You can try seeing if you can set the speed/duplex of NIC/ports manually if auto-detection keeps getting it wrong.

Unifi I like the APs for mesh & multiple SSID+vlans but I keep them on dedicated vlan with zero internet access because I don’t trust that I properly followed instructions to disable opted in analytics/telemetry. The mgmt software is alright but new UI wastes a lot of space. The PoE switch was alright until it stopped being able to keep a config last year. USG router I kept less than a year because it was too slow with any useful features enabled. I’ve glanced around at replacement APs here & there but pretty much waiting until I have more wifi 7 compatible devices and that’ll be another couple years.

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I’d recommend using distro you know best and/or most prefer to work with. I use the flatpak install of Jellyfin Media Player but there are also deb files available.

I’m currently using minipc with Intel n5105 (or something similar) for 1080p HTPC. Debian 12 OS with auto-login & Jellyfin Media Player starting at login. I control it with pepper jobs RF remote but also have a logitech wireless keyboard+touchpad for it. Keyboard+touchpad come in handy when browsing media sites on firefox but some might restrict quality. Some of the newer minipc’s I tried required adding backports repo to install newer kernel for wifi to work. I had been playing with Debian a lot when I set up first one & been using clonezilla to image them so it’s stuck.

Ordered a gmtek n97 minipc to play with and should have it in about a week. Going to test it out with 4k but it’s not a deal breaker for me if it cannot handle that well enough.

Yep, asking for something I’m sure a lot of us would love to have, a ready to go TV remote control style usage, but rather than having discussions about why those options aren’t viable just downvoting.

Create a backup image from the working SD card. Write that backup image to a spare SD card and verify it works. Then try to do ‘apt update’ and see if anything breaks. If it breaks you got a spare SD card ready to go :)

I had issues with DNS checks and traced it to my pihole. I changed that container’s resolv.conf to use cloudflare DNS and it has been working fine since. It was with Caddy so needed to change over to use IPs.

Another thing to remember is the client needs to support decoding the video in hardware or have enough CPU to handle it in software. I have intel i7 (3rd gen) with no hardware HEVC/x265 support but it has enough CPU to power through.

My info may be outdated as I last had G Fiber about a year ago but have moved out of their service area so stuck with AT&T fiber along with their horrible modem+router :(

When I first got the 2G down/1G up G Fiber service there was no bridge mode & had to use their provided device as modem+router+wifi. They updated it to add in a bridge mode option but I never tested it. I had dropped back down to 1G down & up before that option was available.

edit: forgot to mention I had read some people had luck using Unifi Dream Machine to plug in G Fiber’s 2.5G SFP looking module but I wasn’t willing to spend any more money on anything Unifi besides WiFi APs.

My last NAS & ESXi box were 12 years old when I retired them. I had thought about sticking with used enterprise gear but wanted a break to be a little lazy for a couple years. Storage is on Synology (DS1520+) and Proxmox runs on Asus PN63-S1 mini PC. Hyper Backup was primary reason I chose Synology (always been lazy about off-site backups) and docker feature has come in handy for things like secondary pihole & DNS. LXC with docker or podman have been able to cover majority of my needs in proxmox but still have Home Assistant & Unifi Network Controller on their own VMs. Home Assistant I have zero plans to move. Unifi I eventually plan to move over to docker but it works for now, albeit on an older version. Really need to up my documentation & diagram game, it’s all a huge mess, lol.

Future plans would love to have closet full of used enterprise servers running proxmox with all flash ceph storage backend then can do whatever NAS distro I want as a VM. My budget is focused elsewhere for next year or two unfortunately so gonna be awhile unless something breaks.

Always like to hear about other setups as I am constantly re-thinking my own.

I have public wildcard DNS entry (*.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com) on Cloudflare on my primary domain that resolves to 192.168.10.120 (my Caddy host)

Caddyfile

{
  email EMAILREMOVED@gmail.com
  acme_dns cloudflare TOKENGOESHERE
}

portal.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com {
  reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8081
}

speedtest.REMOVEDDOMAIN.com {
  reverse_proxy 192.168.10.125:8181
}

You can self-host ACME server which lets you use certbot to do automatic renewals even for private, internal only certs. I don’t know if it would work with NPM. I plan to test that out at some point in the future but my current setup works & I’m not ready to break it for a maybe yet :P

I use Caddy with the Cloudflare DNS plugin for Let’s Encrypt DNS based challenges, should work for wildcard too but only have a couple subdomains so never tried to do that. My DNS entries are public but point at private IP ranges, e.g. nc.PRIVATEDOMAIN.COM resolves to 192.168.1.20 where Caddy sends the traffic to my Nextcloud docker

Yeah, Proxmox has a built in backup utility. I use it for nightly backup of all VMs and LXCs to cifs share on my NAS.

Free and centrally managed, not aware of any but definitely interested in something like that too.

My current setup has Proxmox backing up all LXC and VMs to Synology NAS then the Synology NAS backing up to Backblaze. Both run nightly. Using the built-in backup utility on Proxmox VE pointed at CIFS share on the Synology NAS.

Synology does have a software backup client available but I have never used it. For my desktops & laptops, they are easily reinstalled+reconfigured, I just make sure the data I care about is stored or synchronized to my NAS or the cloud. Nextcloud for files, Firefox sync for history+bookmarks, bitwarden client+vaultwarden for passwords, chezmoi for some dotfiles on some linux systems.

They changed quite a few things between DSM 6 & 7 and unfortunately one of them broke easy use of those USB sticks. I didn’t want to mess with the internal config of the Synology NAS too much so used the VM approach with the HA image and mapped the USB stick to it.

I hope you like it :)

Software config optimizations help a little bit but my biggest improvement was moving the DB to SSD. Spinning disks are great for capacity but not for DB performance. Random I/O is a big factor for them and those drives drop in performance so fast for that type of I/O due to physically spinning media.

I started out using Owncloud and later switched to Nextcloud once that fork was stable. For all my uses it has always needed beefy hardware to run well but I definitely have way more junk files in synced folders than I should & rarely clean things up.

That varies depending on the computer/motherboard manufacturer and model. The manual may reference that feature but if not can go into BIOS/UEFI setup menu then browse through looking to see if there is any option to enable it. Also I’ve only used it with built-in NICs so not sure if it’s an option with add-on NIC.

IMO, management interfaces like iDRAC are very nice extra to have when using enterprise servers for homelab.

The base iDRAC allows you to control power state, monitor & configure hardware, and view hardware system event log. The remote console and media features cost extra as part of the Enterprise iDRAC. Remote console lets you access server just like if you were physically in front of it. Remote media lets you mount images over the network to the server and boot from bootable ones too.

It has in band and out of band connectivity methods but I only have experience with out of band.

VMs in ESXi have the same behavior when iSCSI connection is lost then restored later. Windows with iSCSI drive mounts shows the same behavior in that scenario too.

UPS would be a great addition no matter what option you choose.