I usually don’t bother with most dot files, if any at all. If I’m copying anything local it’s just easier to use scp on the file, or tar a group then scp it where I want. Obviously you need ssh installed

Absolute favourite is | the pipe command.

/datapool or whatever the array is called for zfs pools, I often do /mail on mail servers, and /www on web servers. Not sure why but it makes it super obvious what’s going on when you login remotely

It’s also kind of squished on some racking, and with it been a 4u rack case full of HDD it’s quite heavy. If you have made it this far in to the garage, you not only have done well but passed the beer collection and numerous cordless power tools. It also has a sign saying beware of the leopard.

Door lock and house alarm, also mines at the back of the garage with plenty of more easily stealable things in front of it.

Depends what you mean by “security”

Out of interest what are you using? I was postfix/courier for a long time, with a must migrate to dovecot 10 years ago. Finally migrated this year and the performance difference is noticeable

You are not on your own, I just can’t get my head around docker either on paper it make sense but it seems just enough of a difference to melt something in my brain. Added to the fact that docker fucks around with firewall rules thinking it’s the only thing of importance on the system, breaking KVM networking in the process. It’s just not something I trust to play well with others.

/etc/skel and the pam_mkhomedir.so module should get you going in the right direction. Never used it but know it exists

You just need a bootable usb stick, id recommend ventoy

The traditional way is man pages and howto guides, which contain loads of information. You can get man pages in terminal or html (but I can remember how).

Next up is online tutorials like you are using, however with complicated setups, like a full mail server, the info gets very specific and can often go out of date.

Then we have readthedocs, which are the project specific instructions which tend to be very good.

How ever my personal favourite is the arch wiki, you’ll need to know how to change commands to Debian based systems, but it does give a lot of info and insight that is up to date.

For moving from Goole photos look at photoprism, immich and nextcloud, there are others, but these are the ones that made my short list

It looks like you grabbed stuff from /dev which I think can’t be moved, it’s created and managed by the kernel

If you did it as root probably broken, if not it should be ok, you might just get programs behaving weirdly.

Postfix and write a milter (mail filter), you can get them to interact a various points in the mail delivery.

I think most things can be accomplished within postfix

Just sailing? Single hard drive connected to what ever

Hosting stuff you care about? Some form of raid/zfs/whatever with at least 2 discs and a backup plan, also hooked up to what ever

That is the bare minimum. Buy used and expect your needs to change within a month/year.

SSD is a bit optimistic for that laptop, quick Google shows a potential 5400rpm sata drive

This with remote transmission on your phone to control it

Well it depends where you sit on the bell curve, 1/8 of the population thinks the other 1/8 are fucking stupid, whilst been completely oblivious to the fact that they are in fact also fucking stupid

I use xfce as a desktop, so based purely on looks windows xp. The problem is the enshitification of windows, improvements in one area drags it’s screaming backwards in other ways, I’m looking at you control panel, you get dumber and less helpful every time I look at you.

Do you have any spare pcie slots, you can get m.2 pcie cards