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Yeah, I want to make use of an IDE floppy drive, which will need to use a SATA adaptor to hook up to the server. I'll probably be using a Debian-based container, and I'll need to automatically read the contents of the disk in some way.

I'm kinda assuming this is actually viable, and that I can work along the basic process of using an off-the-shelf IDE-SATA adapter, give it a mount point in the system, then monitor that directory.

I'm still fairly new to Linux, so I'm not aware of all the quirks and astrices that often come up, especially when wanting to do something like this in 2023.

For the curious, I'm building a centralised music system that will serve multiple speakers, including RF. I'll be managing the music and play lists via whichever modern music server seems the most appropriate, but I thought it would be really neat to use floppy disks as a physical way of selecting playlist, but not exclusively.

All the disks would contain are small ID tokens that represent the playlist on the digital system. The software will monitor the drive, and when a new token is identified, it will simply trigger the playlist to start, presumably via an API call.

Completely pointless, but I like tactile shit and the nostalgia factor!

I'm really sorry that this is probably out of place, as it's not strictly LLAMA, but I couldn't think of anywhere else to post it where people may be able to help.

**Sadly, my grandma passed away yesterday. **It prompted me to retrieve some old photos that my parents stashed in the loft over a decade ago, and they are just incredible! I've found so many pictures of her, going back to when she was really young, to a point where I'll have to check if they are all definitely her! But there's amazing ones of my dad and uncles when they were little, even my nan with my dad and me when I'd literally just been born!

There's lots of really wonderful family moments and slice-of-life history captured there, and I don't think anyone knows they exist.

Mostly, I have enough funny photos to have birthday cards sorted for the several lifetimes!

I want to get these ALL scanned and digitised. But for now, I'm separating out ones with my nan in them to be top priority. Most of the services available have long turnarounds and, while the prices are far from extortionate, I'm looking for something which prices by the KG. Seriously, there must be over 20Kg of photo in here. They're mostly 6x4, so you'd want to have them done at a high DPI, the cost would be astronomical, especially as I already plan to spend a lot on printing.

So, I'd like to do this myself. I've dabbled with some LLM stuff, but I don't really know where to start with image manipulation, and I don't really have time to figure it out, so I'm asking for some guidance.

The rough idea is:

1. Scan photos on high DPI flatbed scanner. Fill up the bed each time with multiple photos for highest speed

2. 'Parse' the scan into multiple image files by identifying where the bounds are and cropping. This should be pretty simple. I think this may be possible in OpenCV? I've never tried before. Otherwise, it has to be one of the simpler jobs for a ML tool. I understand how object recognition works in principle, but not practice.

3. Run select images through an upscaler. Some we may want to display or print larger, and if it's not unreasonable, if we're going to digitise them, may as well make them as high res as we can (I'll keep the originals). I know the usualy 'zoomify' caveats, but obviously when I'm starting with 6x4 images, I'll take all the help I can get.

4. Ideally attempt to 'clean up' the images. I don't think I'd want to colourise anything, but it would be nice to remove obvious stains, creases and such from the print.

5. The plan is to have some albums for people to go through at the wake, print off plenty of extra 6x4 copies so people can just grab them and take them away, but I'll also stick them all on a google drive or something and make the link available so people can download them in higher res, and more people will be able to see and preserve them

My main concern is 2 and 3. 4 would be a bonus. I suspect the shortlist will be 100-200 photos, but processing everything will be an ongoing process. I just want the shortlist done before the funeral.

I'd really rather run locally if viable. I have a two machines that may be able to contribute:

Workstation

• RTX 3090 -32Gb DDR4 --> 64GB DDR5
• 5600x. --> 7900x

I'm actually planning an upgrade very soon, which I can push through fast if it will help.

R720XD

• 128GB DDR3 RAM
• 2x E5-2630 v2.

Probably not super useful, but has lots of RAM, and can be used as a slow workhorse. My workstation is on CAD for 8 hours a day, and is used for gaming in the evening. I can obviously cut out the gaming, but not the CAD, so there could be some utility in handing off some things to the server, if the workload doesn't require GPU.

If you can point me in the right direction to get set up, that would be awesome. I'm new at this and learning fast, but I don't want to under-deliver. I'm very capable of learning the details, but I don't have enough experience to determine the 'best way' of doing something like this.

Any help would be incredible!

I'm a noob who thought they knew what they were doing!

My trusty unraid server running off some ancient consumer hardware finally gave up the ghost due to hardware failure. Needing an alternative in a hurry, I thought I'd do things properly, and got an incredible deal on an R720XD with shitloads of RAM and storage, couldn't be happier with the hardware.

It came with TrueNAS Scale already installed as it's what the previous owner was running. Got everything NAS set up in a couple of hours and have been running an SMB share quite happily.

However, I also run a fair few Docker containers, and this is where the pain starts. I've spent so long trying to get things working, and have simply hit a brick wall. Everything I try yields another bizarre error message that requires hours to resolve, and I feel like I'm trying to track down the solution for some obscure edge case rather than doing something incredibly standard. But I'm trying to piece things together from multiple guides and videos, none of which contain the whole story, and most of them result in more errors that aren't covered.

The TrueNAS forums look like a bit of a dumpster fire when it comes to these issues, particularly around containers, with things getting quite heated. The 'official apps' are extremely limited, TrueCharts extends functionality, but still limited, and not really working well for me. There seems to be a lot of friction with the devs of TrueCharts, and between people wanting to virtualise stuff and those who's solution to these issues is running TrueNAS bare metal and not using virtualisation or containers. It's like, yeah, you're less likely to have issues if you ignore half the feature set. And if it's only 'supposed' to be a file server, then it's frustrating that running it in a VM is also 'not officially supported' too.

I tried spinning up a Debian VM and managed to get Portainer running, but once again hit an absolute mess with filesystems and permissions for any other containers I tried running. I know it's to do with the quirks of TrueNAS and that the setup makes sense, especially for an enterprise focus, but this stuff just worked in Unraid as smooth as butter. I know it can be easier, and I'm just not having a good time. I want to be using containers, VMs and developing, not spending my 4th evening this week losing my mind over permissions so I can progress to the next error message!

Anyway

I am a noob, I liked Unraid, it worked, and TrueNAS Scale was probably never the right choice for me. But now I need to get redeployed quickly, and I'm looking for a path forward that gives me flexibility.

As I said, I like UnRaid, I'd quite like to give TrueNAS Core a try purely as a NAS, but I'm happy to stick with Unraid if that's going to save some headache. I'd quite like to try both to be honest, set up a hypervisor so I can get Unraid functional quickly, then slowly work on TrueNAS.

So I'm thinking XCP-ng or Proxmox bare-metal, Unraid for NAS + Docker, TrueNAS to work on, and the ability to spin up more VMs.

Problem there is that Unraid is only 'supposed' to be booted off a USB. Once again, any discussion of any other way is 'not supported' and discussions on the forums inevitably lead to 'why would you want to?' or 'you don't understand', implying you're trying to get better speed or something. I know it runs in RAM, I just don't really like having my config and license dangling off my server permanently (although I could try the internal USB), and virtualising it would be incredibly useful.

I could use Unraid as a hypervisor, I've heard of people adding a Proxmox VM to Unraid, which seems a bit bass ackwards on the surface, and doesn't 'feel' right, but I guess if it works it's fine. Unraid was absolutely rock solid stable for me, after all!

Again, I don't think I've particularly been fair here, in fact, TrueNAS has impressed me in lots of ways, and I shouldn't be critical of those doing development and answering the same questions over and over from people like me. I just need to get running, don't have a huge amount of free time at the moment, and just want to get NAS+Docker functioning, but ideally in VMs to reduce the upheaval when/if I change things again!

Your help would be appreciated, as would the extra sleep!