I recently replaced my daily-use computer, an old Lenovo ThinkPad laptop, with a more current mini-PC, a Beelink SER5 MAX. Better graphics, better processor, more RAM, hefty NVME drive – everything about this little box is just better than what I had. Powerful and small.

While getting things running the way I like and want, I’m saving bits of information and processes, and decided to collect it all here in some narrative form in case I have to repeat anything. For example, my allegedly-safe UPS system accepted a split-second power fluctuation just this morning, and instead of keeping everything running, my entire network backbone and my NAS and my recently-installed Beelink workstation all took a brief nap. Apparently, the 5-year-old battery in the UPS has weakened to the point of giving up, so a replacement is on the way. This event not only took down the hardware, but when everything was restarted, my Docker containers did not reload. This kept my music and photo servers off-line until I figured out what happened.

So if you bother to come here and see posts like this tagged with “Tech-Geek” or something similar, you can skip to the snark.