Google Calendar reckons it's ISO week 1, even though it didn't start in 2025. Okay, then.
I continued with the whole bunch of benchmarks I was doing to local disks. I've installed two 2TiB SATA drives in the 1U server, and put the "good" RAID card in, along with a 10GbE NIC. Now I'm thinking I should just fill 'er up and get another couple of caddies for the SAS drives. I've not checked in on the power draw of this storage, I suppose.
Networking-wise I think that I've learned what I needed from the Mikrotik, although I also got its SNMP metrics going into Prometheus. This is totally annoying on Debian, due to the licensing of the SNMP MIBs, so I highly recommend just downloading a package from https://github.com/prometheus/snmp_exporter/releases which has a working snmp.yml. (Basically the Debian instructions tell you to build from source to get a working snmp.yml which, to me, defeats quite a bit of the purpose of having a .deb available).
I've moved up to a 4K 27" screen and switched to a modern desktop for what I will consider my "proper" computing (i.e. coding, working on things for the business). It's pretty lush, and I decided to go back to GNOME because I can just set the scaling to 200% and (so far) everything just works?! Given that even getting a consistent dark mode to work without a desktop environment was tricky (on my laptop), I don't even want to try getting HiDPI working. I've mapped GNOME's workspace keybindings to be the same as my cwm bindings on other computer, for muscle memory reasons.
Text looks amazing, and this is recreating the feeling that I had when I once owned a 27" iMac back in 2010. That felt like an opulent computing experience (although I ended up selling it as we needed money). I've got pixels to burn, now.
So, now I have a new screen, I also set up a desktop -- having gotten the specs and benchmarks for the hardware I already have I realize I was wasting a 12th Gen i5 as a server in my basement so it's now my desktop. It's quiet enough and sleeps, and it can drive the 4K screen over DisplayPort. That meant I needed to shuffle things around and a mini-ITX I built last year becomes the "always on" server. It's got an i5-3470 which is kind of meh, but that's fine for my purposes as it has an NVMe drive and a SATA SSD for the media I want to keep on hand. No big "always on" filer, here. The only thing I wasn't prepared for:
It has a 100Mbit Ethernet port.
I can't remember the last time I saw one of those on something that isn't a Raspberry Pi. Now I need to decide how annoying that is before I commit to getting a smaller cooler so I can fit a PCIe card in the tiny case and get 1GbE or 10GbE networking. It seems like a waste to have 300Mbyte/s disk writes behind a 100Mbit/s network, though.