In this project, I explore an all-in-one home server using low cost hardware, bringing together as many common home applications as possible in a single box. Terramaster NAS as low-cost Proxmox node? Teardown and SW Install! In the first video, I introduce the hardware for this project - a cheap Terramaster NAS! It combines two HDD bays and two NVMe slots in a very tiny and low power brick, with dual 2.

Today I’m taking my 10 servers and hopefully working that list down to just 7! JUST SEVEN! So, driven by my desire to consolidate my critical services into one box so I can lab away with the rest of the boxes, I am taking the time to shut down some of the most critical servers in the house and re-home them, then disassemble the parts for the next project. Come along with me on this adventure!

As promised in a previous video about my Proxmox Backup Server, I have a Quantum LTO-5 tape drive that I’m going to try and use to implement a proper 3-tier backup strategy with offsite tapes. I’m currently using Linode’s object storage for backing up my personal data (~200G), and not backing up the video files outside of the two existing copies (on the storage server and the PBS server). With the affordability of tapes, I can keep the video files and personal data off-site reliably.

I’ve gone from “no backups” to “raid is a backup” to “two zfs pools in one box”, and decided it’s finally time for a proper backup solution. So, I settled on Proxmox Backup Server! And today, I rebuild my HP Microserver Gen8 with 4x10T refurbished SAS drives, a new SAS controller card, and more! With this backup solution, I’m feeling a lot better about my data migration to Ceph. Contents Video SAS Drive Formatting ZFS Pool Setup Next Steps Video SAS Drive Formatting Since these drives were refurbished they were formerly formatted for a hardware RAID controller and were giving me lots of protection errors in dmesg - specifically blk_update_request: protection error (and failing to read, but not write).

Continuing the series where apalrd teaches proxmox skills through meaningful applications, today we are setting up a proper fileserver on our Proxmox system using Linux Containers. I’ve chosen to use a lightweight Linux Container (LXC) for this, so we can share the host’s ZFS filesystem. To manage shares and users using a web UI, I’m installing Cockpit, as well as some additional modules from 45Drives to deal with Samba. This should provide a pretty easy to use storage interface, keep all of our storage contained in the host Proxmox system without adding another layer of filesystem or a virtual machine, and run well on lower end hardware such as the Terramaster unit I’m using.

I get asked a lot about what hardware I recommend for homelabs and home servers. It’s a very difficult question since it depends on what exactly you want to get out of your setup. But, whatever you choose, I’m starting a new series where I’ll setup all of the commonly requested home server software in a single box. Since I want to try this on both used and new hardware, here’s a low cost NAS you can buy brand-new and run your own software on it!

As I outlined in my first blog post on the topic, I want to build a new backup server, and I want to explore the different options I have. This project included a lot of testing, and will eventually culminate in actually building and setting up a proper backup system. It’s definitely an important and often overlooked part of a homelab, or even small business networks. Ideally, I can also get a functional offsite backup working, but that might be a future project.

As part of my series exploring backup options, I’m exploring the options for pulling a backup of a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) host to TrueNAS SCALE server. In this case, PVE host has local ZFS storage, and the TrueNAS system is acting as the backup server. Ideally, PVE would snapshot in ZFS and we could sync those snapshots with a TrueNAS Data Replication task, but PVE doesn’t use the ZFS snapshot features by default.

Previously, I described my ‘Ultimate’ OctoPrint setup, and part of that setup process including remounting a lot of OctoPrint folders to locations on my NAS. This setup worked well until I added OctoLapse, and wanted to backup folders not part of the folder path configuration in OctoPrint. To solve this, I used a different approach entirely, using symbolic links instead of a bunch of network mounts to cleanly and easily relocate OctoPrint data to network storage.

As part of my series exploring backup options, I’d like to see if I can use Proxmox Backup Server to archive both datasets and zvols of a TrueNAS SCALE server. Why would you want to do this? In my case, I’m trying to choose the best starting point for my new backup server, and one potential option is to use Proxmox Backup Server (PBS), but I’d like to store data outside of the Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) ecosystem.