Home Server and Self Hosting General - Technological Self-Sufficiency

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Talk to me about offsite backups. One thing I'd love to host is my own password manager, but that's a scary thing to host. If I screw up somewhere along the line, which I will, I'm mega-fucked.

I have Proxmox and Proxmox Backup Server set up. I was thinking that I could host my password manager, let PBS back it up, and then take those backups and put them in some cloud storage, like Backblaze. It's $6/TB a month. If I ever need to restore, I pull the backups down, slap them into PBS, and let it ride. So, I guess my solution would be Backblaze+Rclone.

Do you offsite backup? How do you do it? And if you don't, then why the hell don'tcha?
I do super lazy zipped/encrypted Syncthing backups from my server to my PC, my laptop, my phone and a small PC I have at my parents place. I also have a space-share with a friend where we dedicate 16GB or so on our respective machines for each other.
 
Off-site is handled by periodically taking a pair of drives, writing an encrypted backup to them and then taking them to my friend's hangar at the airport and bringing the pair that's there back. And repeat.
That is awesome, and kind of funny. The Rsync solution would be up my alley. Keep it simple and generally low-maintenance. And I wouldn't have to go anywhere, which is nice.

Syncthing
I should look into Syncthing. The trouble would be keeping connectivity from another site. If I gotta expose a port for that on another residential network, that's gonna be too much of a pain. Could probably VPN it into my home network, though, that could work. I got DDNS, so no issues there. I gotta read up on how Syncthing works.
 
The only point for a UPS is to survive very short power blips and to shut down safely for anything longer.
Or just go overkill. I just can't give up my ancient dual-socket opteron board. Recently redid my entire setup with Proxmox as base and moved my Desktop upstairs to connect via 10Gb. Stream everything downstairs via Sunshine/Moonlight and have my Cockpit/HOTAS setup connected back up via USB/IP running on an ancient Raspberry Pi 2b. I'm running a local Steam Cache that has my entire library downloaded (about 3TB) and when I want to install something it just pulls from the cache over the 10Gb link.

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My Password Safe is just a KeePass file on my home hosted NextCloud.
That means there's already a copy on every NextCloud client I have.
Off-site is handled by periodically taking a pair of drives, writing an encrypted backup to them and then taking them to my friend's hangar at the airport and bringing the pair that's there back. And repeat.
For over a decade I've used a local Password Safe file I keep on Dropbox. Dropbox is synced to my local storage nightly via a Truenas cloud sync job and I have about 1-2TB of the most important/impossible to recover things synced to Backblaze B2.
 
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I've recently been hit by youtube as being a teen, alongside the current state of trooncord asking for IDs I've decided to go full in on just using self-hosted services, not to mention I've given up github long ago after they decided to not accept commits using user+password as auth anymore.
My most recent additions were around self-hosted social media, currently have synapse for a discord alternative running completely cut-off from federation and mastodon for a twitter-like experience(so I've heard, I've never used twitter), these are on the heavier side of requirements and mastodons specially feel like I could use a better alternative, I'm using relays but I like the idea of "bubbles" some alternatives offer. So I've looked up about pleroma, akkoma and rebased, is anyone opinionated on any of these? I was personally inclined to use rebased but their gitlab doesn't even link to an existing page under "installation guide" and the lack of a ready-to-go docker makes me wonder if I'd be putting in effort for something that doesn't work in the end, has anyone had experience with it?
Pleroma, Akkoma and Rebased are just optimized, rewritten versions of Mastodon with some extra features. They're federated to the Troonstodon network by default unless you disable federation. It looks like the creator put Rebased on the backburner to focus on some TERF Tumblr clone? Anyway, you can find an archive of the install guide here. I can't remember this too well because the last time I deployed Rebased it was still called Soapbox-BE, and that instance has been gone for years, but I wanted the thing on Docker as well and wrote my own Dockerfile with the Elixir install and compile commands in the guide.

If you're worried that Rebased is abandonware, you can install the Soapbox or Elk frontend on a different backend for a Xitter-like experience. The Install Soapbox on Pleroma guide is still up.
 
Or just go overkill. I just can't give up my ancient dual-socket opteron board. Recently redid my entire setup with Proxmox as base and moved my Desktop upstairs to connect via 10Gb. Stream everything downstairs via Sunshine/Moonlight and have my Cockpit/HOTAS setup connected back up via USB/IP running on an ancient Raspberry Pi 2b. I'm running a local Steam Cache that has my entire library downloaded (about 3TB) and when I want to install something it just pulls from the cache over the 10Gb link.

View attachment 8698459View attachment 8698460View attachment 8698466View attachment 8698470View attachment 8698476


For over a decade I've used a local Password Safe file I keep on Dropbox. Dropbox is synced to my local storage nightly via a Truenas cloud sync job and I have about 1-2TB of the most important/impossible to recover things synced to Backblaze B2.
That memory usage is kind of worrying as PVE isn't good at dealing with OOM situations reliably.
You should consider setting up a swap using zram-tools. lz4 is very cheap (CPU pressure) to write and basically free to read.
 
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Or just go overkill. I just can't give up my ancient dual-socket opteron board. Recently redid my entire setup with Proxmox as base and moved my Desktop upstairs to connect via 10Gb. Stream everything downstairs via Sunshine/Moonlight and have my Cockpit/HOTAS setup connected back up via USB/IP running on an ancient Raspberry Pi 2b. I'm running a local Steam Cache that has my entire library downloaded (about 3TB) and when I want to install something it just pulls from the cache over the 10Gb link.
Impressive, very nice...

Although, how do you switch between those gaming VMs in a way that it doesn't impede performance and lets the client system govern the inputs?

That memory usage is kind of worrying as PVE isn't good at dealing with OOM situations reliably.
You should consider setting up a swap using zram-tools. lz4 is very cheap (CPU pressure) to write and basically free to read.
Not sure if the reporting is correct. PVE does these weird things to me, too. It depends on the number of VMs running. If in doubt, check host memory usage for each VM and the host's total free RAM. But I agree on zRAM, it's really great.
 
Although, how do you switch between those gaming VMs in a way that it doesn't impede performance and lets the client system govern the inputs?
I don't; those are strictly one on at a time. Consumer AMD cards (7900 XTX in this case) have no support at all for SR-IOV. I'm trying out running as much gaming on Linux as possible but (Ubuntu at least) doesn't play nicely at all with Steam VR hence still having a Windows 11 VM. The WIn7 is so I can run an ancient version of Java necessary to connect to the IPMI remote console on the server board; the video analyzer VM is me starting to play around with some on-prem AI.

The old server is where all the miscellaneous VMs/containers go; have things like a 3d printer and a USB OTA tv tuner card hooked up there. I've had one version or another of the same ZFS pool brought forward across various incarnations of the server since before Linux even had support (first was an install of OpenSolaris many years ago). I've had the current server going on 10 years now and I know it's a huge power sync (along with all the 6 TB drives) but I just can't make myself spend the money to replace it.

Speaking of VR I have ALVR + Vision Pro running and was able to have a pretty good experience running Elite Dangerous VR through it completely wireless.

Bonus HOTAS/Cockpit setup and Server room:

Everything is hooked to a USB hub plugged into that Pi.
1773513297824.png

Storage is currently all in the main server. That 12 bay shelf on top is hooked up via external SAS and was just so I could shuffle things to a different pool to reorganize the main one (had everything in a single 12 wide RAIDZ3 initially and changed it to stripe+mirrors).
2026-03-14 13.45.58.jpg
 
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I don't; those are strictly one on at a time. Consumer AMD cards (7900 XTX in this case) have no support at all for SR-IOV. I'm trying out running as much gaming on Linux as possible but (Ubuntu at least) doesn't play nicely at all with Steam VR hence still having a Windows 11 VM. The WIn7 is so I can run an ancient version of Java necessary to connect to the IPMI remote console on the server board; the video analyzer VM is me starting to play around with some on-prem AI.

The old server is where all the miscellaneous VMs/containers go; have things like a 3d printer and a USB OTA tv tuner card hooked up there. I've had one version or another of the same ZFS pool brought forward across various incarnations of the server since before Linux even had support (first was an install of OpenSolaris many years ago). I've had the current server going on 10 years now and I know it's a huge power sync (along with all the 6 TB drives) but I just can't make myself spend the money to replace it.

Speaking of VR I have ALVR + Vision Pro running and was able to have a pretty good experience running Elite Dangerous VR through it completely wireless.

Bonus HOTAS/Cockpit setup and Server room:

Everything is hooked to a USB hub plugged into that Pi.
View attachment 8700750

Storage is currently all in the main server. That 12 bay shelf on top is hooked up via external SAS and was just so I could shuffle things to a different pool to reorganize the main one (had everything in a single 12 wide RAIDZ3 initially and changed it to stripe+mirrors).
View attachment 8700845
Nice setup you got there, do you have any tips regarding RAIDZ? I currently have a simple eight drive RAIDZ2 pool, are there more optimal ways of setting up pools?
Speaking about disk shelves, is RAIDZ3 a good choice? Originally I was going to slap 12 or more drives in my Netapp to create a pool for backups, but I'm still not sure if that's the best way of dealing with it.

Anyone has good recommendations for external 12Gb/s SAS controllers? Or should I stay on 3Gb/s now considering I only use the disk shelf for weekly backups?
 
Nice setup you got there, do you have any tips regarding RAIDZ? I currently have a simple eight drive RAIDZ2 pool, are there more optimal ways of setting up pools?
Speaking about disk shelves, is RAIDZ3 a good choice? Originally I was going to slap 12 or more drives in my Netapp to create a pool for backups, but I'm still not sure if that's the best way of dealing with it.

For a backup pool of 12 drives I'd prefer RAIDZ3 honestly; it has the safest worst case (you can lose any 3 drives; 4 would be a loss of the pool). 2 6 drive RAIDZ2 would be a worst case of 3 drives lost killing you and a best case of 5. Sequential reads/writes will preform well enough; random would absolute suck on that config though. I only went to stripe/mirror because I had plenty of space and wanted better random performance.

A backup pool I have at work is 36 6TB drives set up with 2 x RAIDZ3 17 wide with 2 hot spares. That can easily do 3+ GB/s sequential over 40Gb ethernet (no real tuning done other than enabling jumbo frames).
 
That memory usage is kind of worrying as PVE isn't good at dealing with OOM situations reliably.
You should consider setting up a swap using zram-tools. lz4 is very cheap (CPU pressure) to write and basically free to read.
I only have a single VM at a time running on that box using at most 28GB out of the 32GB. I wouldn't ever run something important that close to the edge. zram-tools does look interesting though.
 
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Nice setup; deserves better than those flimsy tables, though.

I only have a single VM at a time running on that box using at most 28GB out of the 32GB. I wouldn't ever run something important that close to the edge. zram-tools does look interesting though.
ZRAM/Zswap has one caveat, though, because of the general weirdness of Linux' memory reporting: When your machine hits 100% of physical RAM usage, even with several GiB of free Zswap reported, it will start killing processes, anyway, starting with the biggest offender. So, you'll still need to check against free and what that says.

If the reported used memory is below 90% and available memory is above 10%, you're safe, but something like 95%/5% is bad, and Zswap will not be able to help you out for long.

In other words: you cannot rely on Zswap's set size for judging your overall RAM capacity. You've set it to 22 GiB? It can still max your physical RAM out at just 50% fill rate, with another 11 GiB reported free.
 
I got the P320
All the parts arrived yesterday, and I was able to get TrueNas and Jellyfin installed relatively easily. I uploaded a few movies and shows and the server is easily able to handle a couple streams. Now my biggest problem is Jellyfin downloading incorrect metadata based on the video file titles.

Anyone have a good video metadata editor or bulk renaming utility they like to use for this? Jellyfin's built in metadata editor kind of sucks for large operations.
 
All the parts arrived yesterday, and I was able to get TrueNas and Jellyfin installed relatively easily. I uploaded a few movies and shows and the server is easily able to handle a couple streams. Now my biggest problem is Jellyfin downloading incorrect metadata based on the video file titles.

Anyone have a good video metadata editor or bulk renaming utility they like to use for this? Jellyfin's built in metadata editor kind of sucks for large operations.
I've always used the Arr stack for that. Radarr and Sonarr containers are also available in TrueNAS.
 
It is finally time to get rid of my shitty power strip setup in my server rackmount, so I'm wondering if anyone has found similar solutions here.

My main plan is getting a 1U PDU, and I have two choices here.
First one being a simple 8 plug PDU with Type-F (just the classic EU plug) connectors pictured here:

pdu-typef.JPG

Another choice is a PDU with 4 Type-F connectors and 4 "C13" connectors:

pdu-c13.jpg

I'm really considering choosing the second option, these C13-C14 plugs should take up much less space and should make cable management easier in theory.
Otherwise, I can just say fuck it and get the first option with a bunch of 0.5-1M power cables, but that's not nearly as fun

Thoughts on this? Worth the extra effort?
 
Once that is installed I can begin installing TrueNAS....
Update: Unraid has made me lazy and I got filtered by the Truenas permissions system when trying to set containers up so I went with the only logical option and virtualised Truenas under Proxmox. I had accidentally (sending stupid offers on eBay) bought one of those HP Elite Mini 800 G9s (12700T/16GB/500GB) and have been playing around with Proxmox for the last few weeks and really like it.
On the downside the XFS partition on my 10TB drive I had been using under Unraid decided that it was going to shit itself and xfs_repair couldn't fix it. I did have the sense to backup my *arr configs so replacing the media I lost isn't too much of a problem, but it's still a pain.
 
Update: Unraid has made me lazy and I got filtered by the Truenas permissions system when trying to set containers up so I went with the only logical option and virtualised Truenas under Proxmox. I had accidentally (sending stupid offers on eBay) bought one of those HP Elite Mini 800 G9s (12700T/16GB/500GB) and have been playing around with Proxmox for the last few weeks and really like it.
On the downside the XFS partition on my 10TB drive I had been using under Unraid decided that it was going to shit itself and xfs_repair couldn't fix it. I did have the sense to backup my *arr configs so replacing the media I lost isn't too much of a problem, but it's still a pain.
As a Windows pleb, the pozix security permissions system in TrueNAS is dreadful. I stay as lazy as possible and create a dataset just for apps and slap permissions for the apps user ( 568 ) all over it.
 
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