Yup, I have a domain I purchased and on my lan I use PiHole and Caddy. All my apps and services use the format app.mydomain.com. PiHole forwards all requests for *.mydomain.com to Caddy, which handles the LE certificate (via DNS challenge) and forwards the requests to the proper IP:PORT. I started using this for everything, my Proxmox hosts, printer, my APs…

Immich does have a pretty robust user management… https://immich.app/docs/administration/user-management/

Depends on your needs. I have a couple LXDs that only need 512MB each… But I did upgrade mine to 16GB.

Yeah, one of the USFF or whatever they call them.

I got an HP ProDesk 400 G2 with an i5 6500T, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for 99€. Works beautifully, and while it’s not as efficient as a raspberry pi, it idles around 6-7w and can run a bunch of VMs with Proxmox.

I got a few HP Elitedesk/Prodesk computers. One with an i5 9500T for ~200€, a couple with i5 6500t for about 100€ each (one small factor, the other a bit larger, with a PCI slot for a GPU). Not the most recent or powerful, but more than Enough for a homelab with a handful of VMs. Power consumption sits around 36-50w for the 3 machines, a small dlink switch and a Synology NAS with 4 drives.

RAID is not backup :) And yes, it happened to me for 4 drives in a 16 drive system to fail in the span of just a few days (same batch).

Not only for Nextcloud, but I recommend setting up crowdsec for any publicly facing service. You’d be surprised by the amount of bots and script kiddies out there trying their luck…

I would recommend just setting up iptables & crowdsec. Open only the ports your services need, and add the relevant plugins to crowdsec. Nothing should come through.

If you have services that allow people to upload files, that’s a different story.

It’s been a while since I looked at benchmarks (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-File-Systems). It could be these days.

To be honest, I don’t see a benefit for btrfs (or zfs). I prefer plain ext4 (no LVM). It’s simpler and faster. I have no need for snapshots. Proxmox handles my vms and my working machines are just a collection of dot files… But that’s just me. It’s good that there are choices.

Yup :) Learned my lesson the hard (lol) way.

I used to have everything backed up to a 2TB USB drive. Which I accidentally dropped down the stairs. I lost thousands of family photos and documents. That changed my backup perspective.

I now have a Synology NAS, with 12TB in a RAID5 array (for a bit of disk redundancy). All my home devices, Proxmox servers etc back up here. The NAS also holds a few TB of media. Attached to it I have a USB hard drive (also 12TB). The NAS gets fully backed up to the USB drive nightly.

I also have a remote Raspberry Pi with a smaller USB drive (4TB) attached to it at my brother’s house (in another country), where I backup most of the contents of my home NAS. I don’t back up the media, just the important stuff. I might have to upgrade to a larger drive…