This was my first thought too. Interestingly that death occurred October 2023, while this particular fired employee is accused of accessing Disney's menu systems around June-September 2024.
Almost like this ex-employee saw the news earlier and was then inspired to try to murder someone with bad allergen info.
they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website
Not sure what sort of uptime/reliability your friends are expecting out of a self hosted solution but for something like that you wouldn't need much processing power, even a Raspberry Pi can host a simple website. Not sure what to recommend offhand but there are definitely vendors in that space that sell simple DIY "contact us" form software, or I guess if you wanted to roll your own that's an option too. I'd be more concerned about keeping it locked down/secure.
Keep in mind for the internet your friends would likely need business class internet with multiple static IPs so you can give your little DIY box its own public IP address. Many (most?) residential internet service providers do not allow self hosting websites on their network and they'd be dynamic IP anyway though you could work around that somewhat with dynamic DNS since you're going to need to purchase a domain name and point it to somewhere anyway.
run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more)
Like others said you really don't want to go that route unless you're well versed in that area. It would be annoying for a business especially a new one, those emails will likely keep going into other provider's spam folders for a good period of time. All the big mainstream email providers are notorious for not trusting new email domains / new IP addresses.
Seems easier to just go to Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / whatever other provider you like to use, presumably the business has a business use case for reliable email among other things.
Bonus: Those cloud services can easily host simple contact forms for you so maybe that's your all in one solution. Look into Google Forms and similar.
and to store and remote access documents.
That sounds like the above commercial cloud solutions again :)
But sure technically you could go through the extra step hosting that yourself. Depends on how the business wants to use/access this stuff, it's really a question for them. Could be as simple as a Windows server with RDP (if they're Windows people & just want to log into something "windows" to browse/open files) or maybe multi-user Linux with VNC (the geeks might like, maybe not so much the general Windows/Mac users). Or if you're trying to do something web oriented maybe something like Nextcloud if you want to do all this in a web browser.
You should triple check what exactly they are expecting when it comes to remote access documents... you really don't want to spend the time setting up something that they totally weren't expecting and end up hating.
Should be fine, SATA3 is backwards compatible AFAIK. If the laptop can take a 2.5 inch SATA drive then you should be okay.
I happen to have an even older laptop than yours (from 2008 era) that's been rocking a 2.5 inch SATA SSD for at least 5-10+ years now. Works fine and was definitely an improvement over the old performance. The laptop is still quite old/slow in other ways but that's expected from something that old.. luckily it's not my main computing device.
Best not to overthink it - The sales clerk is trained to ask for this stuff.
Luckily most times I encounter this I just tell them no I don't have a phone number with them & continue checkout like normal. Sometimes that means not getting a sale price on something but usually I avoid those type of member-specific sales anyway.
And worst case - Just make something up. At Best Buy a sales rep absolutely refused to sell me something from the mobile dept without my info. Which didn't make sense because earlier I had bought something at that same Best Buy with a different rep & that rep took my order without my info no problem (she said she had to enter a phone number but just entered Best Buy's).
Yet this particular sales rep refused to proceed without info, so yeah he got an entire fictional name/address/phone/email on the spot.
I believe because any site that has an extension with more than four characters is detected as invalid.
Usually it's just badly coded apps/websites that only whitelisted some of the main domains e.g. most vanity domains don't make it through. Or sometimes there are apps/websites that purposely block your domain if the admins think it's too spammy or whatever.
If your current email provider allows you to use their own domains as an alias that's one way to sidestep the issue e.g. you'd end up with [something]@[youremailprovider].com --> [name]@[name].rocks
I have Fastmail & they have a ton of their own internal domains so that's one way I sidestep that issue. It's pretty common among most/all email providers when you bring your own domain e.g. pretty sure Proton can do the same thing. Once you have your own domain you can make up any [alias]@[yourdomain] you like or just use the provider's as a front facing alias [alias]@[youremailprovider] --> [anything]@[yourdomain].
I don't think it's possible, or at least not in the way you're thinking. Encoding a video with lossless flags usually results in a file size bigger or about the same as the source, and on top of that it takes a long time to actually do the encode.
Video is already highly compressed.
But for sure you can tinker around with ffmpeg (FOSS) & see how it goes for you. I've done it in the past just for kicks since some of the common video codec encoders do have lossless flags but it really wasn't worth the effort.
EDIT: That's just the video in the file, you also have to contend with the audio. That's a bit easier if you just want to use ffmpeg to dump everything into FLAC but again, I don't think you're saving much hard drive space if any.
P.S I’ve enever used XD. So I can’t help you out there, but it seems like a very bare-bones torrent client. qbittorrent recently added support for it but if you’re running a headless server, XD doesn’t seem like a bad option. Github says it has no DHT support? Not sure if that’s the best option, but good luck with it.
Correct. To be fair both XD and qBittorrent don't support DHT over I2P so they're kind of on the same level there. I think (?) neither support PEX over I2P either though I'm not 100% sure on XD about that.
https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/19913
Currently not possible. Bitmagnet would need to have new code to be able to properly talk to the mainline java I2P service to enable DHT over I2P bittorrent. Or the Bitmagnet devs could develop their own I2P service to talk to the I2P network but that might be even more dev work.
https://github.com/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet/issues/303
Per https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent
DHT support requires SAM v3.3 PRIMARY and SUBSESSIONS for TCP and UDP over the same session. This will require substantial development effort on the client side, unless the client is written in Java. i2pd does not currently support SAM v3.3. libtorrent does not currently support SAM v3.3.
And it’s like 3-4 hundred ish.
That should be easy for just about any torrent client (including Transmission), could be worth opening an issue at their GitHub page https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues
Hopefully switching torrent clients resolves that for you.
I’m migrating because Transmission is horrible for a large amount of torrents (multiple of hundreds)
That doesn't sound like too many, you're saying you're at under 1000 torrents? How many multiples of hundreds are we talking?
Surprised Transmission has issues seeding that many, thought Transmission 4.x made improvements in that area. How much RAM does your system have? Maybe at some point you just need more system resources to handle the load.
PS - For what it's worth you can still stick with Transmission and/or other torrent clients & just spread the torrents among multiple torrent client instances. e.g. run multiple Transmission instances with each seeding 1000 or whatever amount of torrents works for you.
It's a nice gesture but I'm a bit doubtful that there's enough people here to sustain a private tracker. Taking a guess at this but it seems most people here in c/piracy are general users, not specifically private tracker users - in fact a fair amount don't even like the idea of private trackers.
!trackers@lemmy.dbzer0.com exists but it's pretty quiet by comparison.
Not saying it's a bad idea but it could be a while before a niche tracker like that would gain enough traction to sustain itself. And I'm just talking about a regular private tracker, not even going to touch on the idea of someone developing a "decentralized private tracker" whatever that means.. TBH if you want decentralized just stick to public torrents with DHT/PEX, that's already decentralized. Or maybe make a semi-private tracker like Demonoid if that's more along the lines of what you want.
Looks like the block list itself is maintained here
https://github.com/fmhy/FMHYFilterlist