I use Hetzner Storage Box. I don’t have a NAS, so it’s a cost that I’d rather avoid. I see it costs not much less than a new nvme disk. I’m just trying to juggle what I have.

I use Podman on my desktop, but only for that single container (I need Microsoft SQL Server for work). I know they are 99% compatible, including CLI syntax, but in that 1% cases things might break and thus https://selfhosting.sh/ is recommending to stick to Docker for newbies, because almost all tutorials are written for Docker. I don’t know, I might try with Podman, however I don’t really need a steeper learning curve if whatever setup guide for some service that I’m using is not compatible with Podman.

Ok, I will keep that in mind. I’m just wary of what you said earlier:

You can fuck up both Ubuntu and Debian’s upgrades by adding a lot of 3rd-party repos because apt doesn’t safeguard against external repos interfering with the core repos’ dependency graph.

You’re not the first person to tell me not to add too many external repositories on Debian for the same reason.

Maybe I don’t need the new features :)

So the trick is to keep the OS minimal, install only Docker from its repo and install anything else in Docker containers.

Why from Docker’s repo and not from Debian’s? I just did a quick apt search docker and I see docker.io and docker-cli.

So, theoretically, I could run Proxmox on the VPS if it’s running Debian? I read that Proxmox requires a lot of RAM and VPSes are too expensive in that regard. But I might run Proxmox at home, I have a beefy PC with 64GB of RAM, except it doesn’t turn on right now (something died, either the PSU or the motherboard, I still need to have it diagnosed).

One thing I read about is that Ubuntu provides unattended updates, so it can automatically update packages and restart the server (that seems a bit too far ;) ). It’s probably possible on Debian but not out of the box.

As a Linux noob I like your oneliner but I agree with @solxix@pawb.social

A more approachable way to do that would be to use wget and then manually run apt install with the downloaded file. That’s what I’ve been doing. :) Yours is “magic” ;)

I have a similar setup. My PC has disks formatted in Btrfs, so I get copy on write snapshots of my system disk, then have a local Restic backup on a secondary disk and then have an off-site Restic backup in the cloud on the Storage Box.

Thanks for pointing me to Paperless, never heard of it, it seems like it could be useful. I wonder how it deals with languages other than English, if at all.

Thanks!

May I ask which Hetzner VPS did you choose? I wonder if the Cost-Optimized ones are sufficient. I would be using it with max 2 users, same as you.

If I go with the VPS option I’d like to host Immich instead. But it seems to be hungry for memory, especially with the ML features enabled.

I really don’t understand this “Nextcloud does too much” rhetoric, the standard bare metal installation is basically just Files, Photos, Calendar and Contacts

That’s just my impression based on their website, it looks like a business suite, but I’m probably looking at it wrong. Thank you, the part about the database is important.

A bonus question regarding the 3-2-1 backup strategy. If my VPS is in Germany, but I spin up a Storage Box in Finland, that falls within the boundaries of “off-site backup”, even if both are managed by Hetzner. What do you think? It’s just easiest to setup, I guess. Otherwise I need another cloud provider (perhaps some S3 object storage).

I was looking at this self-hosting guide and scratching my head in confusion. They say $80 nets you a 4TB HDD. Meanwhile, in my country that costs more like $220+. Yes, for an HDD, not SSD (that would be more like way over $500). I see the guide has been updated this year, so either the US lives in another world or nobody has updated the pricing.

I see you’re already getting downvoted and I will probably share that predicament. I get you, I feel alike. I used various distros over 20 years ago but never got really deep into Linux internals and I also forgot a lot.

I think AI can really be useful but not all models are equal (YMMV).

A couple of real world scenarios where I was having problems that were way above my head at this stage.

I encrypt my system disk with LUKS using TPM. I currently run openSUSE which has Snapper deeply integrated with the system. Because I was troubleshooting some issues and installing various packages I made some changes that I wanted to revert. Snapper is the fastest way for me, no manual reversal, no need to edit any config files, no leftovers. Just boot from a snapshot and roll back. I did that a few times. I had TPM auto-unlock set up but it stopped working. I tried re-enrolling but it still didn’t work. Of course I asked Sonnet 4.6 about that and after an AI-supported troubleshooting session the issue was resolved. It analyzed the logs, found the reason for my issue and explained what and why was causing it (in short: because I did not re-enroll the TMP key after each rollback, there were too many boot entries accumulated exceeding the systemd-pcrlock’s limit and causing all TPM predictions to fail silently).

Second thing was OpenVPN not setting up the DNS after connecting. It took me half an hour of troubleshooting with Sonnet 4.6 and it explained what was happening and proposed a few solutions. In the end it turned out that in my scenario I need Dnsmasq which is dead simple and helped me to resolve my particular issue. What’s interesting is that when I asked about the same issue on openSUSE’s sub on Reddit, a SUSE developer told me to use dnsmasq, too :)

Without AI I guess I’d just have to give up because no one was capable of helping me when I asked online (sure, maybe I didn’t ask enough or not in enough places). Without OpenVPN I cannot use this system, it’s mandatory for my job. I could switch to Fedora where OpenVPN 3 works, but I really wanted openSUSE.

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