I can do better than that: here are a couple of videos from LearnLinuxTV’s Proxmox Course.

• Episode 15: Clustering
• Episode 16: High Availability

You should be able to watch them and get the overview you’re looking for. But really, this whole course is excellent from start to finish. I watched it before I ever touched Proxmox, and I’m glad I did. It was instrumental in helping me choose Proxmox as my hypervisor and gave me a great idea of what hardware I wanted to use and how I wanted to use it.

I run a lot of these services in my homelab. I didn’t really feel like I had something with real potential until I started using Proxmox as my hypervisor. That’s when things exploded. You can create VMs and containers on it with ease, and all the features I would normally have to rely on command line for were also available on the Proxmox web interface. That is so convenient! Need to do a snapshot because you think you might screw up your install on step 37? No problem, just take care of it in the GUI.

Proxmox also handles clustering really well, which will probably benefit you. You can add a Raspberry Pi or two, or a PC, and Proxmox will just manage them all. It will even move services from one device to another if one device gets turned off. It’s really incredible!

The one thing I wouldn’t build yourself is a NAS. I went with a Synology, and I’m glad I did. Building (and maintaining) one from scratch is just more work than I really have time for. With a NAS, you want things to go perfectly all the time, including updates and security updates, so I’m happy to leave most of the testing and configuration to Synology’s team. I just have to remember to update things periodically, which I’m willing to do.

The first thing you should do is get a dedicated server for your plex server software. I recommend the NVidia Shield Pro as your first Plex server host because it has excellent hardware transcoding capabilities. If you don’t want to buy the shield, you could get a larger server with a processor that has integrated graphics capabilities. Installing plex on that will actually give you a few more features and probably better transcoding capabilities, but it would be significantly more expensive.

After that, I’d get a Plex pass to unlock a lot of the good Plex features.

Almost the same thing happened on Reddit when everyone migrated from Digg. It’s so similar, in fact, that I wonder if maybe this isn’t a normal thing.

Please give Proxmox a try! It was such a huge quality of life improvement when I migrated to it. I can’t speak to your backup needs or to the performance of ZFS, since I don’t use either of those. I just think that Proxmox took a lot of the pain out of my homelab management experience without taking away my capabilities to customize it. Highly recommend!

First, you don’t really need a VPN to view Plex content. Plex can be configured to require a secure connection. That ought to be enough. But if you want the VPN tunnel for some reason, the answer is simple: self-host your own VPN server. I recommend OpenVPN or Wireguard.

If you did this, you would prevent your fellow instance users from subscribing to content they are interested in. That wouldn’t be very neighborly.

Every once in a while, a post from a service employee would surface on r/popular on Reddit, and you’d get a glimpse of how they really feel about tips and people who tip badly or don’t tip. They absolutely will retaliate against people they know don’t tip up to their expectations, but they will never share their expectations with their customers.

Granted, this is a slice of the total population of service workers who are complaining on a public forum. Still, would you risk your hair, or your food, or your time to someone who decides you’re not keeping up your end of the social contract? Not me! If I go to a place regularly, I tip even if the service is bad, because I won’t take the chance of being retaliated against.

It sucks.

Those of us who are of a certain age have seen this happen before. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, some big companies like Compuserve and Prodigy and AOL became service providers and offered customers access to their own content, as well as a “gateway” to the internet. They weren’t the only service providers, but they made access to the internet much easier for less technical people, and they had reach. AOL is infamous for its mail marketing campaign where they blasted copies of their software to everyone on CDs.

That brought a whole new segment of the population onto the internet who didn’t have the same culture or capabilities or interest in building a high-quality community. Usenet forums were particularly impacted. Longtime users coined a term that is still used today to describe this phenomenon: Eternal September. Why September? Because prior to all of this, the only time the forums had to deal with inexperienced, uncouth users was in September, when a new batch of first-year college students got access to the internet and found their way to Usenet.

Right now Lemmy is peopled with the high-quality user base that wants to improve the community. Threads threatens to (and will) open the floodgates of people who may not share those interests.

That’s brave! I would never cut my own hair. Well, I guess I would shave my own head. But I’d still be nervous about missing something.

Everyone expects 20% no matter what. Especially those stylists who are working as independent contractors for a large company like Great Clips. Prices went up kind of fast in 2020, so I asked my wife to learn how to cut my hair during the lockdown, and I haven’t gone back to a professional since.

Ugh, this happened to me during a minor release. For whatever reason I had to lug the PC into my office, connect keyboard and mouse, boot it up, and press a key. Then it would boot normally again. I get jealous of those of you with servers that have those remote KVM capabilities.

I’ve been known to skip visiting a doctor after a bad injury. But I will not skip going to the dentist once a toothache starts setting in. If I’m doing things right, archaeologists will find a perfect set of teeth among a pile of dust when they dig up my remains. I do not want to be subjected to even the slightest dental issue!

I assumed these were just the same communities only started on different servers?

This is correct. Anyone can start a community on any Lemmy (Or KBin) server, and they can name it whatever they want. When a community is on a remote Lemmy instance, you see the @<instancename> suffix to help you see which one it is referring to. When no @<instancename> suffix is shown, that means that the community you are looking at is hosted on the instance that you are currently viewing Lemmy content through.

That looks really good. Which dashboard software is it?

I do a few things to keep track of my installed services.

1. I run an instance of Heimdall, which is an utterly simple launcher. All of my services with administration panels get added here.
2. I maintain an excel sheet with all of my assigned IPs. It doesn’t matter if it’s a VM, a container, an iPhone, or some other hardware device. Everything is assigned a static IP and added to the excel list.
3. When I’m creating containers and VMs in Proxmox, I make sure that the proxmox ID of the container or VM is the same as the final octet of the IPV4 IP address. So if my Heimdall service is set up on 192.168.1.155, then the Heimdall LXC gets ID 155. I do this so that I can quickly look up the IP of any service in Proxmox without having to open my spreadsheet.

If you follow this convention, then you could easily export the IDs of all of your proxmox containers and VMs by following the instructions here. Make a few transformations to turn the IDs into IP addresses, and you have a .csv you could import elsewhere.

I’m sure someone has made a tool to do this already somewhere. On Github, xezpeleta made an inventory script “to grab proxmox nodes. This will also try to grab the IP if you have the guest agent installed.” I bet there are others out there.