Love the explanation. I’ve had a homelab for 20 years now and have never heard of FUTO. You’re explainer has made me bookmark the site now for future skimming.

NPM is awesome until you have a weird error that the web GUI does not give a hint about the problem. Used it for years at this point and wouldn’t consider anything else at this point. It just works and is super simple.

I had an issue recently where my new PC build would not shut down. It would power itself back on on every shutdown immediately.

Checked the bios and found that I had Wake on PCIe (something like that) enabled. Soon as I disabled it, I was able to shut down my PC.

My assumption is that I was shutting down my PC and my monitor still being on was causing my Asus mobo to see it as a turn on event.

Correct. I’m running two AD DC’s based on Samba, all running on Zentyal. Super simple to install & setup. I them run a VM in Virtualbox on my laptop for the rare occasions I need to use the Windows RSAT tools.

Other than that, all my Linux VM’s, ProxMox hosts & unRAID NAS all set to auth against the Samba DC. It has been working perfectly for over a year now.

https://www.zentyal.com/

I daily drive Debian and use Windows for work. Only have one Windows VM for playing games via Moonlight.

I use an Ansible playbook to do fresh install stuff such as app installs & joining my local Samba AD.

Another option, that I’ve never tried, would be to put your /home directory on another partition. That only solves the settings though and not your app installation bit.

I’ve been running OPNsense as a VM in Proxmox for a year on an AliExpress box that doesn’t have ECC. If I might ask, why do you have a requirement for ECC?

Before this box, I ran a Dell R230 with pfSense but got tired of the noise and 40 watt power draw.

I’ve had zero issues without ECC, so I’m just curious about your need for it.