Ideally a Bluetooth dongle/maybe a speaker. Looks like an old problem from a quick google. So there we go don’t need VMs!

I have seen Nix come up quite a bit and have been tempted to try it. I’ve rolled with Arch before so I was considering going back to it but maybe something new be go.

The OS itself I don’t back up outside of mirroring. I run an immutable OS (every reboot is like a fresh install). I can redeploy from git so no need to backup. I have some persistent BTRFS volumes mounted where logs, caches, and state go. Don’t backup, but I swap the volume every boot and keep the last 30 days of volumes or a min of at least 10 for debugging.

Something like this has always interested me. I remember reading about doing similar with Windows. Not so much it being immutable so much as having a decent starting image that you load on any device you want with all your programs ready to go.

Runs Arrs, Jellyfin, Monero node, Tor entry node, wireguard VPN (to get into network from remote), I2C, Mullvad VPN (default), Proton VPN (torrents with port forwarding use this), DNS (forced over VPN using DoT), PiHole in front of that, three of my WiFi vlans route through either Mulvad, I2C, or Tor. I’ll use TailsOS for anything sensitive. WiFi is just to get to I2C or Onion sites where I’m not worried about my device possibly leaking identity.

Do you have a guide or ten you used for all this perchance? Unraid has stuff like trashguides and space invader one. Especially the DNS part onwards? If not it’s cool I have Mullvad set up and Pihole with my current setup so I’ll be able to work it out. This is all very compelling for me to try out (I should really have learned about wireguard by now). Thanks a lot for such an interesting and informative write up!

Arch btw

Like I needed even more temptation. Cheers for confirming my suspicion that rolling a Linux distro is likely the go. I don’t really need a VM, just hassio doesn’t (didn’t?) have pass through without it.

For entry homelab stuff I still think it’s great. Literally just smacked it into an old HP server (now my cannibalised gaming builds) and it was good to go. However I was pretty inexperienced then (hence why I think I may have borked something fundamentally). Now days I’m more comfortable which getting under the hood hence looking for alternative. Definitely would still suggest Unraid to some though.

I was tempted to do something like an Ubuntu server. I figured all my NAS stuff is run through docker anyway. Cheers I’ll check out dockge

Docker is great because you can install something and all the shit it needs is installed and runs in that container. It’s good for a multitude of reasons mine are:

1. No more installing a dependency, tool or library alongside a program that fucks up something else. No more shit breaking because you installed the latest python but some other program breaks if you move beyond 3.10 (and you forgot to use venv I guess).
2. Somewhat a follow on from 1 but this makes for great functionality with self hosting. I can run a couple docker compose/build command and build/rebuild the containers anywhere I need them. I can test a container on a windows computer to see if it does what I want and works as intended and then spin the some container up on my media server, even if it’s a different OS. I have a bunch of them on my home server and it and it’s great being able to just plug in the port number of the other containers they need to talk to, if any, and that’s all. One container breaking doesn’t break everything else.

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