex 7020 SFF computer for only a $100 minimum. With eight hours left, I found it interesting and placed a $110 bid without reading the description, and completely forgot about it.

A day later, I randomly opened emails to see if anything had come in. I saw that I had won something, and it was the Dell. As I was reading through to see where I could pick this up, I saw in bold: "Item includes 83 quantities of Dell OptiPlex 7020 office computers, with a box of Dell wired USB mice and keyboards and an unknown quantity of 19" LCD monitors."

I'm confused. I emailed the seller and asked, "Hello, I'm wondering if the description is correct. Is the listing for a single Dell or the full quantity?"

The seller replied, "The listing is for the full quantity of what is written in the description. Please reach out to this number for more questions: ##########"

I called the number, and the person basically said it included everything named in the description.

Turns out, speaking with the lady, the computers were repossessed by a bank after, I'm assuming, a company went out of business many years ago. The bank that had them never got around to selling the computers, and they were sitting in a warehouse for who knows how many years. Since they're moving locations, they wanted to get rid of them as soon as they can. So now I'm home with what I can count as 34 small SFF Dell 7020s and about 40 Dell 7020 towers (not counting ones with missing CPUs, RAM, etc.).

I have reached out to a guy I normally buy used PC parts and equipment from. He's interested, and I offered $100 per computer. I'm also just going to give him the ones with missing parts for about $20 to 20, and give him a few keyboards, mice, and monitors for free. I also plan on donating some to a local technology college.

So here's the thing: what should I do with them? I don't want to sell them yet because, with how lucky I was to get them at that price without any other bidder stealing the deal, I want to play around a little and see what I can do. I was thinking of building a fat Proxmox cluster just for the sake of it, or just a simulated WAN/LAN network for a Cisco CCNA lab. What do you think?

Also the Dells im mentioning is the old Circa ones

Update: The guy who wanted to buy a few of the computers agreed on $60 per tower and $50 for the SFF, $30 for all the ones missing parts, and $200 flat for monitors and for the box of mice and keyboards. I currently have 5 monitors, 2 towers, and 2 SFF computers that I'm going to keep.

I wasn't going to post how much I made, but the numbers are there: $4,356, rounded up to $4,360 because the guy only had cash. I have booked time off work and am planning on spending time with family. I don't plan on getting any new equipment for the lab, especially with how expensive parts are now.

Thank to everyone that commented.

12 x Dell EMC VXRAIL E560Fs with no RAM or storage.
Apparently, the original 10 cost the company about 1.5 million dollars. The top two were later additions.

Edit: The sysadmin is kinder than I deserve. They hooked me up with 20 32GB gig sticks.

I'm gonna get found out by my parents so fricking badly that I leave my PC on all the time... My canon event is nigh! Help me, God.

Ewaste time at work again. Not sure how I can use these. Any ideas?

i raise my new attack drone (netgear nighthawk x10)

When I finally needed my CyberPower LX1500GU it was dead without warning. Here you can see it reporting “Full Battery Capacity” as it did before and continues to do after REMOVING THE BATTERIES!!!
Is there a class-action lawsuit yet???

UPDATE: I replaced the batteries and the behavior was similar. It doesn’t report battery capacity until they are in use. Drained to 50% (reported), but as soon as I plugged it back into the wall it reported “full capacity”. Well, there are plenty of electrical engineering reasons for this, but it’s not how I would expect that indicator to work at all. I ended up finding a really hefty Tripp-Lite SU1500XLCD on craigslist for next to nothing and I’m replacing the batteries on that as well.

I mean besides using it to pick up chicks, and making me the envy of all the jocks in my town, is there really any use case for having a 10GB network at home?

My internet is currently a 1GB fiber network, and I could go to 2GB if I wanted, but that is where I top out. My router has 2.5GB ports on it, and I have those running to my fiber modem, my mesh router, my NAS and my desktop. The rest of my network is either 1GB or WiFi. I am replacing my main router, and I have an old 1GB switch that is acting funny on some ports, so I am going to do some upgrades.

My devices mostly consist of matter IPv6 stuff, and a few Matter over Wifi. I have several 1080P cameras, but they all run fine on on my 802.11g network. The only thing that I found pushed my original 100MBs network was my 4K TV streaming Plex. But I upgraded the TV to 1GB, and it runs smooth now.

Yeah, I want to score chicks. And it would be rad to put Daryl down the block and his stupid cornhole trophies in their place, but is there any real world case where I would need 10GB?

It was weird, but just sitting, having calm music in the background and looking at this, thinking through all the things she runs and all the efforts it took me to bring her to this stage… Kind of gave me a relief from a mild anxiety attack.

Prices are crazy