Great article, they always gave of that energy tbh. But I did not bother and also didn’t use it enough that it would matter. Good to have a write up about it. Thanks for sharing.

Woah, thanks for the article!

Wait, we’re putting stickers in the case now?

Same. When I first started down that path I kept finding posts about how it was impossible to set up and maintain but it’s been pretty painless for me. I basically had no clue what I was doing and I figured it out just fine.

@ndupont Stickers, yes. Colored sticks. I put little stickers all over the computers. Most stickers have mundane details (like host name, Subnet, etc.) but I also use a sticker for each major service. Everything else is documented in notebooks or spreadsheets. It’s probably overkill, but, between my memory and the home-grown gradual evolution of my #homelab, stickers really useful. I have 9 or so computers (rack-mounted), more controllers spread around (e.g., ESP32s running WLED, Pi Zeros), and nearly 250 individual devices for #homeautomation. I’m trying to learn about FOSS for configuration control but that’s slow going.

I really like those big cases. Lots of room for expansion and cooling I’ve got an old CoolerMaster Cosmos II.

I took the bottom rails and retrofitted casters on it. It’s huge and hard to move around. Stands about 30" tall.

Hey @organicpu@lemmy.organic-server.org did you use a LLM like Ollama to write your post?

No shade if you did, I just want to make sure we’re categorizing things correctly at our end.

Ollama/Openwebui, Immich, Snapotter and cause degoog can use ollama.

Ollama probably

I spent an entire weekend doing this and then just sat there staring at it like the Wolverine looking at a picture meme.

I mean, I kinda do- for public services on my website. but I don’t why I would do a dedicated one- when almost all need services authentication.

but I do use homarr for as an internal “homepage”/dashboard. Great idea though.

this is Snapottter https://snapotter.com/

I think the misunderstanding is that I’m running every single service as Docker inside its own LXC. That’s not actually what I’m doing.

I split things by service boundary. For example, Pi-hole + Unbound has its own LXC, Lemmy has its own LXC, Immich has its own LXC, etc. Most of those run natively in LXC without Docker at all.

Docker is only there where the application actually expects/benefits from it. I’m not adding a Docker layer everywhere just for the sake of it.

The reason I prefer this over one giant LXC with everything docker- inside. is the management side.

Yes, there is some overhead. But LXC containers are much lighter than VMs. They share the host kernel and use Linux namespaces/cgroups for isolation, so you’re not paying the cost of a full virtualized OS. The extra memory/CPU overhead is minimal compared to the management benefits I get from separating services.

The Docker overhead only exists on the services that actually need Docker. A lot of my services run directly in their own LXC without Docker at all.

Could I put everything into one LXC and run Docker Compose? Sure. It would probably work fine. But for my homelab, ease of maintenance and recovery is just as important as raw resource efficiency.

Proxmox supports OCI containers natively now

As of 9.1, and kind of. To be clear what its doing is not a drop-in replacement for docker, but using that image as a basis for an lxc - so you’re not just pulling a new image to update, more like re-deploying, so keep your stored data elsewhere, outside of the lxc. So what was handled by pulling an image or a change to a compose is done manually in proxmox now, but it does make things like backups/snapshots much more consistent and proxmox-native.

My last gen Homeserver was like this too. It worked okay, but network configuration, especially port forwarding and ipv6 sucked.

My current generation is just debian stable again, it just works.