141–150 of 247 posts
I highly recommend anyone going this route to use Proxmox as your base install on the (old) hardware, and then use individual LXCs/VMs for the services you run. Maybe it's just me, but I find LXCs to be much easier to manage and reason about than Docker containers, and the excellent collection of scripts maintained by the community: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts makes it just as easy as a Dock…
I highly recommend anyone going this route to use Proxmox as your base install on the (old) hardware, and then use individual LXCs/VMs for the services you run. Maybe it's just me, but I find LXCs to be much easier to manage and reason about than Docker containers, and the excellent collection of scripts maintained by the community: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts makes it just as easy as a Dock…
I use lxd to manage lxc containers. Am I missing out on anything?
It's hardly a requirement but if someone is just starting to learn, proxmox has lots of documentation on how to do things and the UI keeps you from footgunning yourself copy/pasting config code off websites/LLM too much.
Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…
Speaking of laptop batteries as a UPS source, some laptops come with battery management features that keep the battery healthy even when plugged in full time, usually exposed as a setting in the BIOS/UEFI. I've found that business/enterprise type laptops like Thinkpads and Probooks have this as standard, for example Thinkpads from 2010 already had this, assuming you're lucky enough to find one with a usable battery o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of laptop batteries as a UPS source, some laptops come with battery management features that keep the battery healthy even when plugged in full time, usually exposed as a setting in the BIOS/UEFI. I've found that business/enterprise type laptops like Thinkpads and Probooks have this as standard, for example Thinkpads from 2010 already had this, assuming you're lucky enough to find one with a usable battery o…
Macbooks do this as well automatically if kept plugged in for a certain period of time.
I self-host most of what I need but I recently faced the ultimate test when my Internet went down intermittently. It raised some interesting questions: - How long can I be productive without the Internet? - What am I missing? The answer for me was I should archive more documentation and NixOS is unusable offline if you do not host a cache (so that is pretty bad). Ultimately I also found out self-hosting most of what…
You can't install or update new software that you'd pull from the web, but you couldn't do that with any other system either. I can't remember specifically trying but surely if you're just e.g. modifying your nginx config, a rebuild will work offline?
Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…
Why do you recommend removing the battery? Risk of fire? I would have thought any reasonably recent laptop would be fine to leave plugged in indefinitely. Not to mention many won't have an easily removable battery anyway
I highly recommend anyone going this route to use Proxmox as your base install on the (old) hardware, and then use individual LXCs/VMs for the services you run. Maybe it's just me, but I find LXCs to be much easier to manage and reason about than Docker containers, and the excellent collection of scripts maintained by the community: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts makes it just as easy as a Dock…
I use lxd to manage lxc containers. Am I missing out on anything?
I also like that Proxmox can be fully managed from the web UI. I'm sure most of this is possible with LCD on some distro, but Proxmox was the standard at the time I set it up (LXD wasn't as polished then)
Which is not exactly what you want from a gaming PC.
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I've got an old Mac-Mini 2012 laying around. It was a gift. I never wanted to switch to Mac on this solid, but not very powerful machine. Over xmas last year I booted the thing, and it was unbearable slow, even with the original version of the OS on it. After an macOS update, it was unusable. I put an SSD in (thanks YouTube for the guidance) and booted it with Debian and on top of that installed CasaOS (web-based hom…
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo) which I wanted to give a similar fate, but unfortunately it idles at 18W on Debian. I hope Asahi for Mac Mini M4 becomes a thing. That machine will be an amazing little server 10 years from now.
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To be honest I never understood the purpose of RAID for personal use cases. RAID is not a backup, so you need frequent, incremental backups anyway. It only makes sense for things where you need that 99.99% uptime. OK, maybe if you're hosting a service that many people depend on then I could see it (although I suspect downtime would still be dominated by other causes) but then I go over to r/DataHoarder and I see peop…
RAID is not backup, but in some circumstances it's better than a backup. If you don't have RAID and your disk dies you need to replace it ASAP and you've lost all changes since your last backup. If you have RAID you just replace the disk and suffer 0 data loss. That being said, the reason why I'm afraid of not using RAID is data integrity. What happens when the single HDD/SSD in your system is near its end of life? C…
Also, if you're paranoid avout drive behavior, run ZFS. It will detect such problems and surface it at the OS level (ref "Zebras All The Way Down" by Bryan Cantrill)