I like the choice of SIlverstone for the case. I got one of those for my proxmox server. It was compact, but not so compact that I left a lot of skin and blood behind after mounting components. I will say that other manufacturers (like Fractal Design just seem to understand how to design an interior a lot better, though.

TIL! Are there good GUI front-ends for Rsync for when you want to browse the file versions?

My friend’s requirements were that the transfers be encrypted (which ssh does) and that his family have a server that was easy for them to use to upload and download files. The file server also had to be private – meaning not stored in the cloud. They aren’t technically savvy, so we needed an option where they could literally drag and drop a file from their desktop onto a web browser window. It worked well for them. My only regret is that the VPN was so complicated to set up. But on the bright side, Synology unifies the username and password between the VPN server and DSM, which makes it a little easier for my friend (and his family) to maintain.

Offsite backups are hard

If you build a NAS instead of using Synology stuff it will be as easy as setup SSH between the machines and rsync.

To be fair, you can do this with Synology as well. Rsync is built-in and even integrated into DSM. The advantage to using Hyperbackup is that you get block-level incremental backups.

I love that Verizon mounting solution! Velcro is the civilized man’s duct tape!

Just a quick follow-up on how we set up self-hosted cloud storage for my friend:

Synology has an OpenVPN server built-in. We configured that to grant his offsite family members access to his network, and then set up DSM to have a custom URL specifically for Synology Drive. (It’s in the Remote Access section of the control panel.) This way users could just visit /drive and get access to a google drive-like interface that was easy for them to use. Setting up the OpenVPN client on their computer was a pain in the butt (as per usual for OpenVPN), but after that was properly configured, they just have a little toggle switch that enables them to access his NAS, which is easy for them to use.

When you share files with someone on Synology Drive, it even sends them an email telling them that you made a file available. Very convenient! They just have to remember how they access the NAS.

I just got through helping a friend set up a NAS. Even today I recommend people stick with Synology because you get so much with it. Security updates and software upgrades are easy, you get good software packages for free, and the Synology platform is just easier to manage unless you want to be a real power user. Honestly, I would replace your current Synology device with an updated one. The DS423+ I set my friend up with had a reasonable processor that could even do hardware transcoding for Plex. Not a lot, mind you, but plenty for his 1080p and DVD library.

I use my Synology NAS for computer backups, photo storage and display, and occasionally I use Synology Drive (Synology’s NextCloud clone – or possibly a fork of NextCloud) to host files for people to access from my network. I wouldn’t say that any self-hosted solution would be extremely easy to use, but Synology Drive was really excellent for moderately techy people.

Offsite backups are hard. I just use Synology’s HyperBackup to create an archive of the files I can’t afford to lose and physically carry those drives to an offsite location. I’ve had to restore from it from time to time, and it has been a nice experience. I especially like that I can restore only specific files and that it handles versioning. It gets hard when you need an immense amount of space for your backup. But these days you can get drives that are positively huge.

On the other hand, fixing all those problems makes you a really effective problem solver. You learn which technologies are good and which are bad; you learn where to find reliable solutions to problems; and you begin to see where tutorial writers have a lack of knowledge (or were really lazy) and how to fix their problems. It forces you to create good habits and to follow best practices. And years down the line, you’ll have some great, stable software that is the envy of your techie friends.

I prefer porkbun for my domain provider. They’re kind of the darling of the self-hosting community, it seems. But I picked them because they were pretty inexpensive.

I’ve actually used Plex for this before, but I was looking for something simpler. Good call, though!

Sadly, this doesn’t appear to have a slide show feature.

I can do better than that: here are a couple of videos from LearnLinuxTV’s Proxmox Course.

• Episode 15: Clustering
• Episode 16: High Availability

You should be able to watch them and get the overview you’re looking for. But really, this whole course is excellent from start to finish. I watched it before I ever touched Proxmox, and I’m glad I did. It was instrumental in helping me choose Proxmox as my hypervisor and gave me a great idea of what hardware I wanted to use and how I wanted to use it.

I run a lot of these services in my homelab. I didn’t really feel like I had something with real potential until I started using Proxmox as my hypervisor. That’s when things exploded. You can create VMs and containers on it with ease, and all the features I would normally have to rely on command line for were also available on the Proxmox web interface. That is so convenient! Need to do a snapshot because you think you might screw up your install on step 37? No problem, just take care of it in the GUI.

Proxmox also handles clustering really well, which will probably benefit you. You can add a Raspberry Pi or two, or a PC, and Proxmox will just manage them all. It will even move services from one device to another if one device gets turned off. It’s really incredible!

The one thing I wouldn’t build yourself is a NAS. I went with a Synology, and I’m glad I did. Building (and maintaining) one from scratch is just more work than I really have time for. With a NAS, you want things to go perfectly all the time, including updates and security updates, so I’m happy to leave most of the testing and configuration to Synology’s team. I just have to remember to update things periodically, which I’m willing to do.

Please give Proxmox a try! It was such a huge quality of life improvement when I migrated to it. I can’t speak to your backup needs or to the performance of ZFS, since I don’t use either of those. I just think that Proxmox took a lot of the pain out of my homelab management experience without taking away my capabilities to customize it. Highly recommend!

First, you don’t really need a VPN to view Plex content. Plex can be configured to require a secure connection. That ought to be enough. But if you want the VPN tunnel for some reason, the answer is simple: self-host your own VPN server. I recommend OpenVPN or Wireguard.

Ugh, this happened to me during a minor release. For whatever reason I had to lug the PC into my office, connect keyboard and mouse, boot it up, and press a key. Then it would boot normally again. I get jealous of those of you with servers that have those remote KVM capabilities.

That looks really good. Which dashboard software is it?

I’m not familiar with how firewalls for a network interface card work. Unless you mean the firewall in the virtualized operating system?

Sounds like you may have already settled on audiobookshelf, but Plex can easily be used to host all of your audiobooks. You just use a music library.

Someone wrote a great walkthrough here.

I do a few things to keep track of my installed services.

1. I run an instance of Heimdall, which is an utterly simple launcher. All of my services with administration panels get added here.
2. I maintain an excel sheet with all of my assigned IPs. It doesn’t matter if it’s a VM, a container, an iPhone, or some other hardware device. Everything is assigned a static IP and added to the excel list.
3. When I’m creating containers and VMs in Proxmox, I make sure that the proxmox ID of the container or VM is the same as the final octet of the IPV4 IP address. So if my Heimdall service is set up on 192.168.1.155, then the Heimdall LXC gets ID 155. I do this so that I can quickly look up the IP of any service in Proxmox without having to open my spreadsheet.

If you follow this convention, then you could easily export the IDs of all of your proxmox containers and VMs by following the instructions here. Make a few transformations to turn the IDs into IP addresses, and you have a .csv you could import elsewhere.

I’m sure someone has made a tool to do this already somewhere. On Github, xezpeleta made an inventory script “to grab proxmox nodes. This will also try to grab the IP if you have the guest agent installed.” I bet there are others out there.