You cannot have much time in this or you likely have only ever worked on type of install. $120/drop is the price you charge for simple installs that have zero complication. Just wait until you see fire blocking, runs that go over really weird sections of building, etc.

Ask any veteran of this business and they will laugh you out of the room.

The typical price for a business that had drop ceilings and drywall is $150-$300 depending on number of drops ordered. A single drop is barely worth the materials to deploy a tech.

Using that understanding doing it in a house will easily add $250 for the headaches that can happen. So knowing it is $300 and then a possible $250. $900 seems reasonable in the aspect of they have to make money and they have to make sure that sending the tech is worth doing. She got a quote that was the “I don’t want to take this job” price.

Think about it like this. If you were to tell me that you would pay me $50 to come make you a pot of coffee plus all of my travel and materials. That job to me is not worth it. However if you told me you would pay me $500 plus travel and materials. That job becomes worth doing.

What I want to see is this thing fit 7 Nvidia Tesla T4 16GB cards in it. HP says it is possible in the data sheet.

This is going to highly depend on what you hope to achieve with an application.

1. Does the app need more than one person to access it?

2. Does the app need constant up time?

3. Does it make sense to host it?

Really this boils down to how you feel about each of these questions. So your example, the budget software. Yes I can have a single instance of that app on my computer. However I need my wife to have access to it, as she handles the finances.

Another example however is Jellyfin. This is something that is accessed from multiple locations and by multiple people. So today I might be watching a movie while I work. Tomorrow my wife might be doing that. Friday we might have family night. So that needs a server hosted out to actually make sense.

Game servers are another example here. They need constant up time and to be on hardware that is not the machine I am playing the game on.

It is also important to remember that many of us host all of this in a single location that we back up, and also have redundant drives. So we can easily make sure we have copies of our data at any given point. So while yea I can keep all my D&D data and PDF management on my computer, it is easier and more secure to keep and host that on my server where I have a backup and parity running. There plenty of other examples here too like my phone pictures of my daughter or other various bits of data.

Finally, there are things I just want to tinker and play with. I have no reason to host specific things other than to look at what the tech is like. Stable Diffusion is an example here. But my own ChatGPT instance would be useful if only every now and then. Just have to figure out what exactly makes the most sense to you.

Projects are fun. Do it if you don’t mind failing. Just keep failing until you get it right.

The setup is not ideal, I won’t lie to you. It could be better. But honestly, if it works for you, do it. There are so many things you can do to improve it and generally it will serve as a stepping stone to the next upgrade you see yourself making.

I will also note, since you have two of them, you could take the proxmox route and make them redundant. I am sure there is a way with Unraid to make them redundant too. I really wish I had the knowledge to run things in RAM.

99 times out of 100 this is an issue with the cable. Be it the one in the computer or the one in the wall.

If you do it yourself, the cost of materials and tools. Which would be about $150-$250. It is easy to do and learn and due to being low voltage there is very little risk. Just make everything as neat as possible.

If you hire a person, it is base $150 per run. But they usually have a minimum requirement.

I thought for a moment this was in the wrong sub. At this point I think your friends mom needs some taking care of around the house.

There are a great number of reasons that you could be getting that speed. One of the prime ones being that you are using wifi instead of directly connected cables. You should also be checking that your gear can even hit those speeds with iperf tests internally.

Just wait. There are VERY few devices right now that can even realistically use WIFI6 and generally it is only useful to large environments. If you had some reason like remote VR to use it then it would be different. But really you are not likely at all to even be able to use it.

If you were upgrading your hardware because it was dated and it didn’t work as well or you had a need it would be different. No reason to spend the money now when it really doesn’t benefit you.

For Plex specifically it is a pass. This will have Xeons and Xeons don’t support quick sync. You are going to be much better off buying one of those micro desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

Anyway, this is barely worthy of a post,

Shut up! This is always worth a post! We do this because we enjoy it. Not because we seek fame. Good on you for getting the job. Just keep learning and growing.

A word of advice for any one else and any future endeavors. Put your lab at the bottom of your resume. 10 year or 20 years in the game, I don’t care. Put it on there. Give the highlights and you are good. So far it has gotten me two jobs.

If they have DDR3 RAM, I personally wouldn’t use them Strictly for performance understandings. This being they would struggle to keep up with any more modern chip you can get that does support DDR4/DDR5 for a decent price.

That being said, if you need a server to run some basic tasks. You could do worse, but I wouldn’t say I suggest it.

If I were using that site personally and looking I would look more towards the HP DL380 G9 for about $500. But anything from that site is going to SUCK when it comes to sound. Not something you want in a room where you want it to be quiet. Mine is in my office and makes a decent but not unbearable sound.

So this is one of those “You have $5 build a XXXXX” situations. You can build a monster for the full budget and put work into it and it work forever with plenty of power. You can spend a smaller portion of the budget and it requires less setup but maybe is lighter on power. You get the idea.

My thought process here is to understand what exactly you do need. You said you like the form factor of the mini PC. But then also the DIY PC ? So what are the requirements here? The Synology would be near identical to this in form factor so I am confused.

I am going to give two types of advice. The build I went with and its cost, and the honest truth.

1. My build is an HP DL380 G9 rack mounted server. It has dual Xeon CPUs and 100+ GB of RAM. I then also have a Tesla M40 GPU in the system. All together with 2 brand new 2TB SSDs it cost me about $800. The server was about $300 on ebay shipped. The GPU was about $100 including the cable for power. The extra RAM was about $100 for 64+ GB DDR 3 ECC. The SSDs were $260. Granted, you would have to use 2.5 inch drives in this setup, it is very much a powerful machine that can handle most anything.

2. For your setup. You are the only person who can determine what is best for you. I can tell you specs, I can tell you my experience, I can tell you about features of systems and OSes. What I can’t tell you is what is going to fill your needs the most both in terms of hardware and its design in the space you have chosen.

The only piece of advice I will give you is this: If you plan on running a plex server, you will want a CPU that can use quick sync. Intel’s new ARC GPU should be able to as well if you went with a GPU option but I cannot speak to this as I have not tested.

Unraid, and TrueNAS are both solid options. You also have Proxmox you can run. It is important to understand though that Unraid and Proxmox are more than just a NAS. They also host VMs and Docker containers. You do have to pay for a license for Unraid though. It is a one time purchase.

The big thing with Unraid compared to the others is that you don’t really have to worry about the size of disks to get the protection of a parity drive. As long as your largest drive in the array is the parity drive you are good.

TrueNAS also has paid options but they do have the free version.

Proxmox is also open source. Which may be something that you like.

Personally I use Unraid. It is solid and I have had zero issues.

The Ryzen CPU is the best in terms of raw performance. Not by a ton, but it does perform better. I also don’t think those Intel CPUs support quick sync so no reason to even consider them really.

The Ryzen also boosts, while the Intel ones don’t.

It is only as risky as it is attackable.

If you use it internally and segment things so that only your server can reach it, then it is essentially impossible to attack.

Then on the other hand, is your network secure? How easy would it be to get in? Where is the weak point? You have to remember that this is a home. It is not likely to be a large target and generally as long as you have any kind of intelligence you will be fine.

So realistically, you will be fine as long as you don’t host it out to the internet in any ways.

Mac Address filtering works on wired too. If the switch supports it this is the easiest thing to do. But you may have to set a vlan and then only allow that mac on that vlan. Disable DHCP too if you can.

So there are two reasons.

1. As someone else mentioned. Marketing. Bit numbers and such
2. It is a better representation of how wifi works. It is not a flat plane and it doesn’t magically pass through, or around anything. It has limitations.

To clarify #2 a bit. Wifi works much like a flashlight does. When you shine it at objects it stops and you get a bleed around them. So if you shine at a 3 inch by 3 inch square, you will get a slightly less than 3 inch cube appearing on the wall as a shadow. (This varies with distance of course, but assume it is right on top of the cube.) Granted, wifi passes through a great number of objects too so it won’t be a perfect cut out, but it will be greatly diminished on the other side of the object. All this to say, it doesn’t really bend.

Now if you tell me that wifi broadcasts out to 100 feet. I am going to assume that it will go exactly 299 feet perfectly and the 300th foot will be where things flake off. No matter what objects are in the way. Because wifi doesn’t work like a gas, it works more like a fluid. A gas would fill its container entirely. Which is why balloons expand. Fluids however stop and go around objects and such. Wifi is very much the same. Kinda going through, but really just mostly going around, but not bending around like a gas would.

So now if you tell me you have enough water to cover 100 square feet. I am going to assume that the area is a bit nebulous. One side might be 100 feet, one might be 90 and another could be 115. If you look at the wifi pattern for pretty much any AP this will make sense.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/MR_Overview_and_Specifications/MR44_Datasheet

Specifically the pictures under the coverage patterns. These.

You can see they are not perfect circles. You can also see that the AP’s orientation affects how wifi is even broadcast.