Projects are fun. Do it if you don't mind failing. Just keep failing until you get it right.
Wdrussell1
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.
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.
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.
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 there are two reasons.
- As someone else mentioned. Marketing. Bit numbers and such
- 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.
What you are making honestly has no use to me, but I have been following none the less. It is an interesting bit of kit. Keep up the effort, it is not terrible to use for the bit I have used it. As others said of course though, a phone app would be the king. Sadly you also can't benefit those users of other tablets for reading like Kindle. Using the email service is so hacky and just not great from a user experience.
This is going to highly depend on what you hope to achieve with an application.
Does the app need more than one person to access it?
Does the app need constant up time?
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.