I have been using Arch Linux on my Desktop PC at home since somewhere in the last quarter of 2020. I didn't have to rescue-boot or anything like that in all those years. I did reinstall Arch once because I got a new PC.
I do have an all AMD setup, as I heard NVIDIA isn't all too nice to linux in general and the drivers were a hassle to get right, never tried it though.
Maybe it depends on what you're doing on your PC. I'm mostly gaming, surfing the web, youtube and a little docker on the side.
I do understand where you're coming from, but judging from my personal experience with a friend who became a religious extremist (among other things), I don't know if this is actually possible with some people.
This is an honest plea for helping me understand and find a solution.
I tried to talk about his religious views and the world and people for 1.5 years. Nothing helps. Words seemingly never reach this guy, except they reinforce his faith. He would also never go to therapy, as "therapists don't want to help you, they just want your money".
He rather declared that he (and every human on earth) has been born without empathy and is unable to reach any acceptable moral values on his own and that raping and killing children is just part of his "good god, who's love first and foremost" than accepting that literally anything he heard about his faith isn't as good and pure as he sees it.
He's not my friend anymore, but
that does not make him any less of a religious extremist
that does not make him any less of a dangerous person for the people around him
he already has his new social circle, who're all of the same opinion
you can't force him to therapy or confinement until he hurts / kills somebody
The things outlined above are only a small part of what he told me about his faith. I feel like this one is lost for good.
To me it seems like there's nothing anybody can do, we just need to wait until real bad shit hits the fan.
I'd really love to get all my people to use FOSS software or, at the very least, stop using WhatsApp and Co and switch to Signal.
The thing is, most people (including my people) just don't care. At all.
The response is always one of these:
I don't care, let them read all I send / see all I do
You're just paranoid because you're working in IT
You can just ignore the ads
You just gotta deal with it
It got to a point where it became so frustrating and the "paranoid" bit just pissing me off so much, I gave up. I don't even talk about IT anymore with them, they wouldn't (want to) understand anyway.
I feel like I'm on the only inhabitant of an island in the middle of the ocean.
I honestly think the only way to get people to care is, if the consequences themselves kick these people between the legs. Which will probably not happen in a way where they would understand "this wouldn't have happened with FOSS software".
Because you finally understood that visibility is not about the work.
Translation: Nobody cares how well your work is done. Being there and looking busy is way more important than the actual benefits you bring to your employer.
No problem, english isn't my native language either.
In the end, it just boils down to: are you okay with a downtime while reinstalling the hypervisor and restoring from backups? If yes, you don't need a RAID. If no, a RAID of some kind would probably be the most sensible choice.
You should not be able to restore the whole drive, like you would restore a VM. This is because you would first need to have Proxmox VE already running to restore the drive which runs Proxmox VE.
If your NVME drive dies, you would have to do what I outlined above:
get new NVME drive, install in server
install Proxmox VE manually
install Proxmox BS manually (either lxc container or VM)
give Proxmox BS access to backups on external HDD
restore whatever you backed up
Though, to reiterate, I do not know anything about lxc containers.
I did go through the Proxmox VE backup settings on my server, but I could not find a way to backup lxc containers, only VMs. So maybe Proxmox VE does not support backing up lxc containers? Or maybe it just does not show any lxc container backup option because I do not run any lxc containers?
As a tipp: Even if your motherboard only supports 1 NVME drive, you might still be able to use multiple. You could buy a PCIe card with M.2 NVME slots, if you have any unused PCIe slots on your mainboard. With this, you should still be able to have a RAID setup.
How does it work if my ssd dies, where proxmox boot
If you only have 1 disk on your server (no RAID), you will have to
buy a disk
install in server
reinstall Proxmox VE
Install Proxmox BS
have a regular backup on some other disk (e.g. USB HDD) to restore other VMs from
and the lvm for the containers is located on?
Are you talking about containers (lxc, docker) or the VM disks? You need a backup for VM disks anyway (Proxmox BS).
If you're talking about containers, I do not know how to backup those. I do use docker containers but they're all inside VMs. I like to seperate things via VMs, as a rogue container taking down it's VM (or having other negative effects on its host) is less of a headache than a rogue container taking down the whole hypervisor because it's running directly on the that.
For comparison, this is my disk setup for my server (my old PC):
# lsblk
nvme0n1 259:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
nvme1n1 259:1 0 465.8G 0 disk
sda 8:0 0 3.6T 0 disk
sdb 8:16 0 3.6T 0 disk
sdc 8:32 0 3.6T 0 disk
# zpool list
NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT
data_raid 10.9T 2.40T 8.51T - - 26% 21% 1.00x ONLINE -
rpool 460G 7.31G 453G - - 8% 1% 1.00x ONLINE -
The 2 NVME-disks are used in a ZFS mirror (rpool in zpool list above) and store the Proxmox OS. The 3 SATA SSDs (see sd* in lsblk above) are housing all VM data in a ZFS RAID-Z1 called data_raid. With this hardware- and RAID-setup, one disk of each zpool could die right now and all I'd have to do is pay the currently horrendous hardware-prices and replace it. No data-loss or downtime until at least 2 disks of a single zpool die together.
All hardware dies at some point. Preperation is key.
Interesting. I do not know a lot about Home Assistant devices, but I thought they would just be communicating via standard WIFI + data encryption. I definitely didn't suspect there to be a whole new standard of wireless communication to that.
I understand the thing about downtime, running pihole myself. My setup is rather simple and centralized on purpose and I don't really mind the few minutes of "filtered DNS" downtime while pihole and pve are rebooting. As my UniFi Dream Router 7 is the firewall / gateway / DHCP server anyway, I just use pihole as primary DNS and 1.1.1.1 as secondary DNS. It's not filtering "bad domains" via DNS, sure, but I got adblock origin and other browser extensions dealing with whatever comes along anyway.
But, yeah, for redundancy and always-online-production-setups it's actually great having a secondary pve as a temporary stop-gap. Plus, it's a nice and kinda fancy setup, of course. Always appreciated in selfhosted :)
I use 1 host running Proxmox VE (PVE) with a VM for Proxmox BS (PBS). Datastores are located on a USB HDD with passthrough of that specific USB ID to the PBS VM.
It works really well and the only actual downside is that, for a complete-restore (e.g. reinstall PVE or new server or hard drives) you need to set up the PBS VM again before you can use your backups.
For the host-config on PVE, I use a systemd service and timer starting a simple proxmox-backup-client backup of /etc. That is enough to restore the configuration in case of some emergency.
Also: Is there a benefit for splitting your services on 2 hosts? Shouldn't 1 host with all VMs consume less electricity than the same VMs split on multiple hosts?
I cannot speak to collaborative editing of documents, but I do run my own docker-based nextcloud server for my own data.
I use nextcloud for:
files
photos (via memories app)
contacts
calendar
tasks
notes
I am not using the AIO docker image, I am using the nextcloud:APP_VERSION image, with APP_VERSION being 33 currently, preparing to upgrade to 34. My SSL-certificate is done via nginx-proxy-manager, as it was easy to setup on a different VM and it acts as a gateway to my internal services.
Syncing files, contacts and calendar works very well with my Graphene OS Pixel 9a (via the F-Droid App DAVx5, as well as my EndeavourOS desktop. The only thing I can really complain about is the documentation for selfhosting, as it seems to be missing some info. Or maybe I just didn't find it.
If you're interested, I can share my setup consisting of
docker-compose.yml for local tests
docker-compose.production.yml for production and staging deploy
Dockerfile for nextcloud + cron container (though I may replace this with ofelia)
Starter-Script for local tests
GitLab CI pipeline for production and staging deploy
It depends on what it is. I do not have a singular documentation-platform or wiki for those things. I'm more of the keep the docs where the code is guy. I also try to keep complexity to a minimum.
All my linux server setups are done with ansible. ansible itself is pretty self-documenting, as you more or less declare the desired outcome in YAML form and ansible does the rest. This way, I do not need to remember it, but it's easier to understand when looking it up again.
Most of my projects have a git repository, so most of what I need to know or do is documented
in a README.md
as pipeline-instructions inside .gitlab-ci.yml
This way, I was able to reduce complexity and unify my homelab projects.
My current homelab-state is:
most projects are now docker-based
most projects have a GitLab CI for automated updating to newer versions
the CI itself is a project and all my CI-docker-based deploys use this unified pipeline-project
most projects can be tested locally before rolling out new versions to my VMs
some projects have a production and a staging server to test
those which cannot be dockerized or turned into a CI are tools and don't need that (e.g. ansible playbooks or my GitLab CI)
On what to include, I always try to think: Will I still be able to understand this without documentation if I forget about the project for 6 months and need to make a change then? If you can't be sure, put it in writing.
If it's just a small thing regarding not the project itself or the functionality or setup itself but rather something like I had to use this strange code-block here because of XXX, I'll just put a comment next to the code-line or code-block in question. These comments mostly also include a link to a bug-report if I found one, so i can later check and see if it's been fixed already.
I'm not 100% satisfied, so I'm still searching for the "perfect distro for me", if it even exists.
I have been using Arch Linux on my personal PC and company laptop for 4 years, but I couldn't get some things to work.
Things that, after installing Fedora, worked out of the box.
My current setup is:
EndeavourOS (e.g. arch linux with a GUI-installer) for my PC at home
I'm using CheckMK to monitor my hypervisor, physical hardware like disks, CPU etc. and SNMP-capable hardware like my pfSense firewall via a CheckMK instance in docker. It either works in docker or on a few different linux based OS like ubuntu and debian (see CheckMK download page).
There's a free and open source version (called raw edition, GitHub Link) which I am using. It comes with a lot of checks / plugins for monitoring stuff out of the box and if there's something it doesn't ship, you can easily create your own check in whatever language your server is capable of executing a binary of. Or you could look up if there's a user-contributed plugin on the official CheckMK Exchange Platform.
The whole configuration of this is based on rules with a lot of predefined rules and sane defaults already set.
To have an example for your use-case: You can monitor docker-logfiles and let CheckMK warn you, if specific keywords are or are not in a logfile. You will then be able to view the offending lines in the monitoring UI.
Why do I use this?
We use it at work
FOSS
docker makes updating this easy
can send mails, teams notifications, ...
very customizable and expandable
my docker compose file
# docker-compose.yml
services:
monitoring:
image: checkmk/check-mk-raw:2.4.0-latest
container_name: monitoring
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
- CMK_PASSWORD=changeme
ports:
# WEB UI port
- "5000:5000"
# agent communication port
- "8000:8000"
# used for SNMP
- "162:162/udp"
- "514:514/tcp"
- "514:514/udp"
volumes:
- "./monitoring:/omd/sites"
- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
env_file:
- .env
I was just visiting a friend of mine last sunday with my SteamDeck and we played Unrailed! the whole day :D
The SteamDeck is THE perfect, portable fun-games-machine to just take with you. And every sale there's another few local-splitscreen-multiplayer games on sale, my library is scared already.
If you did not live through the time of "going to your friends to play games", this is your ticket to a past you sadly never got to experience.
I have been using Arch Linux on my Desktop PC at home since somewhere in the last quarter of 2020. I didn't have to rescue-boot or anything like that in all those years. I did reinstall Arch once because I got a new PC.
I do have an all AMD setup, as I heard NVIDIA isn't all too nice to linux in general and the drivers were a hassle to get right, never tried it though.
Maybe it depends on what you're doing on your PC. I'm mostly gaming, surfing the web, youtube and a little docker on the side.
I do understand where you're coming from, but judging from my personal experience with a friend who became a religious extremist (among other things), I don't know if this is actually possible with some people.
This is an honest plea for helping me understand and find a solution.
I tried to talk about his religious views and the world and people for 1.5 years. Nothing helps. Words seemingly never reach this guy, except they reinforce his faith. He would also never go to therapy, as "therapists don't want to help you, they just want your money".
He rather declared that he (and every human on earth) has been born without empathy and is unable to reach any acceptable moral values on his own and that raping and killing children is just part of his "good god, who's love first and foremost" than accepting that literally anything he heard about his faith isn't as good and pure as he sees it.
He's not my friend anymore, but
The things outlined above are only a small part of what he told me about his faith. I feel like this one is lost for good.
To me it seems like there's nothing anybody can do, we just need to wait until real bad shit hits the fan.
I'd really love to get all my people to use FOSS software or, at the very least, stop using WhatsApp and Co and switch to Signal.
The thing is, most people (including my people) just don't care. At all.
The response is always one of these:
It got to a point where it became so frustrating and the "paranoid" bit just pissing me off so much, I gave up. I don't even talk about IT anymore with them, they wouldn't (want to) understand anyway.
I feel like I'm on the only inhabitant of an island in the middle of the ocean.
I honestly think the only way to get people to care is, if the consequences themselves kick these people between the legs. Which will probably not happen in a way where they would understand "this wouldn't have happened with FOSS software".
Kinda same when working in IT.
If everything works as expected, people ask "why do I even pay you?"
If somethings wrong, people also ask "why do I even pay you?"
I especially love
Because you finally understood that visibility is not about the work.
Translation: Nobody cares how well your work is done. Being there and looking busy is way more important than the actual benefits you bring to your employer.
I gotta ask some questions:
No problem, english isn't my native language either.
In the end, it just boils down to: are you okay with a downtime while reinstalling the hypervisor and restoring from backups? If yes, you don't need a RAID. If no, a RAID of some kind would probably be the most sensible choice.
You should not be able to restore the whole drive, like you would restore a VM. This is because you would first need to have Proxmox VE already running to restore the drive which runs Proxmox VE.
If your NVME drive dies, you would have to do what I outlined above:
lxccontainer or VM)Though, to reiterate, I do not know anything about
lxccontainers.I did go through the Proxmox VE backup settings on my server, but I could not find a way to backup
lxccontainers, only VMs. So maybe Proxmox VE does not support backing uplxccontainers? Or maybe it just does not show anylxccontainer backup option because I do not run anylxccontainers?I did find this github about Proxmox VE and LXC containers, but I didn't test it and it only has 1 star, so I'd be wary.
As a tipp: Even if your motherboard only supports 1 NVME drive, you might still be able to use multiple. You could buy a PCIe card with M.2 NVME slots, if you have any unused PCIe slots on your mainboard. With this, you should still be able to have a RAID setup.
If you only have 1 disk on your server (no RAID), you will have to
Are you talking about containers (
lxc,docker) or the VM disks? You need a backup for VM disks anyway (Proxmox BS).If you're talking about containers, I do not know how to backup those. I do use
dockercontainers but they're all inside VMs. I like to seperate things via VMs, as a rogue container taking down it's VM (or having other negative effects on its host) is less of a headache than a rogue container taking down the whole hypervisor because it's running directly on the that.For comparison, this is my disk setup for my server (my old PC):
The 2 NVME-disks are used in a ZFS mirror (
rpoolinzpool listabove) and store the Proxmox OS. The 3 SATA SSDs (seesd*inlsblkabove) are housing all VM data in a ZFS RAID-Z1 calleddata_raid. With this hardware- and RAID-setup, one disk of eachzpoolcould die right now and all I'd have to do is pay the currently horrendous hardware-prices and replace it. No data-loss or downtime until at least 2 disks of a singlezpooldie together.All hardware dies at some point. Preperation is key.
Interesting. I do not know a lot about Home Assistant devices, but I thought they would just be communicating via standard WIFI + data encryption. I definitely didn't suspect there to be a whole new standard of wireless communication to that.
I understand the thing about downtime, running
piholemyself. My setup is rather simple and centralized on purpose and I don't really mind the few minutes of "filtered DNS" downtime whilepiholeandpveare rebooting. As my UniFi Dream Router 7 is the firewall / gateway / DHCP server anyway, I just usepiholeas primary DNS and1.1.1.1as secondary DNS. It's not filtering "bad domains" via DNS, sure, but I gotadblock originand other browser extensions dealing with whatever comes along anyway.But, yeah, for redundancy and always-online-production-setups it's actually great having a secondary
pveas a temporary stop-gap. Plus, it's a nice and kinda fancy setup, of course. Always appreciated in selfhosted :)I use 1 host running Proxmox VE (PVE) with a VM for Proxmox BS (PBS). Datastores are located on a USB HDD with passthrough of that specific USB ID to the PBS VM.
It works really well and the only actual downside is that, for a complete-restore (e.g. reinstall PVE or new server or hard drives) you need to set up the PBS VM again before you can use your backups.
For the host-config on PVE, I use a systemd service and timer starting a simple proxmox-backup-client backup of /etc. That is enough to restore the configuration in case of some emergency.
Also: Is there a benefit for splitting your services on 2 hosts? Shouldn't 1 host with all VMs consume less electricity than the same VMs split on multiple hosts?
I cannot speak to collaborative editing of documents, but I do run my own docker-based nextcloud server for my own data.
I use nextcloud for:
memoriesapp)I am not using the AIO
dockerimage, I am using thenextcloud:APP_VERSIONimage, withAPP_VERSIONbeing33currently, preparing to upgrade to34. My SSL-certificate is done vianginx-proxy-manager, as it was easy to setup on a different VM and it acts as a gateway to my internal services.Syncing files, contacts and calendar works very well with my Graphene OS Pixel 9a (via the F-Droid App
DAVx5, as well as my EndeavourOS desktop. The only thing I can really complain about is the documentation for selfhosting, as it seems to be missing some info. Or maybe I just didn't find it.If you're interested, I can share my setup consisting of
docker-compose.ymlforlocaltestsdocker-compose.production.ymlforproductionandstagingdeployDockerfilefor nextcloud +croncontainer (though I may replace this withofelia)localtestsproductionandstagingdeployIt may be a bit over-engineered though.
Since I allowed signal to always-run-in-background I have seemingly never missed a signal notification.
Do they just not show up for you?
It depends on what it is. I do not have a singular documentation-platform or wiki for those things. I'm more of the keep the docs where the code is guy. I also try to keep complexity to a minimum.
All my linux server setups are done with
ansible.ansibleitself is pretty self-documenting, as you more or less declare the desired outcome in YAML form andansibledoes the rest. This way, I do not need to remember it, but it's easier to understand when looking it up again.Most of my projects have a
gitrepository, so most of what I need to know or do is documentedREADME.md.gitlab-ci.ymlThis way, I was able to reduce complexity and unify my homelab projects.
My current homelab-state is:
docker-basedproductionand astagingserver to testansibleplaybooks or my GitLab CI)On what to include, I always try to think: Will I still be able to understand this without documentation if I forget about the project for 6 months and need to make a change then? If you can't be sure, put it in writing.
If it's just a small thing regarding not the project itself or the functionality or setup itself but rather something like I had to use this strange code-block here because of XXX, I'll just put a comment next to the code-line or code-block in question. These comments mostly also include a link to a bug-report if I found one, so i can later check and see if it's been fixed already.
Before I got more into selfhosting, I was running nothing but syncthing in a Raspberry Pi.
The pi was the "Server" and all the other Clients were only connected to the pi (in syncthing).
Worked flawlessly :)
Ha, I wish I could.
I'm not 100% satisfied, so I'm still searching for the "perfect distro for me", if it even exists.
I have been using Arch Linux on my personal PC and company laptop for 4 years, but I couldn't get some things to work. Things that, after installing Fedora, worked out of the box.
My current setup is:
Currently using nginx-proxy-manager for exactly this purpose. Nice and easy-to-use UI, including automatic LetsEncrypt ssl certificates :)
I'm using CheckMK to monitor my hypervisor, physical hardware like disks, CPU etc. and SNMP-capable hardware like my pfSense firewall via a CheckMK instance in docker. It either works in docker or on a few different linux based OS like ubuntu and debian (see CheckMK download page).
There's a free and open source version (called raw edition, GitHub Link) which I am using. It comes with a lot of checks / plugins for monitoring stuff out of the box and if there's something it doesn't ship, you can easily create your own check in whatever language your server is capable of executing a binary of. Or you could look up if there's a user-contributed plugin on the official CheckMK Exchange Platform.
The whole configuration of this is based on rules with a lot of predefined rules and sane defaults already set.
To have an example for your use-case: You can monitor docker-logfiles and let CheckMK warn you, if specific keywords are or are not in a logfile. You will then be able to view the offending lines in the monitoring UI.
Why do I use this?
my docker compose file
I was just visiting a friend of mine last sunday with my SteamDeck and we played Unrailed! the whole day :D
The SteamDeck is THE perfect, portable fun-games-machine to just take with you. And every sale there's another few local-splitscreen-multiplayer games on sale, my library is scared already.
If you did not live through the time of "going to your friends to play games", this is your ticket to a past you sadly never got to experience.
Haha, same here.
Though for me it wasn't about the Zerg, I just liked the logo. That's how I got to Arch and that's (partly) why my servers use debian :D