That will be totally doable, but there’s no one way to setup every service. Some you’ll install from the repository (like nginx or HAProxy or samba). Others you’d have to clone from git (like netbox or dokuwiki). Others have entirely different methods. So, unfortunately it’ll be a lot of reading the documentation.

In general, I prefer unprivileged LXC to a full VM unless there’s some specific requirement that countermands that preference (like running an appliance or a non-Linux OS).

What I tend to do is create a new container for each service (unless there’s a related stack). If the service runs on Docker, I’ll install that right inside the container and manage it with docker compose. By installing Docker directly from get.docker.com instead of the built in packages, it pretty much works all the time.

Since each service is in its own container, restoring backups is pretty service-specific. If you wanted some kind of central control plane for docker, you could check out swarm mode.

For me it’s the Mac Finder. It’s always running so (unless it crashes) there’s no delay in opening a file manager window and, more importantly, it has built in Quicklook and Miller columns. Haven’t managed to find a good-enough implementation of either of those in Linux, so I just work around it.

Not sure how wide a variety of sizes there are, but I’d search for “threaded inserts.” You drill the holes and screw the inserts in and that gives you an interface for machine bolts. I’ve only seen them in bigger sizes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some that would fit standoffs.

Without knowing a little more, it’s tough to say what’s going on, but I suspect when you recreated the storage, you connected it to a slightly different place from last time. What’s the output of cat /etc/pve/storage.cfg? The dump, images, private, snippets, and template directories are auto-created when you assign those roles to a storage pool in the PVE Datacenter.

Seeing the content of storage.cfg and maybe mount would help get this sorted, I think.

In my state (Vermont), the Secretary of State has an rss feed that basically presents the results as an xml file. I’m using that to make some local results spreadsheets. Could be other states have similar things.

I’m not familiar with the Ben Eater series, but there are certainly a couple options to check out.

Mark Ferneaux did a fantastic series on the workings of pfSense. It’s a little dated, but the core concepts are still sound and apply to networking generally.

There are also several sites that do in-depth networking topics with a focus on certifications. My favorite of the bunch is Viatto.

I also quite like The Network Berg, though his videos are specifically focused on Mikrotik.

Linux runs fine on Intel Macs. There are a couple peculiarities you’ll want to be aware of, though.

• Ventoy doesn’t work as an installer. The boot menu will come up, but any ISO you choose will hang
• Not all distros will recognize the wireless card and install the firmware (Be prepared to install it using a USB to Ethernet adapter)
• Same goes for the iSight web cam

Other than those initial hiccups, everything works pretty flawlessly.

The thing that immediately came to mind was mailpiler.org. It’s been on my list to stand up for a while, but I’ve never got around to it.

Awesome. I’m glad it helps. I’d be a little weary of using the same directory in multiple containers. File systems may or may not behave well with multiple machines writing to them. Not saying anything bad will happen, but do keep an eye out for issues.

I’m making some assumptions, namely that you’re using an unprivileged LXC container and the mount point is a bind mount.

Unprivileged LXC shift user ID numbers so that an escape won’t result in root access to the host. The root user (uid 0) in the container is actually uid 100000 from the perspective of the Proxmox host.

What I usually do is set ownership of my bind mounts to that high-numbered ID (so something like chown -R 100000:100000 /path/to/bind/mount) from Proxmox. Then the root user in the container will be able to set whatever permissions you need directly.

Check out ersatztv.org. That software lefts you create custom, continuously playing channels that you can watch from Jellyfin as a live TV channel.

Since you’re interested in this kind of DIY, approach, I’d seriously consider thinking the whole process through and writing a simple script for this that runs from your desktop. That will make it trivial to do an automatic backup whenever you’re active on the network.

Instead of cron, look into systemd timers and you can fire off your script after, say, one minute of being on your desktop, using a monotonic timer like OnUnitActiveSec=60.

Thinking through the script in pseudo code, it could look something like:

rsync -avzh $server_source $desktop_destination || curl -d "Backup failed" ntfy.sh/mytopic

This would pull the back from your server to your desktop and, if the backup failed, use a service such as ntfy.sh to notify you of the problem.

I think that would pretty much take care of all of your requirements and if you ever decided to switch systems (like using zfs send/recv instead of rsync), it would be a matter of just altering that one script.

I had never heard of this, but it sounds fascinating — thanks for sharing! Definitely going to try to set this up this weekend.

Dokuwiki (dokuwiki.org) is my usual go-to. It’s really simple and stores entries in markdown files so you can get at them as plain text files in a pinch. Here’s a life lesson: don’t host your documentation in the machine you’re going to be breaking! Learned that the hard way once or twice.

For reverse proxies, I’m a fan of HAProxy. It uses pretty straightforward config files and is incredibly robust.

I can’t give direct experience here, but this is exactly the use case I’ve been meaning to spin up mailpiler for: https://www.mailpiler.org/. One of these days that will rise to the top of the priority list.

If you want an image, it doesn’t matter what the underlying file system is. You should be able to use a tool like Clonezilla and get a 1:1 copy. Depending how you’ve set up partitioning, you could also use sgdisk to set up the proper partitions and zfs send/recv for the new data portion of the drive and install a boot loader. That’s probably the way I’d go in this instance.

I’ve not used Symfonium, but I use substreamer on iOS and it’s perfectly serviceable: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/substreamer/id1012991665

There was a recent conversation on the Practical ZFS discourse site about poor disk performance in Proxmox (https://discourse.practicalzfs.com/t/hard-drives-in-zfs-pool-constantly-seeking-every-second/1421/). Not sure if you’re seeing the same thing, but it could be that your VMs are running into the same too-small volblocksize that PVE uses to make zvols for its Vans under ZFS.

If that’s the case, the solution is pretty easy. In your PVE datacenter view, go to storage and create a new ZFS storage pool. Point it to the same zpool/dataset as the one you’ve already got and set the block size to something like 32k or 64k. Once you’ve done that, move the VM’s disk to that new storage pool.

Like I said, not sure if you’re seeing the same issue, but it’s a simple thing to try.

My go-to for this is a plain Debian or Ubuntu container with Cockpit and the 45Drives file sharing plugin. It’s pretty straightforward and works pretty well.