everything is little Linux servers now

So late this past summer, I had a hard drive fail on me. This was pretty upsetting -- I had all of my *code* checked in on github, but it still had a lot of files on it that I didn't want to lose, so I took it to one of those data recovery places, and they were able to get the files off of it. It was kind of expensive and something of a hassle, but I got my files back.

So in response to this, I got a little networked hard drive thing for backups (a WD MyCloud). Surprisingly affordable -- and what's neat is that it's just a tiny Linux server running Debian with an ARM chip on it. Most of the setup is through a nice little web interface, but you can also ssh in and configure it like you would any Linux server.

By default, though, it's not running NFS like I'd wanted it to. It's really not that hard to set these things up, but it's not obvious how to do that from the web menus. I just went with something like these instructions here, though.

And now I've got a cute little embedded Linux device sitting on a 6TB spinning disk, shared over NFS. This is an OK future in many ways.