It sure will handle a remote VPS, it’s just not as automatic to set up as it is with PVE.

I put this off for a long time, but I finally did it this weekend.

Basically, you install the proxmox-backup-client utility and then run it via cron or a systemd timerto do the backup however often you want.

You’re responsible for getting the VPS to communicate with your backup server (like pretty much any self-hosted service), so some sort of VPN between them would be good. I used NetBird for that part and I have a policy that allows access from the client to PBS only on TCP port 8007.

I’ve been quite happy with Proxmox Backup Server. I’ve had it running for years and it’s been pretty solid for all my VMs/containers. There’s also a bare metal client, which I’m adding to a couple cloud VPS machines this weekend. We’ll see how that goes.

Also, since it’s just Debian under the hood, I also use the PBS host as a replication target for my ZFS datasets via sanoid/syncoid.

I just had to do this. Don’t skip the release notes. They’re really good at highlighting potential pitfalls, just scroll back through and look for the heading “Breaking Changes.”

In my case there were a few, but they were only for API calls I’m not using, so I just did the update in one go and it worked out great. (Of course, I made sure to take a backup first.)

Oh! Also, try posting this here: https://practicalzfs.com/. That’s a discourse forum really focused on ZFS. Jim Salter runs it and Alan Jude often contributes advice. There are some folks there who know ZFS inside and out.

Checksum errors can often mean a failing component. It could be the other drive or maybe a sata cable. Is the original pool mounting correctly? If so, you should be able to do a simple rsync to move it to the new pool.

A hybrid is probably a good way forward. I had a career as a photographer for a while and I learned from that: going through 1000 photos takes very little time, but going through 10,000 takes an eternity. If you can star or mark your obviously important photos as you go along, it’ll take very little to print them at the end of the year.

This was a recent point of discussion on the 2.5 Admins podcast (https://2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-228/). Some good discussion on there.

My own thought is the best way to handle your family-member-finding-your-old-photos problem is the analog way: make some prints. It’s absolutely idiot proof, the methodology of keeping paper goods is well understood, and the technology is platform independent.

I do this with HAProxy and keepalived. My dns servers resolve my domains to a single virtual ip that keepalived manages. If one HAProxy node goes down, the other picks right up.

And this is one of the few things I’ve got setup with ansible, so deploying and making changes is pretty easy.

I can’t think of anything that specifically uses ssh, but Syncthing would do this, though for passwords I’m more inclined towards bitwarden.

With this concept in mind, I recently put together a VDI setup for a person who’s in one location for half of the year and another the other half. The idea is he’ll have a thin client at each location and connect to the same session wherever he is.

I’m doing this via a VM on Proxmox and SPICE. Maybe there’s some idea in there you could use.

In that case, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I’ve been reading a little bit before I go to bed and learning a lot that I glossed over when I set up my own mail server years ago. He and Alan Jude wrote some ZFS books as well that I keep coming back to and picking up new tricks each time.

I get pretty much anything Michael Lucas writes. The information is always great and his writing style is fun to read.

Important to note: it’s not a step-by-step guide to copy and paste and have a mail server running. It’s all about understand all the stuff that goes into it.

Take this with a grain of salt, the more I re-read, the more I realize I’m making assumptions about your setup that may or may not be true. First, I’m making an assumption that you’re doing ACLs for samba shares (and I know that system better on FreeBSD than Linux). I’m also assuming based on your description you want everyone to have access, but not write access.

I think you could do an officewide group with read-only permissions on all of the shares and then set the unix group to the department.

So, for your HR team you’d do chgrp -R hr /path/to/parent/shares/hr and setfacl -m d:g:rwx /path/to/parent/shares/hr and add the officewide group’s read-only perms: setfacl -m d:g:officewide:rx /path/to/parent/shares/hr. Rinse and repeat for each share.

Not sure if this is what you’re after, but maybe it’ll help lead in a good direction.

I’ve only ever tinkered with openmediavault, so I’m by no means an expert, but there is a ZFS plugin available. Here’s a forum post that may help: https://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php?thread/7633-howto-instal-zfs-plugin-use-zfs-on-omv/

That fruit argument is so that samba plays nicely with Apple’s SMB client implementation.

That will be totally doable, but there’s no one way to setup every service. Some you’ll install from the repository (like nginx or HAProxy or samba). Others you’d have to clone from git (like netbox or dokuwiki). Others have entirely different methods. So, unfortunately it’ll be a lot of reading the documentation.

In general, I prefer unprivileged LXC to a full VM unless there’s some specific requirement that countermands that preference (like running an appliance or a non-Linux OS).

What I tend to do is create a new container for each service (unless there’s a related stack). If the service runs on Docker, I’ll install that right inside the container and manage it with docker compose. By installing Docker directly from get.docker.com instead of the built in packages, it pretty much works all the time.

Since each service is in its own container, restoring backups is pretty service-specific. If you wanted some kind of central control plane for docker, you could check out swarm mode.

For me it’s the Mac Finder. It’s always running so (unless it crashes) there’s no delay in opening a file manager window and, more importantly, it has built in Quicklook and Miller columns. Haven’t managed to find a good-enough implementation of either of those in Linux, so I just work around it.

Not sure how wide a variety of sizes there are, but I’d search for “threaded inserts.” You drill the holes and screw the inserts in and that gives you an interface for machine bolts. I’ve only seen them in bigger sizes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some that would fit standoffs.

In my state (Vermont), the Secretary of State has an rss feed that basically presents the results as an xml file. I’m using that to make some local results spreadsheets. Could be other states have similar things.