I have this little NUC (small computer) that I've been using for ~8 years now to run my bitcoin/lightning node and everything else related. I've been using it as a playground to just try everything, I've installed and reinstalled so many things, I ran it with FreeBSD (my fav), Ubuntu and in the last years Debian, it's been running pretty stable with very little maintenance. 

But a few days ago it would't boot anymore, disk full, the 500 GB internal SSD isn't enough anymore for full blockchain + indexes and I don't want to run it pruned, it's also connected to a 2 TB external USB HDD but that one is a bit slow. I've moved some things around a few times to make it work again but now its not booting anymore with a totally unrelated error about a wifi device (wtf, its not even using wifi), so after all these years of experiments and bloat I've decided to just start over with fresh install, same NUC, bigger disks, reinstall OS and restore config. This time I'm going to install the minimal just to:

- Connect my wallets to my own bitcoin or lightning node

- Look up transactions on my own blockchain explorer

- Connect a BitAxe solo lottery miner

Bookmark this post if you want to follow along as I will post my updates as replies.

#sidequest #hobby #server