I had a bit of flip-flopping in my setup. First, I had a Pi Zero hooked up to my router via USB for Pi-Hole and Radicale CalDAV server. Worked fairly well but it occupied the USB slot of my router which can be useful to hook my smartphone up in case my ISP fucks up to have LTE network wide. Also, because it spoofed itself as a LTE modem, it was very cumbersome to deal with network side.
After the n-th time I fucked it up and got tired of figuring out how to set it up from scratch to work via USB, and got tired of how fucked that ends up in the network topology, I pulled out the secondary PC with an i5-4460 and put Proxmox on it. I quickly found this to be a better solution, much easier to set up, configure, maintain and migrate, and also much faster and snappier. The two major downsides was that it was pulling 20W on idle with barely anything on it, as well as the stock cooler I had to install in it being noisy as shit after >8 years of (ab)use.
I ended up grabbing one of these for the sake of running Proxmox.
i5-7500U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 7W on idle. Despite that, I still under-utilize the hardware, plus I have no idea what I'm doing.
All three LXC's are Debian 12 based. The Pi-Hole one obviously has Pi-Hole, as well as unbound for DNS resolving and hard set domain names for all the Proxmox stuff.
The "websrv" one only has Apache2 with LibreSpeed on it, pretty much barely used, I seldom use it to test local connection and WireGuard speeds.
The Docker one is the one I
really have no idea about what I'm doing. I installed Portainer on it to have a configuration interface, but from what I understand it's much more than that and I don't know how to properly use Docker from the command line. It's running two things: Radicale and Gotify.
I'm not exactly happy with how it's set up. I have no idea about the intricate details of Proxmox, Docker or Portainer, I only ran those helper scripts to set it up and followed whichever tutorials on setting up Docker/Portainer. There is no backup system in place. I feel like the Docker/Portainer setup is excessive and could be solved better, but I don't know how. I tried installing NextCloud on it but it's even more complicated than I thought so I gave up on that. I also don't know what other useful self-hosted thingamajigs I could put on it. Plus, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing relying on LXC's or should I use full KVM's, and if so, when should I use an LXC and when should I use a KVM. Or what the fuck is up with Proxmox's storage management and where can I find what when I SSH into it. I guess I should also learn how to deal with VLAN's so that I can isolate all the services from my LAN, but I don't know shit about how they work or how to set them up under RouterOS. And chances are I'd need to get a managed switch instead of a dumb one like I have right now to figure that out.
Another thing I was thinking about was turning that i5-4460 PC into a NAS server. Thing is, I don't even know how I would get around to doing it. It still eats 20W on idle, I'd need to get some hard drives, and install some NAS software. I have, zero, fucking idea, about all of that. I understand that usually people go with TrueNAS and ZFS. I don't know if I should go with TrueNAS Core and use Proxmox for shit that could be useful like a torrent client, or TrueNAS Scale and use it's virtualization features for that, not sure what would be the best simplicity/reliability tradeoff here. I understand that for the most part you should use TrueNAS for NAS and Proxmox for virtualization, and rely on them in tandem, and I assume I could then set up isolated NFS shares depending on whether or not I want some Proxmox service to have access to a specific directory, like a media library or torrent directory, or if I'd want to have an administrative share to everything when I want to manually access it.
I also have zero idea about how to deal with ZFS, mainly how to set it up so that I won't lose any data. Right now my "backup" system is something that just barely qualifies as one. A 4TB WD Blue drive I seldom plug into my PC to do a file sync of all drives. I have a 1TB OS SSD, 2TB data SSD and a 2TB data HDD, I had to add some exclusions since the 4TB WD Blue was getting full. I was thinking of getting X drives for ZFS to have, idk, 6-8TB of usable storage, and then getting a 6-8TB HDD for a cold backup, kinda like I'm doing it right now, but I don't know how to calculate ZFS eating up however many TB of those drives for it's magic to not overspend or underbuy. Yes, I know this is far from a proper backup, but I don't really have a better option than to have a second copy of the data in the same room, which is still better than no backup. On the plus side, the cheapo case I'm using for that PC has an external 3.5" drive mount on top on which I relied for those cold backups before getting a better ventilated case for my main guts. I would like to get into data encryption as well, but I'm anxious about locking myself out of all my data if I lose a key or fuck something up from my lack of knowledge, so for now I'd prefer to stay as close to raw data as possible.
Ideally I'd love for my PC to be free of mass storage like that, only have SSD's for OS, software and games, have all of it delegated to a NAS server, and have it either serve as a host for certain services if that's viable, or be available for Proxmox via NFS so that I can put actually useful shit like Jellyfin, qBitTorrent, -arr autodownloaders etc but can't right now as I keep all of my data on my PC that runs Windows and doesn't run 24/7. And of course have it set up in a way where I won't lose any data to a drive failure or a power surge, which in my case would be having a reliable offline cold copy lying somewhere in my room like I do it right now. No encryption or non-standard formats, just directly accessible raw data, plug it into any computer and have all the data right there.
In short, I require spoonfeeding in the following topics so that I know what to do next;
-how the fuck do I use Proxmox properly
-how the fuck do I use Docker CLI properly
-should I use Portainer, or pure Docker, or switch to something else for easy service setup
-what benefit would NextCloud give me and how to set it up right under Proxmox
-what the fuck is ZFS and how to set it up to not lose any data
-what drives should I buy for a NAS (dedicated/whatever, same models/mixed models, new/refurbs)
-how should I deal with raw cold backups with ZFS (no remote backups)
-how should I deal with drive encryption with minimal risk of locking myself out
-should I go with TrueNAS Core or Scale and how much should I do in Proxmox and how much in TrueNAS
