Max-P

As someone that admins hundreds of MySQL at work, I’d go with PostgreSQL.

Sometimes it’s like that, especially if they grew up in poverty, even if they’re pretty well off now. It sticks, you’re just conditioned to save as much as possible. Which they very well could be: they could have plenty of income but be far behind on their retirement accounts and would rather put money for their upcoming retirement if they can. There’s a lot of factors there.

I wouldn’t say normal, but also not uncommon especially if you’re someone that’s good with tinkering.

Basically if the furnace is fairly old, parts start wearing down and requires replacement or fixing. So you get to a point where you have to fix things more often because all the parts have reached end of life. Often it’ll be a small thing like maybe you need to clean the flame sensor, and then after that your negative pressure sensor goes out so you have to fix that. Those are all safety measures, so the furnace might be working perfectly fine but the control board thinks it’s unsafe, and shuts down, which is the correct thing to do. There’s a possibility the wire juggling is bypassing some of those.

But a lot of those items you can do for basically free or really cheap, so it’s not appealing to throw $2500 on a whole new one or to get a professional in to charge you $300 for the same fix. Furnaces also need to be services regularly, ideally yearly to check everything is good and prevent failures at inconvenient times, which many just can’t afford or don’t want to spend the money on. If $2500 is a lot of money for your parents, it’s just a small tradeoff that yeah it might go out every now and then and you fix it for so much cheaper.

Yeah, that didn’t stop it from pwning a good chunk of the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell

IMO the biggest attack vector there would be a Minecraft exploit like log4j, so the most important part to me would make sure the game server is properly sandboxed just in case. Start from a point of view of, the attacker breached Minecraft and has shell access to that user. What can they do from there? Ideally, nothing useful other than maybe running a crypto miner. Don’t reuse passwords obviously.

With systemd, I’d use the various Protect* directives like ProtectHome, ProtectSystem=full, or failing that, a container (Docker, Podman, LXC, manually, there’s options). Just a bare Alpine container with Java would be pretty ideal, as you can’t exploit sudo or some other SUID binaries if they don’t exist in the first place.

That said the WireGuard solution is ideal because it limits potential attackers to people you handed a key, so at least you’d know who breached you.

I’ve fogotten Minecraft servers online and really nothing happened whatsoever.