I wanted to shared my enthusiasm, which makes me feel like a little boy (despite me being 50+) fascinated by how such complex systems can be managed so easily by novices. I started using Proxmox recently. I had a machine running one VM with various docker images installed. But NVMe was tiny. So I setup another node and got it to share the same NFS share on the NAS, where I had saved full backups of the VM. Once added the NFS share to the new node (with a bigger ZFS local partition) I simply restored the VM from the NFS share that had been backed up from the original node. It seemlessly imported and started. Then I cloned on the new node so that I could get it on the new ZFS partition. Now the next task is to get a bigger NVMe on the original machine, install Proxmox from scratch, and add to cluster so that it shared the backup NFS share. I just then need to understand how to get HA up and running so that VMs are always synced flawlessly. Proxmox is super brilliant. I feel like I have a data center at home :-) I could not imagine this system was so flexible and relatively easy to use. The people that deliver and contribute to this stuf are super cool. A couple of proxmox nodes, a Truenas scale NAS and a good backup strategy and your data is really safe and rock solid … I hope :-)
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“Just one more thing” we all say until we’re hosting a bespoke cloud service for everyone we know.
Next do pihole, put everything on a mesh VPN, home assistant all of your lights/locks/coffee machines, jellyfin, then you may as well get a seedbox in Singapore and automate your media consumption, while you’re there you may as well run subsonic and lidarr and if you’re going to host media audiobookshelf for your reading/audiobook needs.
Or, branch out to other nerd hobbies and buy a 3D printer (why not) and cover your walls and flat surfaces with modular organization systems
After starting my move away from Windows to Linux in earnest 5-6 years ago I share that enthusiasm I got back for homelabs and self hosting. And yeah - I passed 50 during the journey as well.
I recently ran out of space on a 512GB NVMe I had as local-LVM in my proxmox (it is crazy how I currently run 40+ services on that thing). So I ended up adding a new 2TB NVMe, cloned the 512 to it, expanded the partition, and now everything runs as usual.
Proxmox is awesome. And I’m 51.
how does it compare to docker and a directory of /app/docker-compose.yml files? i just have not yet tried it.
So, in my case at least, having services spread across LXC containers and VMs, instead of various dockers stacks directly under on host, allows me to provide each service with its own internal IP address as opposed to having to worry about setting up 2 services with the same port because I can’t remember I was already using that port. It’s just cleaner that way.
Additionally, I get to create containers with the specific needs for each service to run comfortably.
It also allows for easier deployment and testing without much danger of ruining the host in something like CasaOS for example. If I have to make some adjustments to the host machine to make a docker stack run better, have more accesses, etc., I can have at it without fear that those changes could affect other docker stacks in the same host, because all hosts are contained.
Then there’s the ease of management and deploying fully functional services with one line in the CLI of the host.
After running UnRaid, OMV, CasaOS and a few others, Proxmox has been the one system that is just so intuitive that I don’t really have to think about it much. For the most part, deployments of pretty much anything just work.
oh cool! all thoughts i have had to cross. i’ll check it out! thanks!
Any time.
I’m 55 and I share the sentiment. The difference is I’ve been in IT for 30+ years and I still get giddy when I’m setting somewhere and can access my own servers that I run.
The PVE helper scripts comm on discord is a very solid bunch of people, a bunch of the helper script devs are very active.
PVE helper scripts
+1 for the helper scripts: https://community-scripts.org/
as a teen doing homelab I can say it is great learning and fun while still being quite easy and with the benefit of being independent of big tech, saving on subscriptions. Also I can brag about how homelab is great to my friends :3.
Right now I have all I need setup and it only breaks once a month!
When you come down from your high and you’re looking for your next hit check out home assistant.
I also have Home Assistant running on an n150 NUC with 16GB of ram, a 4TB SSD only to save all my 24/7 recording CCTV on frigate with a Coral TPU for the AI recognition.
Everything runs over matter (wifi).
Home Assistant regularly reminds me of Arthur C. Clark’s adage: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I got that on my list.
I need to make a post here soon as well about my setup, I guess
I’ve read about this. It’s literally what I imagined the future would be. Will try it ASAP.
It is as vast and customizable as it gets. The sky, and your imagination, is the limit. I’ve been at it for years and i’m still tinkering with automations and services. It’s biggest strength, in my eyes, is being able to run everything local and off line. My advice is to start with zigbee so as to not congest your Wi-Fi traffic and add in zwave where the budget allows and range is needed.
Matter over thread works well too and is propably the most future proof option. The new ikea stuff is really cheap and mostly thread only. :) smlight slzb ultima3 hub will do both zigbee and thread simultaniously.
I feel like homelabs are our generations’ model train nerd hobby equivalent. I get so much joy in being able to connect the containers and hardware and doing for myself what I was paying others for via subscription.
So I even mask my autism like my old man?
Maybe if the model trains could actually bring in your groceries and mow your lawn they’d be comparable. Granted, self-hosted software can’t do those exact things either, but it can do an awful lot of the digital stuff that’s part of our lives now which often takes up just as much time and effort if not more. Model trains are a banger hobby, but homelabbing can easily be more than just a hobby, it’s deeply practical too, and I’d argue it’s actually a necessity for establishing personal digital sovereignty and privacy going forward.
As a kid I always thought the basement model train set ups were cool. Then as I grew into a young man, I thought it was kind of weird that some grandpa had a train set in his basement he played with. Then as I got older, it started making more sense to me. I don’t have a train set in my basement, but selfhosting I would imagine, is along the same lines at least for me.
It is. Do you know how I know? It pisses off my wife to no end the ridiculous amount of time I spend testing services to self-host 🤣
Ahhhh the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). I don’t have those issues, so I’m free to run amuck as I please.
Yeah but I think Americans are going to make personal compute a felony soon.
What’s not on the internet isn’t known by the internet.
That just makes it cooler
Please do not conflate me with the bullshit that is going on. Not all of us have hive mind.
No it means you’re going to be a based desperado sysadmin this fucking garbage fire century isn’t getting any less garbage fire but it is getting funny and cool let it happen
Joy and utility.
Plus, there’s something for everyone.
I kind of barely use mine it just hangs around in the background hosting services but I just love knowing it’s running and accessible anywhere.
@trilobite@lemmy.ml my man, I share your enthusiasm even at 71. I look back to the days I started with an Altair, which didn’t do a lot in regards to modern computers, but boy was I hooked. Today, I have a small OptiPlex MT coming in and I am going to set it up for a friend of mine’s son who has expressed a desire to get into selfhosting at the age of 10. I just checked the tracking on the shipment and it is out for delivery!!! I’m all giddy like a little schoolgirl at what the day has in store as I set up the server.
We’re going to start off small. A couple of Docker containers, and the boy wants to host a simple MineCraft server for himself and a couple of other school friends. I’ve got a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 low profile, to drop in it, and am going to max out the ram at 32 gb. The GTX 1650 isn’t the most banging GPU but it will be better than the onboard graphics and it won’t need additional power cables and will play well with the stock PSU.
I’m going to also install RustDesk so that any issues or questions he may have can be resolved remotely. I’m sure he will probably out grow the Optiplex in a few years (hopefully), but it’s simple enough to whet his appetite for now and could be converted into a simple NAS later on. The kid is just an impressive young man, gifted, but doesn’t lean back on his abilities and is always pushing himself academically or otherwise, to excel far beyond that of a normal 10 year old. Certainly head and shoulders above anything I was as a kid and I think it’s important to give kids all the opportunities to at least try something to see if they like it or not. He just received a fistful of academic awards recently. Most of the kids that were called up to the stage received a cert of achievement. They handed his in a folder there were so many.
I’M STOKED!!!
That is really nice to hear! I share your feelings ❤️❤️❤️
There are ways to do it with a network disk being present or something, but generally HA in Proxmox needs an odd number of nodes to reach quorum; basically if an HA node detects that it is isolated then it freezes all VMs, assuming it is having network issues and that other nodes, which themselves may not be isolated, could be running the same VM - since the whole point of HA is that if a node and its VMs disappear, the remaining ones take over duties until the missing node returns.
If you have an even number of nodes, you need a tiebreaker vote to reach quorum - half the total nodes plus 1 for a majority is the default.
You can adjust the total number of node “votes”that dictate what quorum is, but if you have two nodes and you set it to 1, then you’ll always have “split brain” where copies of the same VMs will keep running on both nodes, and if you set it to two then and node going down will freeze the other as well (both will assume they are the one with problems, since they’d both be below quorum). Therefore you need an odd number of votes.
The best way is to have a third host (or a 5th, or a 7th, etc. 😅); but there is a way (tutorial on Proxmox’s docs) to set up the presence of a network share as a tie-breaking vote, rather than a full additional node; the idea being that if the node can see the disk, that means it can see the network and therefore it is the node you’d want running the VMs.
So plan carefully around this, it’s not fun when a cluster you’ve become dependent on for services deadlocks itself 😅 ask my wife how I know this
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PSU Power Supply Unit SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network
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good bot
