I like data, I like tech, I like investing large amounts of time and energy to self-host things that muggles would not bother with.

I mean, yes, I could. But I’m committed to the #selfhosted life where I spend hours building unnecessarily complicated systems to make my life easier in small ways.

I’m starting to think my commitment to the Apple ecosystem and my desire for self-hosting are at odds.

The process for this is to obtain an EPS32 with bluetooth and wifi, pair it to the scale with bluetooth then keep it powered on in range of the scale, then the data goes into HA?

I have the opposite experience of this. All of my local services are a single docker container inside an LXC. I don’t like that it’s conceptually messy, but in practice it’s easy to manage. What I love about it is the simplicity of backing up or moving the entire LXC between servers.

I’ve not had any drama with things breaking across Proxmox updates. The only non-gui thing I need to do during the process is adding two lines to the LXC conf to have Tailscale work correctly.

It’s mind-bogglingly convenient, especially compared to the before times. Consider donating to them if you can.

No one’s mentioned Forgejo yet? Solid git and artifact repository.

There’s lots of ways to skin this particular cat. My current approach is low powered Synology (j series?) for mass storage, then 1 litre PC’s running proxmox for my compute power using their NVME for storage, all backed up to the Synology.

Two good points here OP. Type docker image ls to see all the images you currently have locally - you’ll possibly be surprised how many. All the ones tagged <none> are old versions.

If you’re already using github, it includes an package repository you could push retagged images to, or for more self-hosty, a local instance of Forgejo would be a good option.

Build anything small into a container on your laptop, push it to DockerHub or the Github package registry then host it on fly.io for free.

Great write up, thanks. For video learners, Wolfgang does a good step-by-step on YouTube

Guide to Self Hosting LLMs with Ollama.

• Download and run Ollama
• Open a terminal, type ollama run llama3.2

Love the effort you’ve put into this question. You’ve clearly done some quality research and thinking.

When I asked myself this same question a couple of years ago, I ended up just buying a second hand Synology NAS to use alongside my mini-pc. That would meet your criteria, and avoids the (I’m not sure what magnitude) reliability risk of using disks connected over USB. It’s more proprietary than I’d like, but it’s battle tested and reliable for me.

+1 for Syncthing. I run it on a server at home, then on my MacBook over Tailscale. For web access I run FileBrowser (also over Tailscale) against the same directory.

I run two local physical servers, one production and one dev (and a third prod2 kept in case of a prod1 failure), and two remote production/backup servers all running Proxmox, and two VPSs. Most apps are dockerised inside LXC containers (on Proxmox) or just docker on Ubuntu (VPSs). Each of the three locations runs a Synology NAS in addition to the server.

Backups run automatically, and I manually run apt updates on everything each weekend with a single ansible playbook. Every host runs a little golang program that exposes the memory and disk use percent as a JSON endpoint, and I use two instances of Uptime Kuma (one local, and one on fly.io) to monitor all of those with keywords.

So -

• weekly: 10 minutes to run the update playbook, and I usually ssh into the VPS’s, have a look at the Fail2Ban stats and reboot them if needed. I also look at each of the Proxmox GUIs to check the backs have been working as expected.
• Monthly: stop the local prod machine and switch to the prod2 machine (from backups) for a few days. Probably 30 minutes each way, most of it waiting for backups.
• From time to time (if I hear of a security update), but generally every three months: Look through my container versions and see if I want to update them. They’re on docker compose so the steps are just backup the LXC, docker down, pull, up - probs 5 minutes per container.
• Yearly: consider if I need to do operating systems - eg to Proxmox 8, or a new Debian or Ubuntu LTS
• Yearly: visit the remotes and have a proper check/clean up/updates

My ‘good reason’ is just that it’s super convenient - for backups and painlessly moving apps around between nodes with all their data.

I would run plain LXCs if people nicely packaged up their web apps as LXC templates and made them available on LXCHub for me to run with lxc compose up, but they generally don’t.

I guess another alternate future would be if Proxmox added docker container supervision to their web interface, but you’re still not going to have the self-contained neat snapshot system that includes the data.

In theory you should be able to convert an OCI container layer by layer into an LXC, so I bet there’s projects out there that attempt this.

No answer, but just to say I run most of my services with this setup - Docker in a Debian LXC under Proxmox, and don’t have this issue. The containers are ‘privileged’, and I have ‘nesting’ ticked on, but apart from that all defaults.

There are a heap of general “Linux Administration” courses which will patch a lot of holes in the knowledge of almost all self-taught self hosters. I’d been using Linux for a while but didn’t know you could tab to complete file names in commands till I learned it on Udemy ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I routinely run my homelab services as a single Docker inside an LXC - they are quicker, and it makes backups and moving them around trivial. However, while you’re learning, a VM (with something conventional like Debian or Ubuntu) is probably advised - it’s a more common experience so you’ll get more helpful advice when you ask a question like this.

how to access the NAS and HA separately from the outside knowing that my access provider does not offer a static IP and that access to each VM must be differentiated from Proxmox.

Tailscale, it will take about 5 minutes to set up and cost nothing.