since you’re buying parts, you can specifically look for boards with 6-8 (more than that will require a ‘specialty’ board). 8 isn’t impossible to find. start a build on pcpartpicker, go straight to motherboards and filter 8 or more ‘SATA 6Gb/s Ports’, then sort low-to-high on price. you should find a msi pro am4 and an asus prime am5 that are quite reasonably priced and have multiple reputable vendors selling them.

otherwise you’re looking for an expansion card to add to a board you’ve already got or to expand one of those above for even more.

of course, you need the drive bays to hold them all, too. which can be harder to find at a reasonable and affordable price than motherboards and controller cards.

‘humans and cardassians can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.’

and even when you do know what you’re doing, you’re probably choosing not to host your own. at least not one that faces the public. a private mail ‘server’ that consolidates mail for you from multiple providers (and sends mail back out the same way) is different.

i have an old wood desk at the office. it just resonates and amplifies noise when i set a desktop form factor external hdd (with its attached rubber feet) on it. it now sits on a couple old-school foam rubber mouse mats.

don’t expect a 19 year old laptop to perform all the tricks something more ‘modern’ can do, such as transcoding video for a streaming media server. also note that a t5600 is not a ulv chip (draws as much as 34w under load, on its own)–so probably not a candidate to run ‘lid down’ without some outside help for cooling.

it’s not fast, it’s not power efficient, it has slow networking (10/100 and 22-year old ‘g’ wifi), and lacks usb3 for ‘tolerable’ speed on extra external storage space—but it will be ‘ok enough’ for learning on.

if you go with something like yunohost or even dietpi, you will pretty much restrict yourself to what it can run and do and how it does it. if you want more ‘control’ or to install things they don’t offer themselves, you’ll need to ‘roll your own’. a base (console only) debian would be a great place to start. popular, stable, and tons of online resources and tutorials.

i use dietpi, which is built upon a minimal debian.

office back in the 9x days you could just use all 1’s.

that’s the one i remember… and the picture of it next to the release countdown at microsoft’s offices.

i think the only things these days for ‘unactivated windows’ (home, pro editions) is inability to ‘customize the desktop’ (change wallpaper, theme…) and occasional activation nags.

it doesn’t quit working or shutdown (iirc enterprise or server trials do that after they expire, though) or quit getting updates or anything like that.

they actually still ‘win’, because you’re still using their platform.

maga nuts and the rest of the ‘far right’. truth and an informed populace are their enemy.

they were under $1 a dozen then, they’re still about $3 here–last i noticed the price anyway.

me neither. because i don’t buy 'em anymore. i don’t even go past 'em in the store.

i run with scripts disabled by default. it gets annoying at times, but most sites and pages i go to work fine. a few are true ‘apps’ and are whitelisted. random sites that don’t work i just search for an alternative source if i really want to read it. i have separate browser installs with fewer restrictions that i use specifically for certain things (like webmail or the little online shopping i do).

the few web sites that i am responsible for… all work without scripts. many of the visitors i care about have shitty internet, so i don’t want massive js or css bundles in there or tons of unoptimized graphics or media.

website wouldn’t need to embed any JS code.

other than the 20 trackers and ad scripts.

more than half the households in my county do not have any high-speed wireline service available to them.

and you could change him into something else. links the cat was mine.

captive portal detection, certificate status verification, and iirc server settings updates. yes. none of them are ‘absolutely required’ but they do exist to improve the reliability and secure operation of the program–and none are secret nasty spying telemetry. just turn those particular settings off as desired.

me neither. best is a 1070. don’t play newer ‘demanding’ games, nor do i have a system ‘worthy’ of a better card anyway.

there is mv3 version of ubo here:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home

dunno how well it works on yt, though. i use dlp on a pc for the time or two a month i ‘need to’ look at a yt vid.

adguard’s free browser extension is also mv3 compliant (for chrome). i think the old adblockplus (disable ‘acceptable ads’ and ignore offer to ‘upgrade’ to a paid version) is, too.