You need to pick a machine (if you only have 1 you don’t lol) to be your web portal, bang a block of code in via ssh or command line (I copy pasted) then you can access Portainer via the web portal.

From there “Stacks” is Docker Compose and you can fiddle with your containers, networking settings and all the other stuff via a UI instead of having to SSH in all the time to look at your compose files.

Then if you wanna use docker on more machines you just bang a block of code into that machine via ssh and it will appear in your Portainer

Far easier imho

I found a lot of the problems I had with Docker were with Docker. Once I moved to using Portainer for Docker it became much more accessible.

This looks like a good shout. I have actually tried it out but it was years ago when I was trying to get a Sonos-like service and ultimately settled on Squeezebox.

Maybe it’s time to try it again, thanks for the idea

It’s a Dell Optiplex 7050

Try a live Proxmox USB, it’s what I did when my machine went unresponsive. Allowed me to look through the logs of the OS when it hadn’t booted to find out what went wrong.

For me it was that I had put my USB HDDs in via Fstab and one had died, which made Proxmox unbootable until I hashtagged the lines out in fstab.

Eh I did all this with a cheap thin client.

Proxmox as the frontend

OMV in a VM with usb passed through

Debian VM for Plex and Docker

Adguard and Nginx and Arr in Docker

Network sharing from the OMV VM

HDDs to USB.

I’ve solved this exact issue and numerous others with samba / CIFS recently. This is how I have my Proxmox on a mini pc with usb mounted HDDs at present:

1 VM Home Assistant OS, not relevant really

1 VM OMV Open Media Vault.

1 VM Debian with Docker installed.

So in my experience over the last few months you want your usb drive to have absolutely nothing to do with Proxmox. Nope.

I had 3 hooked in mounted in Proxmox and when one of them threw a fit Proxmox refused to load.

Better to have a NAS VM installed and have the drive(s, I have 3, 2x1tb and 1x750gb) passed straight through, whole usb, to the NAS VM.

This means if the drive fails Proxmox doesn’t break, and also in my experience with OMV, it’ll still run if a drive breaks

Then what I did was set up the shares and made them samba in OMV then set my other VM, the Debian one, with mount points in the Fstab.

The key for me in this endeavour was to make sure the Fstab entry made sure that the OS wouldn’t fail if it couldn’t find a drive, as happened in Proxmox, so I made sure “nofail” was somewhere in the Fstab config.

For Samba to work in Linux you need to install cifs-utils, then add a line in /etc/fstab. Mine goes:

//omv.local/sharename /mnt/filename cifs credentials=/etc/cifs-credentials,file_mode=0777,dir-mode=0777,auto,nofail,vers=3.0 0 0

You have to create the mount point mkdir /mnt/filename and give it permissions with chmod

You also need to made the cifs-credentials file in /etc/

It needs to contain:

username=yourusername password=yourpassword domain=WORKGROUP

Then what I do for Audiobookshelf and whatnot is mount the mount point as directories in Portainer under the volumes: - /mnt/Downloads:/Downloads

Then in the UI of the service I’m using in Docker I can use the Downloads folder and it’s the mount point.

This is what’s working well for me. If a drive fails I try and fix it in OMV instead of trying to plug a monitor into my mini pc to try and work out from the logs why Proxmox has failed…

Use this comment as a framework for your research and save yourself some heartache. You can mount the CIFS/Samba share to Proxmox and use that, so you can still use the drive in Proxmox for backups and such

I’ve just come back to this comment to get sabnzbd running, thanks again

My budget-friendly solution has been to replace my ISP provided router with a 10 year old Netgear router that handles all the protocols my ISP does off eBay for £25.

I have a 4 storey townhouse so having this on the ground floor is useless when you’re on the top floor.

So I have a power line system installed which I’ve hooked into the modem. I’ve got a wired router in the front room that has all the front room tech worked in.

On the top floor I have an even older Netgear router a friend gave me, with OpenWRT installed plugged into the power line and running as an access point.

In total this whole system has probably cost me £80 to fully install as I was given the older Netgear.

Works beautifully, cost very little, and I’ve got a Guest Mode ap that turns on when I turn guest mode in Home Assistant, a simple “Hey Google turn on Guest mode”

Over the last few months I’ve made a whole bunch of different combinations of VMs, LXC and Docker until now, where I have Home Assistant, a NAS and a Debian server which I deploy docker stacks into.

At one point I had about 15 different machines I could spin up, but now it’s just the 3. The great thing about Proxmox is you can just create and destroy to your hearts content

I went Proxmox when I was in your shoes a few months ago.

It installs like a Linux OS so you already know how to do that.

You get a webui to work from.

From there, YouTube is a massive help. Watch videos on “how to install WHATEVER on Proxmox” and just replace WHATEVER with whatever you want to prod until it works.

My first service was Home Assistant, which I already ran on a Pi. I had that fully migrated in a day giving me a spare Pi.

Next it was Portainer, and used that for Adguard and Uptime Kuma, and then I got fancy and threw secondary servers of those services on my pi and put that on the network as a fail over.

So yeah, just install it and try to do shit, YouTube is your friend.

Holy shit I totally thought I was talking out of my arse lol

So you’re trying to get 2 instances of qbt behind the same Gluetun vpn container?

I don’t use Qbt but I certainly have done in the past. Am I correct in remembering that in the gui you can change the port?

If so, maybe what you could do is set up your stack with 1 instance in, go into the GUI and change the port on the service to 8000 or 8081 or whatever.

Map that port in your Gluetun config and leave the default port open for QBT, and add a second instance to the stack with a different name and addresses for the config files.

Restart the stack and have 2 instances.

This actually sounds like what they’re doing at Home Assistant.

Buy a HA Yellow or whatever, plug it in to your network and turn it on. It loads up and you log in on a web page on your phone. Install an app, sign up for Nabu Casa and get your services working outside the network.

And it’ll pick up a lot of what’s already on your network and set it all up for ya.

If you want to move to Proxmox then I say give it a go.

Maybe just keep what you have running and set up another machine to have a play. If you like it, then stick it on your main machine and work out how to replace everything, could be a fun project for you.

I use Proxmox and have Open Media Vault as my NAS. I use SMB/CIFS to share the drives and have a share that Proxmox can use for daily backups, as well as having backups on the main SSD every week. I need to off-site backups but I haven’t researched that yet.

I have a Debian VM that runs Docker and have everything running on that except OMV and Home Assistant. I have another Debian VM that I spin up to try things out.

RAM-wise I’m hitting about 12gb so if you have something with 16 lying around you can easily try out most of what you have running already, and if you don’t have anything to run it on you’re talking under £100 for a mini PC.

Give it a go, I’m sure you can come up with something to run on a mini pc anyway

Hahaha it’s that guy again. I want an Amazon server for a fiver please!

Honestly I just think it’s my general ability. I couldn’t get the Docker Compose file to work in Portainer. But in all seriousness I don’t think I need NC, I was just interested in what it offers.

Plex. Emby.

Yeah I don’t see why not. It should be as easy as SSH in to the half top, install Docker and have it run the Portainer client then just bang Portainer on your daily driver and start throwing docker compose files at it.

Have a look at Gluetun for your VPN needs. I’ve basically got all my Arr in the same stack with Gluetun as the networking for the stack, then have other containers running independently that don’t need the VPN, like Adguard and Homarr.

I’ve got a Gluetun appreciation post up that should get you started with it.

It’s all your fault!