Probably not exactly what you have in mind, but I’d still recommend The Reality Dysfunction (and the other two books in the Night’s Dawn Trilogy) by Peter F Hamilton.

iBall

Thanks - I’m looking for a pad with no other features other than the USB output, but this does have that outlet.

Nice, thanks! That’s the sort of thing, especially the second one that has USB-C out as well. Neat.

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Thanks. That means I need to move all data off the hosts on to, say, a NAS - then the NAS becomes the single point of failure. Can I operate a swarm without doing that but still duplicate everything from host 1 to host 2, so host 2 could take over relatively seamlessly (apart from local DNS and moving port forwarding to nginx on the remaining host)?