Can I go to my public sites

I would not recommend. Remember, wherever you step, your feet are leaving traces. Your public sites may be a little too publicly well-known afterwards.

and/or VPN into my servers?

VPN’s might not work from there, or the use may be considered a crime.

Yes. Firewalls.

With an iPhone, however, you are screwed. Apple won’t let you do what you are looking for.

You say it is mounted. Then you can share it in all the same ways as you would share any other of the VM’s folders.

I am using SMB shares for that (but that is not always the best way ofc).

recover data from unfunctioned remaining RAID disks due to RAID controller failure

In this case, you need a new RAID controller of similar type.

Can I even simply attach one of the RAID 1 disk to the desktop system

No. One disk out of a RAID array is different from a normal disk.

Recovery becomes easy if you do not use a hardware RAID controller, but a ZFS software RAID instead. It does nearly all automatically. But you need to do a little more reading tutorials for the first setup.

The SD card is broken, but not totally dead yet.

So, decide now if you want to try and rescue some files from it, then DO NOT USE IT anymore until the real data recovery operation starts. No further tries to boot, no fsck etc.

better to pass the individual disks through to the VM and manage the zpool from there?

That’s what I do.

I like it better this way, because less dependencies.

Proxmox boots from it’s own SSD, the VM that provides the NAS lives there, too.

The zpool (consisting of 5 good old harddisks) can be easily plugged somewhere else if needed, and it carries the data of the NAS, but nothing else. I can rebuild the proxmox base, I can reinstall that VM, they all do not affect each other.

Tl;dr but:

If you simply want the best UX, then you need to stay with the real Facebook etc.

They spend millions and millions and millions only for UX. Free software can never compete, period.

I have 3 separate machines:

1. That fat home server with NAS and VM’s etc.

2. A Pi serving my smart home.

3. A plastic router with OpenWrt doing DNS and (I like to believe) some security, and giving WiFi to many small devices.

They all run 24/7 but I just don’t want everything to be dead and dark when one machine is down for whatever reason.

This will be the spec for my next server. The current one is smaller, and several years old

I have several different requirements for my server, for example, my son does video editing and needs lots of storage. I want to experiment with more VM’s and containers, therefore RAM and threads.

Do you think people just beginning could get buy on 4 cores and 8 GB RAM for a while?

For most people I think they just want to have some NAS and a reliable machine. But please grant them 16 GB, otherwise they would ask why their laptop has so much more than their server :-)

I would absolutely want the extra router because most people have one from their service provider. For self hosting, you want an additional router with your own software.

The hypothesis is that $150 of equipment to avoid dozens of hours of software configuration

OK fair try, but you also need to sell me 20-25 TB of disk space on 5 spindles (plus a SSD for the bootdisk), 64 GB RAM (with a chance to go up to 128) and the CPU must have 16 threads or more.

we can have 5~10 photos which are basically duplicates

Have any of you guys handled a similar situation?

I decide which one is the best and then delete the others. Sometimes I keep 2, but that’s an exception. I do that as early as possible.

I don’t mind about storage space at all (still many TB free), but keeping (near-)duplicates costs valuable time of my life. Therefore I avoid it.

even allowed in Germany?

Yes.

works well on my LAN network, but when I try to make the server accessible via a DynDNS service

I guess your Fritzbox does NAT for your LAN. Then the dyndns address works only when the client is outside.

all that data would become inaccessible to my OMV.

Why?

Nothing gets destroyed unless your OMV actively destroys things (which is very unlikely)

A zpool is easily portable to a new machine/VM.

enforce tagging at the switch level (i.e. don’t trust the cameras to maintain their own VLAN) settings.

Very smart solution!

I guess you need to “zpool import -f” because your system has crashed before and did not shutdown properly.

After reading again, I understand that your pool is alive and well. It is just not mounted anywhere.

Look into /etc/fstab if you find the correct mountpoint there. Then tell it to your ZFS with "zfs set mountpoint= "

Measure the time after the reboot of the AP until the next failure.

If it is always the same duration, then that excludes the memory problem. If it is a variable time, then that excludes the DHCP problem and probably also DNS.

I can imagine several causes:

• more than one DHCP server in your network (most likely)

• very wrong DNS setup in your network (unlikely, because I guess you would have given us a hint in that direction)

• heavy downloading traffic and one cheap plastic device (router, switch etc.) runs out of memory

I would take a normal Android device and this slideshow app:

https://slideshow.digital/doc

unless you know how to verify they are not running malware out of the box.

So why don’t you tell us how to verify that?