And then being able to extract from a display buffer seems like a good skill to have.
In its "media" volume it holds my movies, books & papers, and music that have been de-DRMed (if necessary, I always prefer buying non-DRM products). Each medium has a slightly different method of de-DRMing. My toy search engine only indexes the books/papers though.
Is RAID the only redundancy?
(Windows)
https://github.com/leadedge/Spout2
(Mac)
There's a lot of near brain dead point and click options.
I have friends with FreeNAS / QNAP which are clearly technically superior, but I wanted to minimize work / maintenance of which I already have enough of in my life.
Case in point: If I wanted to run a VPN server on it too, I could install the official VPN Server package and configure it in their (excellent) web UI. It offers OpenVPN, L2TP/IPSEC and PPTP. I could also however install their Docker package or Virtual Machine package and set it up myself in the command line. Or possibly look up a community-built package that provides a Wireguard VPN server.
Since I had some hardware around from an older PC upgrade and I'm generally curious and experienced with hardware and software configuration I rolled my own for now.
Whichever route you go, don't forget to use something like Plex to organize your audio/video collection and access it from a multitude of devices. It's like your very own personal Netflix.
you want a device that will not cost too much if you screw up ripping it apart. There was a good sized discussion regarding multiline LCD displays here on HN if we dig about we may find it. I think you should have an idea how its done but i dont want to extrapolate too much for the sake of the platform [HN] you could make a PIC device or any other stamp computer like arduino to manipulate the control switching and read the data bus out to a file thus translating one character at a time. it could be done in the 50's way using a row of toggle switches and a debounced "doit" button to send a binary command to the display controller but 10 fingering is slow in return for simplicity, thus automate the task with a device such as arduino or pic F84
SERVER-- if you can set up a local webpage and know how to code html as a minimum you can set up a local server, the next thing is if you want to let it touch the internet connection, so operational security is a first consideration. next is your ISP and how they filter your connection [or not] with some ISPs they want to "protect you from the web" so you have to workaround that, often using a nonstandard port will do it like setting your webserver or ftp server or smb[carefull!] server to ports like 1337 or 21337 as an example. You will also need to port forward your router to whatever internal IP your server is using, one port per IP for each server. next is working with DNS or not. If you have static address you can just memorize the public IP that leadsto your router and tack the port number on the end such as 192.168.1.80:1337 as an example for an internal address or the public address such as 2o7.1o7.o7.7:1337 {not a real IP!} for example. if you want a kewl DNS there are places where you can get a DNS subdomain or real domain if you have money for it. i use http://freedns.afraid.org/ often for this so i can use a name and it helps with the issue of dynamic IP.
Instead of figuring out what the public IP is for my router every time the lease goes stale, freedns will update the DNS entry to point to the new public IP.
Its not a massive undertaking as i can rip it all down and put it back up in about 15mins [slow but i hate running],
by hand, but it is an undertaking until you get settled in the topography and commit it to memory.
You can set up for an HTTPS certificate and lock things down a somewhat for MITM attacks that dont have time to break the encryption. <<