I was eyeballing a MD3600 yesterday, for only 150$.

Went back and forth on the idea of running it for an iSCSI san… but, remembered why I prefer zfs and ceph over HW raid.

If you want 10G performance, you need to get a 10G nic. They are only 30-40$ on ebay.

While, you CAN bond a pair of 2.5GBe ports, and POTENTIALLY get 5g of throughput, it will not be on a single session. ie- you can’t download a file at 5Gbps.

10G hardware is cheap.

I use technitium as the primary server, with a pair of backup servers running bind9.

The backup servers do zone-transfers from the primary.

I don’t think homelabs were ever the intended audience. There are MUCH more price effective, reliable, and performant options over their cases + expanders.

Ebay.

Also, i3 doesn’t really use less power. The -T models will use a lot less power. But, you aren’t really going to notice a difference with the i3 models.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/2639vs2627vs2599/Intel-i3-6100T-vs-Intel-i5-6500T-vs-Intel-i5-6500

TDP is the same between them too.

For reference, I have 3 micros. i5-9500T, i7-6700, and i5-8500t. They all use pretty much the same 8-12watts of idle power.

Also, I generally avoid the pre-6th gen computers. DDR-3, slower, less efficient. i5-6500 is the oldest processors in my lab.

And- right now, 50$ is the going-price for M900s / Optiplexes/etc, with an i5-6500t.

Although, you can get the i3 models for 30$ or so.

Go pick up a optiplex micro on ebay. 6th gen intel, or newer.

This will cost you around 50-150$ depending on which one you get.

Slap a couple NVMes into it, and a 2.5" SSD.

Run your docker containers here, including paperless-ngx.

You might check out unraid too…

I went from TrueNAS Core -> Unraid -> TrueNAS Scale -> And Landed back on Unraid.

My reasons were documented here: https://xtremeownage.com/2021/11/10/unraid-vs-truenas-scale-2021/

Even if you do want to do casaOS, or linux- I’d still recommend putting proxmox as the base os.

No… I have proper, tested backups.

I did put the disclaimer front and center! Ceph really needs a ton of hardware before it starts even comparing to normal storage solutions.

But, the damn reliability is outstanding.

https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2023/proxmox-building-a-ceph-cluster/

Having around 10 total enterprise NVMes, and 10G networking, I am pretty happy with the results.

It runs all of my VMs, kubernetes, etc, and doesn’t bottleneck.

Depending on the use-case, absolutely.

For a small site, absolutely.

I have a few dozen externally exposed projects that I self host though, a few of them are rather resource intensive, which would add up pretty quickly in AWS.

In my case, keeping everything in an isolated DMZ, handles reducing the risk vastly, as well as completely isolating internet-exposed applications from everything else.

It’s all about have proper redundancy, and risk-aversion.

And, of course, working backups, and a contingency plan when something bad happens.

But- then, how are my side-businesses supposed to make money?

Storefronts, and other externally-exposed services generally don’t work too well… when they aren’t exposed.

Don’t host your own email server.

Just trust me.

I FOUND THE ULTIMATE REPLACEMENT.

(Offers basically no solid reasons as to why it is better then Nextcloud).

“mimimi chinese application” LOL

Meanwhile, very top of the githubrepo:

中文版本

OP, are you simping for a random chinese github repo?

How are you supposed to secure something that you don’t understand?

Personally, when I used to route my home services through a VPS- I used a simple VPN tunnel from my VPS to my home network, which my home router would establish (dynamic IP).

From there, my firewall dictated what was actually allowed to enter through the tunnel… and the reverse proxy, did its thing.

Why?

Because I picked up a lifetime pass over 10 years ago, long before Jellyfin/Emby was even heard of.

Back then, it worked perfectly fine, and now it works, perfectly fine.

It has a good app on my Rokus/Shields. It just works.

When, it stops working, or they pull something stupid, I have Jellyfin already ready to go.

Until then though, plex reigns king. (Also, I like its interface more then Jellyfin)

I am still a huge fan of Blue Iris.

Yup. It has a price tag. But, in terms of NVR, there isn’t another comparable option, for the amount of features it includes.

And- its extremely flexible. If you don’t want to transcode, it defaults to direct to disk encoding. If you slap in a GPU, or have intel quick sync, it is happy to use it.

If you want object detection, codeproject.ai integrates flawlessly with it, and also works with either CPU/GPU algorithms, or can use a coral TPU.

Normally- I recommend opensource projects- but, Blue Iris is rock solid. Its only real downside, is that it only runs on a windows box. But, there is a docker container which supposedly works for it too.