It all depends on how you want to homelab.

I was into low power homelabbing for a while - half a dozen Raspberry Pis - and it was great. But I’m an incessant tinkerer. I like to experiment with new tech all the time, and am always cloning various repos to try out new stuff. I was reaching a limit with how much I could achieve with just Docker alone, and I really wanted to virtualise my firewall/router. There were other drivers too. I really wanted to cut the streaming cord, and saving that monthly spend helped justify what came next.

I bought a pair of ex enterprise servers (HP DL360s) and jumped into Proxmox. I have an OPNsense VM for my firewall/router, and host over 40 Proxmox CTs, running (at a guess) around 60-70 different services across them.

I love it, because Proxmox gives me full separation of each service. Each one has its own CT. Think of that as me running dozens of Raspberry Pis, without the headache of managing all that hardware. On top of that, Docker gives me complete portability and recoverability. I can move services around quite easily, and can update/rollback with ease.

Finally, the combination of the two gives me a huge advantage over bare metal for rapid prototyping.

Let’s say there’s a new contender that competes with Immich. They offer the promise of a really cool feature no one else has thought of in a self-hosted personal photo library. I have Immich hosted on a CT, using Docker, and hiding behind Nginx Proxy Manager (also on a CT), accessible via photos.domain on my home network.

I can spin up a Proxmox CT from my custom Debian template, use my Ansible playbook to provision Docker and all the other bits, access it in Portainer and spin up the latest and greatest Immich competitor, all within mere minutes. Like, literally 10 minutes max.

I have a play with the competitor for a bit. If I don’t like it, I just delete the CT and move on. If I do, I can point my photos.domain hostname (via Nginx Proxy Manager) to the new service and start using it full-time. Importantly, I can still keep my original Immich CT in place - maybe shutdown, maybe not - just in case I discover something I don’t like about the new kid on the block.

That’s a simplified example, but hopefully illustrates at least what I get out of using Proxmox the way I do.

The cons for me is the cost. Initial cost of hardware, and the cost of powering beefier kit like this. I’m about to invest in some decent centralised storage (been surviving with a couple li’l ARM-based NASes) to I can get true HA with my OPNsense firewall (and a few other services), so that’s more cost again.

I’ve written my wiki so that, if I end up shuffling off this mortal coil, my wife can give access to one of my brothers and they can help her by unpicking all the smart home stuff.

I’m using self hosted wiki.js and draw.io. Works a treat, and trivial to backup with everything in Postgres.

It doesn’t have to be hard - you just need to think methodically through each of your services and assess the cost of creating/storing the backup strategy you want versus the cost (in time, effort, inconvenience, etc) if you had to rebuild it from scratch.

For me, that means my photo and video library (currently Immich) and my digital records (Paperless) are backed up using a 2N+C strategy: a copy on each of 2 NASes locally, and another copy stored in the cloud.

Ditto for backups of my important homelab data. I have some important services (like Home Assistant, Node-RED, etc) that push their configs into a personal Gitlab instance each time there’s a change. So, I simply back that Gitlab instance up using the same strategy. It’s mainly raw text in files and a small database of git metadata, so it all compresses really nicely.

For other services/data that I’m less attached to, I only backup the metadata.

Say, for example, I’m hosting a media library that might replace my personal use of services that rhyme with “GetDicks” and “Slime Video”. I won’t necessarily backup the media files themselves - that would take way more space than I’m prepared to pay for. But I do backup the databases for that service that tells me what media files I had, and even the exact name of the media files when I “found” them.

In a total loss of all local data, even though the inconvenience factor would be quite high, the cost of storing backups would far outweigh that. Using the metadata I do backup, I could theoretically just set about rebuilding the media library from there. If I were hosting something like that, that is…

Cheers mate - no doubt I would’ve scratched my head for a bit when I do my weekly container updates tomorrow.

The whole point of this particular comment thread here is that we’re already starting to see what’s happening: people are taking back control. You’re here on Lemmy, proving that exact point.

I never said we needed Cory to tell us what comes next. Just come up with another colourfully descriptive term like he did with enshittification.

You sound like that insufferable ponytail from Good Will Hunting.

Cheers. Fixed.

We need Cory to coin a term for what comes after enshittification. Perhaps we can call it the Great Wipening, where we all stop paying to be treated like serfs and start taking back control of our content and data.

I pay for Usenet - not my fault if they don’t pass it on.

Joking aside, like some others have said, I support many artists via Bandcamp.

lol - I’m the same, and frequently wonder if I’m allowing tech debt to creep in. My last update took me to 8.0.3, and that was only because I built a new node and couldn’t get an older version for the architecture I wanted to run it on.

This is more about the car maker harvesting data, rather than just tracking the car. Car makers have been (quietly) building more tech into their cars to collect data for the purposes of selling it to third parties. It’s effectively the enshittification of cars.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/toyota-car-brands-collecting-driver-data-privacy-concerns-laws/103443500

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/toyota-car-brands-collecting-driver-data-privacy-concerns-laws/103443500

Unfortunately, any mobile data component likely to be integrated with something more integral to the car, like the entire entertainment/climate control interface, or something equally difficult/impossible to drive without.

I think OP is referring to the whole “connected cars” thing, which isn’t the same as GPS. Many cars nowadays have mobile data capabilities on and are, unbeknownst to the owner, sending all sorts of information to the car makers.

This isn’t just governments and government contractors collecting data for road use and tolling. It’s for-profit companies harvesting consumer data for their own purpose. OP is right to be paranoid.

Yep - same here. I use MAC auth on all of my SSIDs, as well as PEAP auth for the “user” SSID. The kids’ phones get dropped into a dedicated VLAN, so knowing their MAC addresses is key to that.

Yes, every time they change phones, they have to ask me to add it to the wireless for them, but I have my RADIUS database in Postgres - I can easily use Adminer to add/change/delete the relevant table entry with the correct MAC address.

Yeah, no dispute here, mate. We’re pretty shocking like that. But I think religion stands out as an example of the worst, most inventive way we’ve come up with to subjugate and hurt people.

As a species, we’ve convinced ourselves that religion should be protected rather than inspected. We let lots of bad things happen in the name of religion. It’s bullshit.

IMO, and without actual data to back it up, I reckon religion (and religious difference) is responsible for the most suffering throughout the history of humankind.

I just have a one-liner in crontab that keeps the last 7 nightly database dumps. That destination location is on one my my NASes, which rclones everything to my secondary NAS and an S3 bucket.

ls -tp /storage/proxmox-data/paperless/backups/*.sql.gz | grep -v '/$' | tail -n +7 | xargs -I {} rm -- {}; docker exec -t paperless-db-1 pg_dumpall -c -U paperless | gzip > /storage/proxmox-data/paperless/backups/paperless_$( date +\%Y\%m\%d )T$( date +\%H\%M\%S ).sql.gz

Yep - they introduced paid subscription tiers and put multi-user support into those: https://www.photoprism.app/editions#compare

You do need to be able to reach your public IP to be able to VPN back in. I have a static IP, so no real concerns there. But, even if I didn’t, I have a Python script that updates a Route53 DNS record for me in my own domain - a self-hosted dynamic DNS really.

You certainly can run Wireguard server in a docker container - the good folks over at Linuxserver have just the repo for you.