astrsk

I would make the case for proxmox on the machine so you can divvy up the hardware as you see fit— but also setup the hard drives as a zfs1 pool (1 redundancy failure allowed). This way you can make multiple isolated machines or use LXC containers directly for apps, services, etc. while benefiting from ZFS’s excellent performance and reliability. I would say that TrueNAS Scale has been a bit of a letdown for me because it feels bloated, easy to make mistakes with complicated setups, and I have less control over the hardware. I don’t like how updates have fully broken apps. That said it is a reliable ZFS wrapper with more bells and whistles in the UI over what proxmox offers— caveat being that both can do everything if you want to take the time to learn ZFS commands.

There is also the TrueNAS based alternative HexOS that is more beginner friendly for just getting a nice NAS setup fast while still supporting apps / containers.

I love Actual. It’s fantastic and easy to use. I use off-budget accounts and weekly / monthly reconciliation just to keep the general value of these accounts at stable intervals.

I have a slight bone to pick with the PWA version of the site though. After a couple months of using the PWA front end to keep my budget and transactions accurate manually, I opened the site on my desktop browser and it completely lost all that work due to a sync issue. Apparently the PWA for weeks had not remained in sync and so all manual entries were not making back to the server. But the app works so well I never noticed because it kept just working. Supposedly there’s an alert saying it’s not synced with the server but it’s not prominent enough. So if you use that feature (the PWA) then be sure it’s syncing often.

This is mostly an IOPS dependent answer. Do you have multiple hot services constantly hitting the disk? If so, it can be advantageous to split the heavy hitters across different disk controllers, so in high redundancy situations that means different dedicated pools. If it’s a bunch of services just reading, filesystems like ZFS use caching to almost completely eliminate disk thrashing.

If you can see it, you can record it.

I use Actual and my solution is to just report the differences in investments value at the end of each week as a transaction. It’s not great but it affords me an opportunity to see trends in a different way and make adjustments feeling a little more informed. I even put my car in and just check KBB every year and update it. Helps with the year end net worth evaluation though it’s not the most flexible.

What are the features you need from your host? If it’s just remote syncing, why not just make a small Debian system and install git on it? You can manage security on the box itself. Do you need the overhead of gitlab at all?

I say this because I did try out hosting my own GitLab, GitTea, Cogs, etc and I just found I never needed any of the features. The whole point was to have a single remote that can be backed up and redeployed easily in disaster situations but otherwise all my local work just needed simple tracking. I wrote a couple scripts so my local machine can create new repos remotely and I also setup ssh key on the remote machine.

I don’t have a complicated setup, maybe you do, not sure. But I didn’t need the integrated features and overhead for solo self hosting.

For example, one of my local machine scripts just executes a couple commands on the remote to create a new folder, cd into it, and then run git init —bare then I can just clone the new project folder on the local machine and get started.

If you don’t need to host but can run locally, GPT4ALL is nice, has several models to download and plug and play with different purposes and descriptions, and doesn’t require a GPU.

For ableton, you can run it in wine and it can work well enough to do things. It’s an OK experience at best and flat out doesn’t work at worst. Kiss your VST plugins goodbye with that though, gotta stick to the built ins which do all work when it’s working overall.

Otherwise, check out bitwig studio, made by ex ableton devs and natively runs in Linux. Still gonna be hit or miss on 3rd party plugins but the app is on par with ableton as an experience. Price in the same range too. Best short explainer is ableton meets logic in terms of usability.

It’s the Linux version of steam taking advantage of idle time to process shaders. It’s a critical part of making all those proton launched games working right. I wish it had better control for when to run it but it is what it is.

Borg backup is gold standard, with Vorta as a very nice GUI on machines that need it. Otherwise, all my other Linux machines are running in proxmox hypervisors and have container/snapshot/vm backups regularly through proxmox backup server to another machine. All the backup data is then replicated regularly, remotely via truenas scale replication tasks.

So far it’s fine. Not much of a difference on the surface. Except floatplane videos in Firefox have distorted audio now after the update. Might be unrelated but it was directly after updating. Oh and my Application Menu crosses into the monitor to the left of my primary screen which is a bit annoying. Nothing showstopping here.

I self host services as much as possible for multiple reasons; learning, staying up to date with so many technologies with hands on experience, and security / peace of mind. Knowing my 3-2-1 backup solution is backing my entire infrastructure helps greatly in feeling less pressured to provide my data to unknown entities no matter how trustworthy, as well as the peace of mind in knowing I have control over every step of the process and how to troubleshoot and fix problems. I’m not an expert and rely heavily on online resources to help get me to a comfortable spot but I also don’t feel helpless when something breaks.

If the choice is to trust an encrypted backup of all my sensitive passwords, passkeys, and recovery information on someone else’s server or have to restore a machine, container, vm, etc. from a backup due to critical failures, I’ll choose the second one because no matter how encrypted something is someone somewhere will be able to break it with time. I don’t care if accelerated and quantum encryption will take millennia to break. Not having that payload out in the wild at all is the only way to prevent it being cracked.

Do VLANs with multiple wireless and wired clients using OPNSense and OpenWRT dummy APs count? Still haven’t quite figured it out.

Eh, at least you can still take notes very easily and reinstall DE later.

I’d prefer GNU’s ddrescue just because I find it more robust and has better progress output. It’s functionally the same interface but lets you use a mapfile to resume sessions should anything happen to interrupt the copy.

Arguably I’m against this because you never know what’s going to happen and the conventional wisdom for appliances like this is to just backup any important configs, backup your containers and vms, then do a fresh install from the latest install media on the new disk followed by a restore of the backups. It might take a little more time but it’s negligible and allows you an opportunity to review your current configs, make necessary changes, and ensure your backups are working as intended.

According to this Blu-ray has some of the worst expected shelf life, with the exception of BD-RE.