You cannot have much time in this or you likely have only ever worked on type of install. $120/drop is the price you charge for simple installs that have zero complication. Just wait until you see fire blocking, runs that go over really weird sections of building, etc.

Ask any veteran of this business and they will laugh you out of the room.

The typical price for a business that had drop ceilings and drywall is $150-$300 depending on number of drops ordered. A single drop is barely worth the materials to deploy a tech.

Using that understanding doing it in a house will easily add $250 for the headaches that can happen. So knowing it is $300 and then a possible $250. $900 seems reasonable in the aspect of they have to make money and they have to make sure that sending the tech is worth doing. She got a quote that was the “I don’t want to take this job” price.

Think about it like this. If you were to tell me that you would pay me $50 to come make you a pot of coffee plus all of my travel and materials. That job to me is not worth it. However if you told me you would pay me $500 plus travel and materials. That job becomes worth doing.

What I want to see is this thing fit 7 Nvidia Tesla T4 16GB cards in it. HP says it is possible in the data sheet.

This is going to highly depend on what you hope to achieve with an application.

1. Does the app need more than one person to access it?

2. Does the app need constant up time?

3. Does it make sense to host it?

Really this boils down to how you feel about each of these questions. So your example, the budget software. Yes I can have a single instance of that app on my computer. However I need my wife to have access to it, as she handles the finances.

Another example however is Jellyfin. This is something that is accessed from multiple locations and by multiple people. So today I might be watching a movie while I work. Tomorrow my wife might be doing that. Friday we might have family night. So that needs a server hosted out to actually make sense.

Game servers are another example here. They need constant up time and to be on hardware that is not the machine I am playing the game on.

It is also important to remember that many of us host all of this in a single location that we back up, and also have redundant drives. So we can easily make sure we have copies of our data at any given point. So while yea I can keep all my D&D data and PDF management on my computer, it is easier and more secure to keep and host that on my server where I have a backup and parity running. There plenty of other examples here too like my phone pictures of my daughter or other various bits of data.

Finally, there are things I just want to tinker and play with. I have no reason to host specific things other than to look at what the tech is like. Stable Diffusion is an example here. But my own ChatGPT instance would be useful if only every now and then. Just have to figure out what exactly makes the most sense to you.

Projects are fun. Do it if you don’t mind failing. Just keep failing until you get it right.

The setup is not ideal, I won’t lie to you. It could be better. But honestly, if it works for you, do it. There are so many things you can do to improve it and generally it will serve as a stepping stone to the next upgrade you see yourself making.

I will also note, since you have two of them, you could take the proxmox route and make them redundant. I am sure there is a way with Unraid to make them redundant too. I really wish I had the knowledge to run things in RAM.

99 times out of 100 this is an issue with the cable. Be it the one in the computer or the one in the wall.

If you do it yourself, the cost of materials and tools. Which would be about $150-$250. It is easy to do and learn and due to being low voltage there is very little risk. Just make everything as neat as possible.

If you hire a person, it is base $150 per run. But they usually have a minimum requirement.

Anyway, this is barely worthy of a post,

Shut up! This is always worth a post! We do this because we enjoy it. Not because we seek fame. Good on you for getting the job. Just keep learning and growing.

A word of advice for any one else and any future endeavors. Put your lab at the bottom of your resume. 10 year or 20 years in the game, I don’t care. Put it on there. Give the highlights and you are good. So far it has gotten me two jobs.

I mean, the entire point of VPN like that is all time online. The better solution is likely a port forward for syncing.

I don’t think that really solves the problem here. That will still use the VPN all the time when mobile. So the battery will still drain quickly. Zero Tier I admit is quite heavy compared to Tailscale but the battery issue remains.

You know, honestly… If you want to get into self hosting your stuff. The better option is to get one of those mini desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo. They are cheap and powerful. It will likely server you until the hardware dies depending on what you want to do. It also costs only the cost of the machine and the TINY amount of power it will consume per year.

Once we get a good, well priced E-ink tablet. I think e-readers are going to become much more common. But sadly every company wants to stuff them full of things that the display just isn’t really good for. Like the Huawei MatePad should have 2 weeks of battery life easily. But instead they put an OS on it that eats battery and it barely lasts a full day.

What I think would be a good thing to start looking into as you progress, is the ability to take these scans and other items and turning them into actual text. This can give you more freedom and make the user experience much better. Like the ability to take a book and turn the bright white pages into a much friendlier dark mode for night reading. This could also mean, when E-ink tablets do start becoming easier to own. You will be able to easily adapt to them.

What you are making honestly has no use to me, but I have been following none the less. It is an interesting bit of kit. Keep up the effort, it is not terrible to use for the bit I have used it. As others said of course though, a phone app would be the king. Sadly you also can’t benefit those users of other tablets for reading like Kindle. Using the email service is so hacky and just not great from a user experience.