TechAdmin

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

For the OS side a few ways.

• Clone & then rename+change drivers
• Ansible/chef
• NixOS

For home folder side of things a dotfile manager, cloud services, and file sync tool will take care of most things. I use chezmoi for dotfiles & nextcloud for file syncing. Firefox is only cloud synced service I still use for now. I have yet to find any decent sources of information on dotfiles so gonna be stuck going through those stupid things to figure out what you want to sync.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

My mother used to regularly do photo albums with family photos before we all went digital so I’ve been looking for a solution for years. Nextcloud has been decent with a few apps installed. Only done a couple small albums & worked for my needs. The face detection is alright but cheap cameras, blurry photos, and random mix of internet saved photos doesn’t help, lol. The map view works really well for photos with GPS data. I have my phone setup to automatically upload all new photos to Nextcloud too. Lately been working on plans to share access with my family over zerotier so they can view and upload their own to share back with me.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I’ll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

My current workaround for that is adding whatever I want to shuffle into a playlist. I have one with some sci-fi shows in it that I regularly use. Smart collections is my most missed feature from Plex.

edit: nvm, doesn’t sound like it would help your use case, read through it too quick first time round

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

Was it the official container image or 3rd party? Whichever it was, they should get notified so that init script can get fixed to prevent similar happening to others.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

Yep, 8th gen (Coffee Lake) saw a lot of improvements in Intel Quick Sync, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hard…

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

Intel Quick Sync video saw a lot of improvements on 8th gen & since it’s all so old the pricing differences between 7th & 8th gen are going to be negligible.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

The OS was also very limited with focus on Linux ports of games which there were not very many at the time. Proton wasn’t a thing yet. I bought two of them, one for myself and one for my brother. I tested it out & it was neat but wiped both to do clean installs of Windows 7 so could play the games we wanted.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

Would love a new Steam Machine and could actually be good this time. Proton didn’t exist when they released the original Steam Machines which limited you to linux ports of games. I had bought two but wiped & did clean installs of Windows 7 so we could play all the games wanted to.

Before Proton, gaming on linux relied on native ports or WINE. Native ports were rare & not always better. WINE took some learning to make work well but I dunno, never got any good at it.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

The nice thing about a dedicated center channel is you can focus your volume battles there for some movies.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

For the sata drive behavior it’s probably finishing the writes from buffer. I like to use the iotop utility to watch storage IO activity on my systems. Could try running it on both systems to get a better picture of what’s going on.

I currently use NFS and CIFS but have used iSCSI in the past. I like the simplicity of NFS & CIFS and they meet my uses. iSCSI has it’s strengths as others have stated.

• /var/lib/mysql - I would say iSCSI in it’s own image+lun. Should get lower latency as well as higher transfer rates compared to NFS for DB but it depends on the kinds & how much usage.
• virtual machine images - I prefer NFS mounts for same reason, easier to work with the files directly. If you do go with iSCSI you can have different disk images for different kinds of VMs. Should be able to use both at same time on most hypervisors if you want to play with them too.
• lots of small files - NFS should work without issue

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

It’s Debian-based so can install all the same desktop and window environments available there.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

I started with Slackware around 1997 because I needed a free C compiler plus all I had were junk, hand-me-down computers. Stopped programming & using linux around 2000 and had switched back to Windows on a newly built, decent computer. From about 2000 until about 2016 I rarely used linux besides a couple routers. Raspberry pi 3 came out with built-in wifi & my dislike of Windows 10 got me back into linux for more use cases. Valve’s work on proton finally made it so I could switch to linux for most gaming & my Windows usage dropped to almost nothing. Currently using Manjaro on primary desktop and Fedora 38 on tablet with mix of distros in LXC & VMs on mini-PC w/ Proxmox VE & Synology NAS. SteamVR on linux been getting decent amount of work on it lately so once it gets stable I’ll have one less reason to need Windows.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

Sounds like the drives are combined with RAID 5. Could be hardware RAID card or software RAID as part of the BIOS. Server model number can be used to search for administrator manual and may have more info there. If it’s hardware RAID card then try to find the model number & search for it’s manual. If it’s software raid at the BIOS level then motherboard/server manual will cover it. Should be some messages and prompts during boot related to it. Terms to look for ‘RAID’, ‘storage controller’, ‘Perc’, ‘LSI’.

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

Most standalone APs can be plugged into the router and immediately start working, they’ll forward along DHCP requests. You can turn off your router’s wifi after they have been configured. For Unifi APs you only need the controller running when you want to manage/update the APs and for stats collection, I only power mine up to check for new firmware updates once a month. Can disable Unifi analytics/telemetry with a config file option too but no way to do it via web UI.

For VLANs you will need to configure the VLANs on Opnsense and the APs. Unifi lets you specify the mgmt VLAN and VLAN per SSID. For my setup I have vlan 5 for work ssid, 10 for mobile devices, 15 for IoT and other things that don’t need internet, and 20 for a couple temporary & guest SSIDs.

The Unifi APs are alright but the controller software itself is fairly limited for stats/data, still better than other standard consumer APs I’ve used though. I’ve been wanting to try out Grandstream Wifi APs for replacement as most models include a built-in controller capable of managing more than enough APs for my home uses and still have option of standalone controller or cloud managed but it’s not priority as my current APs still receive firmware updates,

TechAdmin, 6 months ago

Another benefit to LXC is you can map devices, including GPU, to multiple LXC while keeping them accessible to the host. For my home setup I currently have 3 LXC with access to the iGPU, 1 for jellyfin+caddy via podman nested, 1 for moonfire-nvr via podman nested, and been trying to use 1 to figure out hardware transcoding with owncast through multiple install methods but no luck so far. I’ve also been playing with mapping rtl-sdr v3 devices, zigbee stick, zwave stick, and coral usb for a variety of projects lately.

edit: I forgot to answer the question and went straight to ranting, lol. LXC is like a bare-metal VM. You can install & run multiple things on them like a normal VM including podman or docker.

TechAdmin, 7 months ago

This project, neko.m1k1o.net/#/getting-started/examples , looks like a good base to try running regular GUI apps via docker & web.

edit: and here’s the git with Dockerfiles, github.com/m1k1o/neko-apps

TechAdmin, 7 months ago

On proxmox you should be able to share any GPU (integrated or dedicated) to multiple LXCs while keeping it accessible to the host. I use intel integrated GPU in LXC for plex, jellyfin, and one with just ffmpeg I use to convert videos occasionally. I used these instructions as starting point/base when I set mine up on proxmox v7.x, …proxmox.com/…/plex-hw-transcoding-lxc-and-jasper…

I had looked at instructions to assign the GPU to a specific VM but it looked like way too much work and people were saying it didn’t always work for the 11th gen iGPUs. Thankfully I ran across the sharing method and it’s been running stable since.

TechAdmin, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

My info may be outdated as I last had G Fiber about a year ago but have moved out of their service area so stuck with AT&T fiber along with their horrible modem+router :(

When I first got the 2G down/1G up G Fiber service there was no bridge mode & had to use their provided device as modem+router+wifi. They updated it to add in a bridge mode option but I never tested it. I had dropped back down to 1G down & up before that option was available.

edit: forgot to mention I had read some people had luck using Unifi Dream Machine to plug in G Fiber’s 2.5G SFP looking module but I wasn’t willing to spend any more money on anything Unifi besides WiFi APs.

TechAdmin, 8 months ago

I use Caddy with the Cloudflare DNS plugin for Let’s Encrypt DNS based challenges, should work for wildcard too but only have a couple subdomains so never tried to do that. My DNS entries are public but point at private IP ranges, e.g. nc.PRIVATEDOMAIN.COM resolves to 192.168.1.20 where Caddy sends the traffic to my Nextcloud docker

TechAdmin, 8 months ago

You can self-host ACME server which lets you use certbot to do automatic renewals even for private, internal only certs. I don’t know if it would work with NPM. I plan to test that out at some point in the future but my current setup works & I’m not ready to break it for a maybe yet :P

TechAdmin, 8 months ago

I have public wildcard DNS entry (*.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com) on Cloudflare on my primary domain that resolves to 192.168.10.120 (my Caddy host)

Caddyfile

<span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  email EMAILREMOVED@gmail.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  acme_dns cloudflare TOKENGOESHERE
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">portal.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8081
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">speedtest.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  reverse_proxy 192.168.10.125:8181
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

TechAdmin, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Free and centrally managed, not aware of any but definitely interested in something like that too.

My current setup has Proxmox backing up all LXC and VMs to Synology NAS then the Synology NAS backing up to Backblaze. Both run nightly. Using the built-in backup utility on Proxmox VE pointed at CIFS share on the Synology NAS.

Synology does have a software backup client available but I have never used it. For my desktops & laptops, they are easily reinstalled+reconfigured, I just make sure the data I care about is stored or synchronized to my NAS or the cloud. Nextcloud for files, Firefox sync for history+bookmarks, bitwarden client+vaultwarden for passwords, chezmoi for some dotfiles on some linux systems.

TechAdmin, 8 months ago

Yeah, Proxmox has a built in backup utility. I use it for nightly backup of all VMs and LXCs to cifs share on my NAS.

TechAdmin, 8 months ago

My last NAS & ESXi box were 12 years old when I retired them. I had thought about sticking with used enterprise gear but wanted a break to be a little lazy for a couple years. Storage is on Synology (DS1520+) and Proxmox runs on Asus PN63-S1 mini PC. Hyper Backup was primary reason I chose Synology (always been lazy about off-site backups) and docker feature has come in handy for things like secondary pihole & DNS. LXC with docker or podman have been able to cover majority of my needs in proxmox but still have Home Assistant & Unifi Network Controller on their own VMs. Home Assistant I have zero plans to move. Unifi I eventually plan to move over to docker but it works for now, albeit on an older version. Really need to up my documentation & diagram game, it’s all a huge mess, lol.

Future plans would love to have closet full of used enterprise servers running proxmox with all flash ceph storage backend then can do whatever NAS distro I want as a VM. My budget is focused elsewhere for next year or two unfortunately so gonna be awhile unless something breaks.

Always like to hear about other setups as I am constantly re-thinking my own.