https://charity.wtf/2021/08/09/notes-on-the-perfidy-of-dashboards/

Graphs and stuff might be useful for doing capacity planning or observing some trends, but most likely you don’t need either.

If you want to know when something is down (and you might not need to know), set up alerts. (And do it well, you should only receive “actionable” alerts. And after setting alerts, you should work on reducing how many actionable things you have to do.)

(I did set up Nagios to send graphs to Clickhouse, plotted by Grafana. But mostly because I wanted to learn a few things and… I was curious about network latencies and wanted to plan storage a bit long term. But I could live perfectly without those.)

Not sure about how it handles video, but I’ve been meaning to take a look at https://getbananas.net/

How much storage you want? Do you want any specific feature beyond file sharing?

How much experience do you have self hosting stuff? What is the purpose of this project? (E.g. maybe you want a learning experience, not using commercial services, just need file sharing?)

Yep, I do that on Debian hosts, EL (RHEL/Rocky/etc.) have a similar feature.

However, you need to keep an eye for updates that require a reboot. I use my own Nagios agent that (among other things) sends me warnings when hosts require a reboot (both apt/dnf make this easy to check).

I wouldn’t care about last online/reboots; I just do some basic monitoring to get an alert if a host is down. Spontaneous reboots would be a sign of an underlying issue.

Incus has a great selection of images that are ready to go, plus gives scripted access to VMs (and LXC containers) very easily; after incus launch to create a VM, incus exec can immediately run commands as root for provisioning.

Nextcloud is in EPEL 10. You’ll get updates along with the rest of the OS.

I have been using EPEL 9 Nextcloud for a good while and it’s been a smooth experience.

If you want specifically Docker, I would not choose an EL10 distro, really. I have been test driving AlmaLinux 10 and it’s pretty nice, but I would look elsewhere.

IMHO, it really depends on the specific services you want to run. I guess you are most familiar with Docker and everything that you want to run has a first-class-citizen Docker container for it. It also depends on whether the services you want to run are suitable for Internet exposure or not (and how comfortable you are with the convenience tradeoff).

LXC is very different. Although you can run Docker nested within LXC, you gotta be careful because IIRC, there are setups that used to not work so well (maybe it works better now, but Docker nested within LXC on a ZFS file system used to be a problem).

I like that Proxmox + LXC + ZFS means that it’s all ZFS file systems, which gives you a ton of flexibility; if you have VMs and volumes, you need to assign sizes to them, resize if needed, etc.; with ZFS file systems you can set quotas, but changing them is much less fuss. But that would likely require much more effort for you. This is what I use, but I think it’s not for everyone.

I don’t use Nextcloud calendars or address books. But I assume they are included in regular backups.

I pay about 50€ for all absolute overkill Hetzner dedicated server (128gb of RAM).

I live in two different flats in different cities because of personal circumstances.

I assume you basically want protection against disasters, but not high uptime.

(E.g. you likely can live with a week of unavailability if after a week you can recover the data.)

The key is about proper backups. For example, my Nextcloud server is running in a datacenter. Every night I replicate the data to a computer running at home. Every week I run a backup to a USB drive that I keep in a third location. Every month I run a backup to a USB drive on the computer I mentioned at home.

So I could lose two locations and still have my data.

There is much written about backup strategies, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-2-1_backup_rule … Just start with your configuration, think what can go wrong and what would happen, and add redundancy until you are OK with the risks.

You need two drives for the OS, four for data. Hetzner boxes are cheap with 2 drives, cost multiplies if you add any other.

Huh, what?

I see in your link that that image has support for KasmVNC, which is great and you could use to make Emacs work…

But the whole point of VS Code is that it can run in a browser and not use a remote desktop solution- which is always going to be a worse experience than a locally-rendered UI.

I kinda expect someone to package Emacs with a JS terminal, or with a browser-friendly frontend, but I’m always very surprised that this does not exist. (It would be pretty cool to have a Git forge that can spawn an Emacs with my configuration on a browser to edit a repository.)

Web-accessible Emacs? What are you using?

I keep everything documented, along with my infrastructure as code stuff. Briefly:

• Nextcloud
• Vaultwarden
• Miniflux
• My blog
• Takahe (a multi-domain) ActivityPub server
• My health tracker CRUD data entry
• https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/
• Grafana (for health stats and monitoring data from Nagios)
• Nagios
• FreeIPA/Ipsilon (SSO)

edit: plus a few things that do not have a web UI.

I was going to mention ZFS, but I suspect Raspberries are too weak for ZFS?

If you can use ZFS in both sides, send/receive is the bomb. (I use it for my backups.) However, I’m not sure how well encryption would work for your purpose. IIRC, last time I looked at it, if you wanted an encrypted replica, the source dataset should be encrypted, which did not make me happy.

I’d love to work on making NASes “great” for non-technical people. I feel it’s key. Sending encrypted backups through peers is one of my personal obsessions. It should be possible for people to buy two NAS, then set up encrypted backups over the Internet with a simple procedure. I wish TrueNAS Scale enabled that- right now it’s the closest thing that exists, I think.

The next TrueNAS Scale can do LXC containers using Incus. It’s similar to a VM, but more lightweight. You can create a container for any Linux distro and install Borg on that. With previous versions, I googled and found some instructions to run Borg in a container with SSH, or you could use a VM.

Borg also supports dummy SSH targets, that TrueNAS can provide. Apparently, it’s lower performance-

Why the choice of TrueNAS Scale? For just a Borg target, you could run any Linux distribution.

YunoHost is a non-profit. Things could change, of course, but I’d fear more that YunoHost dies than it tries to monetize.

TrueNAS is backed by a for-profit company that so far has a good track record and looks pretty sustainable. Plus, while YunoHost might be a bit more troublesome, TrueNAS Scale is pretty much based around “open” things- their app catalog is basically Helm charts, for example.

Docker Compose is quite portable too, but if you are re-using YAML compose definitions from the Internet, or non-official container images by third-parties, there’s also risks involved- not everything is easy to migrate! I prefer a very hands-on approach to my personal infra (I package some RPMs!), so I think I wouldn’t personally use YunoHost, but I feel somewhat comfortable recommending it to others.

YunoHost is very nice to run on a VPS (or a box at home, or anything). It has good email hosting support, and I feel people without systems administration experience could get it running and host a couple of apps for a group without too much trouble.

TrueNAS Scale has awesome NAS capabilities. ZFS is the bomb. Plus, they are integrating Incus, which I’m a huge fan of. I think it hits a sweet spot for people with systems administration experience. Just install it and you get great NAS capabilities, the option of running a K8S instance, LXC/VM capabilities, and some “app catalog” (I test drove that briefly and it looked decent, but I think less hands-free than Yunohost.). My pet peeve (and I understand why they do this) is that you need separate drives for the OS and for data, so if you want redundancy you need 4 drives- which is likely fine for home use, but I’d like to run TrueNAS Scale on a Hetzner dedicated server, and that increases costs a lot.

If your primary desire is to run a few apps and you want to minimize your learning/effort, I’d check out YunoHost. If you want to do more, but also invest more time, TrueNAS Scale is awesome.

I did some testing with it, because I believe more people should be able to self-host.

I like how it is implemented. It has good support for email. Many apps support SSO.

The critical part to me is how up-to-date applications are. I started a small project to automate version tracking, check out:

https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/app/nextcloud.html

; so for example, the YunoHost Nextcloud app does not lag much behind upstream. My intention with this is to let people see that they have been updating Nextcloud dilligently for two years; they might pull the plug tomorrow, but it’s a good track record.

(I’d like to add scrapers to other projects similar to YunoHost. My ultimate goal would be to be able to choose a list of apps you’d like to self-host, and see which projects like YunoHost carry the applications you want, and compare how they track updates.)