As mentioned many times I’m sure, I use my rpi’s as a pi-hole/VPN. It’s nice having them as dedicated devices for low power things, if my main server ever fudges up, my VPN still works and internal DNS is still resolved. If I’m not home and get complaints from the family that jellyfin isn’t working, I can either fix it remotely or wake up my dev server for them to use in the meantime.

I also have an rpi 1 as a “dedicated ssh machine” that I can ssh into in case all of my other machines have gone goofy. If for any reason my two main devices aren’t accessible, that one will be because if there’s power to the house it will turn on. It does literally nothing else, so there’s very little chance a power outage will corrupt anything. It does require that the pivpn device is working if I’m not home, but I prefer to leave that to it’s own …devices.

This one gave me the confidence to post my setup, I salute your bravery (°_°)7.

The best of luck with your future insurance claim.

Uggo = uptime

• Old Synology NAS for storage
• Optiplex 7060 running jellyfin, paperless, *arr stack, handbrake, ripper, maybe some other containers.
• NUC5 running nextcloud (nextcloudpi) baremetal and an audiobiokshelf container

I would think that the power led would be on if there’s power going through the motherboard.

Are you referring to the power led or the disk usage led? I think on my nuc the only other led is the disk usage one, which looks like a soda can. The power led is always on, but doesn’t indicate standby or operating as far as I’ve seen.

It’s likely there’s another boot device that’s taking priority over USB, if USB is even enabled in the bios. I’ve had a few computers that try to pxe boot after internal drives, so it never went to usb until I futzed with the boot order to remove pxe. It’s likely not that you didn’t have an SSD in it, but that USB drives aren’t high enough on the boot list, or not at all. You could try finding what the boot selection key press is on boot, then blindly picking first, second, third option etc. to see if anything gets a hit (frantically press boot key during start up then hit enter after a few seconds, then reset and do it again if nothing happens after about 30 seconds, but hit down, then enter.)