I agree about the USB Ethernet dongle. Unless you only require short distance wifi range (eg hotel room temp router) the radio in the pi isn’t going to be enough

I built a pi4 router a few years ago, and it’s still running great, I recommend the project. But unfortunately I can’t find the HOWTO and it was before I started taking good notes. I assume your current router is a phone company supplied modem/router?

My setup is cable modem–>pi router–>switch–> old netgear router in Access point only mode

Being that your router/modem is upstream of router, I’m not sure if you could pass-through the WAN to the pi router, and pass back the LAN to the router/modem for the wifi… maybe someone on here can shed some light?

I could have the best self hosted setup… living in a van, down by the river!

This thought came to me this morning. I have 4 machines both because the BEAST grows organically, and because we’re always trying to avoid that single point of failure. Then a scenario comes along that makes you question your whole way of thinking, diversifying may actually create more problems

I didn’t mean to imply that Services actually broke. Only that they didn’t come back after a reboot. A clean reboot may have caused some of the same issues because, I’m learning as I go. Some services are restarted by systemctl, some by cron, some…manual. This is certainly a wake up call that I need standardize and simplify the way the services are started.

Your problem may differ from mine, but whenever I’ve been greeted with the command line in grub the solution has actually been in bios. I’ll leave you with my notes, which are a bit snarky after spending a lot of time trying to figure out hot to repair grub, when the solution was 3 clicks in bios:

"Inspiron won’t boot

Goes to the grub command prompt

Don’t fuck with that thing

Restart, F2 to get into bios

Change boot sequence to start the SSD first, not ubuntu

Reboot, itll do it a couple times, but should boot right into normal grub"

I hope your solution is the same

Slaps forehead I know I read that guide too…whether I forgot about it or thought that would do something else… Thank You!

I’m sorry, what?..Oh, all I heard was that my linux home server is going to be running on new hardware in about a year and a half when all these used computers go on sale. 😁

I take any chance I can to drop a Chris Barnett link:

Ventoy

I’ve been pretty happy with paperless-ngx, it should tick all your boxes

Oooh memories, I can’t remember the version number but mandrake 10 must have been close to my first linux distro!! …it.didn’t.go.well.

Dietpi is a nice little distro, especially when running it minimal without a GUI. Its added toolkits make farting around on the command line more comfortable

Thank you all for the input.

If I was looking for a top of the line card I would dig in and learn everything there is to know about graphics cards to make an informed decision. When it comes to buying a run of the mill card, its hard to get that excited!

Not sure what I’ll buy yet, but you’ve pointed out what I need to look for. Thanks!