I would make an FAQ. I think for getting tone it is important to know what things are hard facts, what things are more subjective preferences, and what’s things are “we had to make a choice between options with no clear ‘best’ option”.

I would be inclined to think that if you are just renting a machine or VM and all the configuration/maintenance is your problem it would be close enough. But I am not a mod and don’t want to be.

I have a Pfsense router and run HAproxy on it. Most of the services I have run on 3 VMs in a Docker Swarm. HAproxy can point to all three and just uses the first to respond. I think this is what you are going for. I haven’t tested how robust this solution is because my primary motivation was wanting to play with Docker Swarm once I accepted K8s was not worth the effort.

I am no expert, so grains of salt and such. But my assumption is that it’s a marketing expense. They get a lot of people familiar with cloud flare services and some of them later need a professional level solution. So people use what they are already familiar with. This is the same reason why tech companies provide hardware/software to schools for cheap/free.

It will be controlled by Truenas not Proxmox. Truenas can add swap space to each drive automatically: https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/truenas/11.3-U2.2/storage.html

But you probably already have existing drives so that doesn’t help. This might though: https://wiki.debian.org/Swap

But be aware that Truenas is design to be an appliance and doesn’t really want you tinkering under the hood. So you may have to manually add the SWAP after each boot of TN.

I would guess the best long term fix would be moving services out of the TN VM and into a different VM.

I have TN Scale VM hosted in Proxmox. The only “issue” I have is the webgui gets pushed to SWAP if not used for more than a week. So when I connect it it literally takes a couple minutes while is gets shuffled back into RAM. Once it’s “warmed up” it’s fine. But my Scale VM is doing these things: manage ZFS pools, control NFS/Samba shares, replicate pool snapshots to off-site backup server. It intentionally have it do nothing else. All other services are in different VMs or LXC containers in Proxmox.

Does your Scale install have any SWAP space setup? That should prevent out of memory issues. Potential performance issues would be better than crashing.

If you can setup the raid card to just pass drives through to the OS, then it’s fine. Also used SAS drives are usually cheaper because there are less people trying to buy them. These guys have a good reputation, so I would trust buying used from them: https://serverpartdeals.com/

Just setup your ZFS pool with redundancy so if a drive fails you aren’t hosed.

I can understand the potential problems of trying to define “low-effort post”. In contrast can guidelines be given for a “quality post”. If no guidance on either end is given it may discourage some people from posting anything. Maybe people can contribute what they see as indications of a “quality post”.

I don’t see how it would push manufacturers to do that. I can see how it would make consumers more open to soldered RAM if RAM is so expensive there is no way you are going to upgrade it later. But, I would be interested to get your thoughts as I miss stuff that feels obvious I’m hindsight all the time.

Just link them the story of a Dad getting locked out of his Google account after sending a picture of his child to the Doctor as part of remote care.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked

The point being they can fuck up your life on a whim and don’t care about the harm they will cause because your one out of millions.

This is an area where AI can be helpful. Tell the AI what Linux distro your on and what you want to do. Most of the time it will give you pretty good answer. If you don’t understand what it is telling you to do, ask it to explain the thing in detail. Most important thing though is to always verify what it tells you before you run stuff. Google search specific commands or use the “man” command to get documentation. The key thing is the AI can make you aware of CLI commands and tools more easily then trying to find what you need on your own.

I think you are making it more complicated than needed. If you just want reliable service, just figure out who has the most reliable Internet and power and they can host the server. If you want to learn kubernets or docker swarm, you can try that but it will take a ton of upfront work.

Edit: Also get a UPS for the server.

Be aware if you have the iGPU as the only video output device and passthrough to a VM it will no longer show what the host system is doing. This would be referred to as a headless server. I would suggest making sure you can SSH into the host before doing that. LearnLinuxTV has guides for how to do that with best security practices.

Docker works differently, so it may not be an issue with that.

Truenas uses KVM for virtual machines. So that will allow GPU passthrough, but may require command line and config files to do it. For docker this seems relevant: https://forums.truenas.com/t/electric-eel-nvidia-gpu-passthrough-support/11797

When you read files from the ZFS filesystem it will automatically keep the files in RAM. This is called the ARC and it is why people frequently recommend having a lot of RAM with ZFS. The ARC is very effective, automatic, and has no risk because it only caches reads. A cache drive is a secondary ARC generally using a fast SSD. The problem is that it generally only helps performance when you are reading lots of small files multiple times. This is because ZFS does so well reading large files from HDD that it doesn’t make much of a difference.

In short: If you already have the drive and want to play with the feature, go for it. But if your going to spend money on the drive, you will probably be better served spending it on more RAM.

I assume the cache drive is for your ZFS pool. You probably don’t need that.

What about GiB?

Intel iGPU are very good for transcoding.

Other people have already talked about why you are having performance issues with the Pi. As for a better NAS solution you will probably be better off with a used desktop PC from the last 10 years. If the computer doesn’t have enough SATA ports you can get a sata addon card or HBA (host buss adapter) addon card flashed in IT mode. You should be able to find a lot of options on eBay. Maybe people can chime in with specific models to look at.

I have had good luck with self hosted Headscale server and Tailscale clients on Pfsense routers creating a mesh network. But I am trusting other people’s networks. So Tailscale clients on each computer and the NAS would be lower risk.