Ethernet speeds historically were measured in 10/100. In my past life I worked for an a small rural isp. And part of my learning I was taught that cat5 was 8 strands of wire, or 4 twisted pairs. I got very familiar with crimping patch cables. If one strand were cut a network card would negotiate down to its lowest speed and still work at 10mbps. Operating on 4 wire or two pairs. It’s possible with those numbers you had a bad connection, or a broken strand in the cable and it auto negotiated down to 10mbps. To this day I still crimp my own cables, and I own a cheap cable tester to make sure the crimps and cables are good.

I’ve had very bad luck with raspberry Pi’s and SDCards. They just don’t seem to last very long. I swapped to usb storage and things got somewhat better. I just had a usb drive die after 3 to 4 years of use. When I was still using SD it seemed like multiple times a year. Heat. Power loss, you can only punch holes in silicon so many times before it wears out. Whatever the reason.

My approach for this is configuration backup not the entire os. I think this approach is better for when it’s time to upgrade the os or migrate to a new system.

For my basic Pi running WireGuard and DNS, I keep an archive of documentation on steps to reconfigure the system after a total loss. Static configs are backed up once, and If there are critical configuration items that change then I back those up weekly. I’ve got two systems (media related servers, not Pi’s) that I keep ansible playbooks to configure 90% of the system from scratch so it’s as hands off as it can be.

Old I.T. Proverb: Documentation is like sex. Even bad documentation is better than no documentation at all.

Synology Diskstation DS1522+ $699.00

Synology Diskstation DS1621+ $899.99

Some of those apps are available through the community package center. If not then you can run a docker environment or a virtual machine on the DS and run whatever you want. It’s got a lot more horsepower than a single board computer, but I still recommend separation of duties and let the NAS be a NAS. Put your services on a server or separate virtual environment.

This is my DS16xx+ and expansion bay

OpenAudible. I strip the DRM from all of my Audible audiobooks and archive them.

There’s a free way to do it using rainbowcrack but OA is simpler.

Influxdb is a “time series” database for storing metrics. Temperatures, ram usage, cpu usage with time stamps. Telegraf is the client side agent that sends those metrics to the database in json format. Prometheus does pretty much the same thing but is a bit too bloated for my liking, so I went back to Influx.

Grafana, influxdb, telegraf agents. Easy to setup. Barely any configuration required. Everything you asked for in the default telegraf agent config. There are dashboards with plenty of examples on grafanas website.

Piracy. He won’t come out and actually say it which could incriminate himself. Also he just setup a Koi pond in his backyard and put a 24-7 live webcam stream of it. There is really nothing more to it.