OK, here's the other adventure...
This summer I came to the realization that a cheap desktop could serve as a centralized repo of family pix and vids. The keyword is "cheap." It doesn't need to "do" much other than safely store and serve pix & vids to the family on the LAN.
I researched and bought the cheapest AMD ( fanboy *cough* ) based desktop with the intent of wiping out Windows and putting Ubuntu Server 20.04 ...
Bought an HP EliteDesk 705 G1 SFF running an AMD A4 PRO-7800B w/ 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hdd.
But, it came w/ Windows 10 Pro... and it was cheaper than buying Pro by itself! That was too tempting so, many hours were lost trying to figure out how to move W. Pro to a VM. Yet, even w/ all the research, it didn't bring over the license. So that ship has sailed. Also I did use Clonezilla to clone the 500GB hdd before going thru the install of Win10 Pro... in case I have to return it.
Installed Ubuntu Server 20.04... but things were ... wonky. Hard to initially describe. It just acted weird. Then after it was installed and I'd do, "sudo apt update" followed by "sudo apt upgrade" it'd drop the connection. Time out? But it would take a couple minutes for it to become responsive and I could reset the NIC and try again. I learned it was actually making progress so repeatedly issuing "sudo apt upgrade" was in fact working.
On top of this, being a relative Linux noob ( "DOS rulez!" He said, until he tried to install it in a VM. ) in a "less pain is better" mentality I tried to install a GUI. I get confused w/ the DE/DM/WM nomenclature. I ended up installing more than one login screen thingie, and I forget which GUI, but logg out/shutdown were greyed out ... research said something about not being connected w/ the root account. Fixing this turned out to be temporary as I'd have to redo it after each reboot.
To get past the wonky NIC I used a USB to Ethernet adapter ( purposed for a laptop w/o an RJ45 ). This worked! But I didn't (and still don't) think it good to have it as a permanent solution. Thoughts?
Then, I bought a 2TB hdd and an internal NIC.
The hdd upgrade happened first. Ubuntu Server 20.04 then "kubuntu-desktop" which is overkill, but I usually used Xubuntu in the past & well I wanted something w/ a bit more ... "Presentation!" - Megamind.
Forgot to mention, that this time, installing to the 2TB, the install kept crashing. When I caught on and restarted the installation w/o internet it was rock solid/normal. ( I'm pretty sure I was using the USB dongle. I've had trouble w/ USB devices powering down in Windows so that's what I assume was happening. )
At this point, I noticed I only had 200GiB and got the great fortune of learning yet another thing. LVM. (LVM was the default option. I just went w/ it. Little did I know.)
. there's vgdisplay & lvdisplay. To get the right names of vg's & lv's
. and then lvextend ... But there's more than one way ... and 2 of them are upper & lower "L"
. I kept mixing the 2 ways using the wrong cased arg.
. what worked: sudo lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv
** (that first arg is a lower-case "L") **
. then, sudo resize2fs /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv
. "df -h" & "inxi -Fxz" both confirmed it worked, AFAICT.
( inxi was a nice find. pretty prints full specs )
When I finally got around to installing the NIC, I found out that it was PCI and "Batgirl" ( I am not making this up! It's the name of/on the mobo. ) didn't have any PCI slots. Only PCIe. Duh. Where have I been?!
Eventually got back to the store and exchanged it for a PCIe NIC. TP-Link TG-3468. Not detected.
Similar issues to: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1199444/tp-link-tg-3468-ethernet-pci-card-not-working
But I haven't dug into it yet.
...
Given that the "SEVER" isn't stable in the serving department I haven't made much progress on learning/setting up samba. I'll link to a vid or 2 I watched, as they have conflicting setup instructions.
That's all for now.
More Q's to follow.
Thanks.