No need to be antagonistic. I merely suggested the method I use for my home lab after learning the “hard way” to containerize and separate certain things.

OpenMediaVault is based on Debian. I think it’s currently OMV 7, but I’m not at home at the moment so I can’t check. Very solid system though.

This absolutely overkill

Hardly. Keeping the file server separate is good for reliability in case you bork an unrelated service, so you don’t take out everything else with it. That’s also partly why things like VMs, LXC, and Docker exist.

My NAS is a 2014 Mac Mini running OMV. It works great, very capable little Linux machine. Don’t bother with Mac OS.

There you go, that’s another option.

For the file server conundrum, something to keep in mind is that Proxmox is not NAS software and isn’t really set up to do that kind of thing. Plus, the Proxmox devs have been very clear about not installing anything that isn’t absolutely necessary outside of Proxmox (on the same machine).

However, you can set up a file server inside an LXC and share that through an internal VLAN inside Proxmox. Just treat that LXC as a NAS.

For your *arr stack, fire up an exclusive VM just for them. Install Docker on the VM, too, of course.

LLMs

If you’re gonna use that, please make sure you comb through the output and understand it before implementing it.

I’ve been subject to MSO for decades. LibreOffice was a welcome change.

I use a ryzen 3600x and 5600 or 5700xt with 16gb of ram

Solid. My gaming PC runs a 5800X3D, 7900XTX, and 32GB RAM.

My idea was to get a new, smaller case to fit my mitx board and psu in and use the old one with a cpu which supports “all” codes, 32gb ram.

Fair. For what it’s worth, the 3600X will easily support 4K streaming.

The old case has enough space for everything I’ll ever need, but the question is, would it be worth the effort.

“worth the effort” is highly subjective. IMO, never take on a hobby with the expectation of a return on your investment - you’ll never see it. Do it to learn and further your knowledge.

As far as the case goes, most “standard” ATX cases should fit your needs. I harvested the case from an old HP Proliant ML110 G2 from 2004 which, shockingly, is (mostly) ATX-compliant, and will become the new home of my NAS…at some point.

With transcoding ticked off my issue list, my last remaining point is storage and the uncertainty, whether using usb-c connected, direct attached storage (DAS) systems to set up a fileserver is inherently problematic or not.

My NAS is strictly just a NAS. It’s a 2014 Mac Mini running, Open Media Vault, with a Sabrent DS-SC4B 4-bay hard drive enclosure connected via USB. All 4 drives are in a RAID5 array.

My Plex and Jellyfin instances run within a VM under Proxmox, on an entirely separate machine. It works pretty well for what it is. Though, like I mentioned above, I plan on moving the whole NAS to a larger case where I can mount the drives inside and directly connect them to the motherboard, instead of relying on USB.

I don’t understand ZFS

Neither do I, and I have neither the time nor energy to figure it out. Solidarity!

and docker would yield a ton of chaos if i used it.

Docker is actually pretty sweet once you get the hang of it. I would recommend skipping over docker run commands entirely and going straight to Docker Compose. You write a “compose” file (using YAML) that defines the service, container, volumes, ports, and other (optional) environment variables, find a central place to keep your compose files (separated by folder, because they all tend to be named compose.yaml - it can be anywhere as long as you have the right permissions), point your terminal at whatever compose file you want to run, and tell Docker to fire it up with `docker compose up -d’. And the neat part is that most self-hosted projects will already have an “example” compose file that is easily tweaked to fit your own use case.

There is also a project called “Dockge” (not a typo) that really helps to streamline that whole process with a simple web UI. Made by the same dude who created Uptime Kuma. I run Dockge on everything that runs Docker, including my laptop and gaming PC. They can all be linked together.

Setting up shared network directories in a somewhat polished user interface seems more achievable for me without causing a bottle neck.

For this, I use NFS mounts. OMV makes it pretty easy. Those mounts are then mapped to the appropriate containers inside of my compose.yaml files.

But I had issues when I rebooted VMs / containers with usb pass throughout which took to long to recover. A dedicated NAS would mitigate that issue but would be more costly.

I always advocate for a dedicated NAS, because you can reboot VMs and containers on a separate hypervisor (even the hypervisor itself) willy-nilly without affecting the actual files.

At the moment, I am looking at a terramaster d5 DAS to give my file server a trial…

Looks nice, but I wouldn’t recommend a hardware RAID. If the hardware dies, your data is fucked. With software RAID like mdadm, you can move the array between machines with zero issues as long as the new machine has mdadm installed. It recognizes the array immediately. Really handy.

What hardware is your current PC running? Are you intending to replace the aforementioned Thinkpad with this PC? Or are they one and the same?

Something to remember is that “NAS” is just an acronym for Network-Attached Storage, i.e. a fileserver. That’s it. It is not specific to any particular software or hardware, so long as whatever you implement functions as a fileserver. But unfortunately, like most things, that acronym has been co-opted by many companies as a catch-all marketing term for their proprietary “home server that does all the things” systems.

That’s fair.

And I do use the SD slot, with a dozen GB of MP3. Anything fancier does not make much sense in a car.

I guess my American is showing here, but, do you not want a better stereo in what is arguably one of your most expensive purchases? Your Skoda is just a VW Polo under the skin, and lots of aftermarket headunits are available. I’ve replaced the headunit in most of my vehicles over the years. Worth it every time, plus it’s one of the easier ways to modernize an older vehicle (even my 2008 Toyota Sienna got a new headunit).

Carefully

Why do you want to ditch KeePass? I use it with Syncthing between at least six different devices without an issue.

The other maintainer, nel0x (who does the Play Store releases), has started distributing a degoogled version of their own. nel0x is arguably more trustworthy.

Could you tell me more about the non standard implementation? Coz I just use composerize to convert docker run commands to compose (or if I find compose files then hooray!) and pop those into portainer. Seems to work fine.

Portainer is generally fine, but if you decide to migrate away from it, you will basically need to rebuild your whole compose stack setup.

I don’t like that a lot of features seem to be hidden behind a costly subscription, but thems the brakes.

Yeah, that was a big reason I moved away from it myself. They used to be way more flexible, but started really clamping down on free users a few years ago.

As for proxmox… is it lighter weight than Debian?

Proxmox uses Debian as its base OS, and since Proxmox is built to run full VMs, it isn’t really comparable to running Docker containers on bare metal. You can run multiple Docker stacks inside a VM (including Portainer) - I do this with several VMs. But running a full VM inside a hypervisor on top of already-stressed hardware is probably a tall ask. So in your case, I would stick to Debian with Docker on bare metal.

The other thing I’m curious about - are you running a desktop environment on this machine? Or is it running headless? A DE will take up a lot of resources that the N5095 is already short on, and that CPU isn’t exactly a great contender for streaming, either… It tends to fall on it’s face if running much more than a single stream - including other services.

Portainer is just a docker container that manages other Docker containers. IMO, it’s going down the enshittification hole. They chose to use a non-standard implementation of compose files, so you’re stuck using Portainer unless you reconfigure your whole setup.

Proxmox, by contrast, is a hypervisor meant to run VMs and LXCs. The Proxmox devs have explicitly stated that nothing else should be running outside of it.

Home Assistant.

If you want smart devices but not the data collection that goes with it, then Home Assistant is your friend. Just be forewarned that it is a seriously deep rabbit hole.

My only gripe is that there isn’t a good Android app to go with it. I’d like to receive notifications on my phone, too.

Home Assistant can do notifications for Frigate that are very similar to Ring’s notifications.

This is the kind of attitude that drives people away from open source.

Yes, people should read the manual, but at some point they will have questions, and there are a lot of projects that aren’t clear on certain things. Such as YAML changes.

Oh fuck off, dipshits. You chose this route despite the community that built you.