Thanks very much. I'd forgotten that these were Westmere generation! Experimenting anyway; at least the RAID controller is behaving, and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has gone on cleanly.
For a realtime-ish solution I wonder if you've seen Ninjam[1]? It used to be that most evenings one could find various populated rooms; the serverlist[2] shows that the infrastructure's all sat there ready for people to come.
You play over the most recent (eg) 16 bar repeat. At the end of each repeat, everyone gets the updated loop. It's easier to experience than describe but is surprisingly effective and bypasses a whole class of latency issues.
dBase was one of my first exposures to databases. As a largely penniless computer-obsessed kid in the late 80s/early 90s I was big into sending off for any freebies offered in the ads of the pages of UK BYTE.
Somehow I scored a (stripped down?) copy on multiple floppies that I couldn't even use, as an Amiga owner - but incredibly, this freebie came with a fantastic paper manual which I devoured.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)