theZedt

In case the hard disk itself is taking too long to respond, some operations will fail and can cause the controller (software or hardware) to drop the disk out of the RAID. Even when no RAID is used, the hard disk itself can still spend too much time retrying a (failing) read, causing unwanted delays and possible further damage. To alleviate this, you can try to use a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) or CCTL (Command Completion Time Limit).

Installing an operating system remotely comes handy when you don't want to spend all the time required for the install process next to the physical machine or want to give someone else access to perform the procedure. CentOS is one of the OSes which supports remote installation using the VNC protocol.

By default SSHd will terminate an ongoing connection if there was no traffic (incoming or outgoing) for a while. If you usually leave remote sessions running for long amounts of time and hate the unexpected disconnects, this can be changed by enabling the keep-alive feature on the server directly so it applies to all remote sessions regardless of client used.

CentOS is a conservative distribution giving you the most stability and security, at the expense of newer features like the latest PHP release. Fortunately there are ways around for getting a newer PHP by using one of the several repositories out there providing updated packages. My personal choice for this task is Remi's Repository.

Magisk is a great solution for customizing (rooted) Android devices via modules without modifying the firmware (much...). Magisk modules are easy to install and activate (through Magisk Manager), however in rare cases when something fails you can end up with a bootlooping device. In such instances you can either resetting/reflashing the device or use the handy Magisk module installer tool.

Since OPNsense is more vanilla FreeBSD it is a lot simpler to install additional FreeBSD software on it than on pfSense. One piece of additional software that can be useful, especially for monitoring and statistics purposes, is munin.