unless the data is off site, its not truely a backup

Two is one and one is none. No matter if it’s offsite or on top of your main server. Also 3-2-1 is an industry standard for a reason. Plus unless you test that you can actually restore your backups they don’t really exist (also known as Schrödinger Backups).

i still need to find a way to setup a simple sambashare via a web gui and a good backup solution.

I’m running openmediavault as an VM for file shares and backups with proxmox backup server. Works pretty well. I’ve got a physical backup server in detached garage and another in a VPS which syncs the most important parts to remote location.

I definitely didn’t suspect there to be a whole new standard of wireless communication to that.

There’s multiple. Some devices are on wifi, some on z-wave and as zigbee is getting quite a lot of support from vendors I’ll likely add that to the mix soon-ish. Also I could use bluetooth for some automations, but at least for now I don’t really see any advantages over that.

As for pihole, it’s main DNS server for devices in my network and rest of the family uses the net quite a lot too (IPTV and streaming services included) so any longer downtime would cause at least annoyance for them so it’s nice to have an option to keep things running and take my time to maintain hardware or whatever. I of course could change DHCP server to offer something else too, but it’s simpler and faster to just migrate a VM to another host.

Is there a benefit for splitting your services on 2 hosts?

I don’t know about OPs situation, but I have a mini-PC as proxmox hypervisor too addition to my main server. Mini-PC is located middle-ish of the house as it’s running home assistant with ZWA-2 and the location helps a lot with Z-wave coverage. But added benefit is that I can (within the pretty strict resource limits) move VMs to the mini-pc when doing maintenance on main server. It’s pretty handy to move PiHole and some other small stuff to another host so that everything on network still functions even if one hypervisor is down.

Would spamming low effort comments to fill a quota then fall under the spam bit, not necessarily self promotion bit?

Possibly, but there’s equally gray area that what counts as low effort spamming and what actually contributes to the conversation. For example I’ve replied to comments “I’m using X to do Y” with “I’m using X too and I’m happy with it” to give an opinion to possible solutions. That kind of comments are easy enough to throw out and, if the “10% rule” is interpreted strictly, it isn’t really obvious if they should be considered as “improving your ratio” or as a part of actual conversation.

I disagree that it would be the same than no rule at all, in my opinion that gives a pretty clear position on what’s allowed and what’s not without setting any strict limits so there’s some room for interpretation for community/mods to act.

Maybe rephrasing a bit helps: “This community is not an advertising platform. Self promotion is allowed only from active members of this community. Excessive promotion will result on post removals and/or ban from the community.”

What I’m afraid is that if there’s a strict rule then someone will argue that “only 9,87% of my posts are promotion, I don’t deserve a ban” even the rest of their content has little to no value for the conversation. And, since it’ll be a rule for the community, I personally think it should apply as it’s written, so it should have some kind of option to weed out smartasses trying to game the system in place.

But I’m not likely to promote anything around here, so for me it doesn’t really matter, just trowing out my thoughts about the matter.

I worry a bit that its getting unwieldy, so feel free to suggest options to clean up the language a bit.

I would just keep it simple: “Self promotion for your product is allowed, but this is not an advertising platform. Be sensible and participate to community. Abuse will result in post removal.”

I don’t think it really helps to place any arbitary limit as it might just result on spamming low-effort comments so that your “quota” stays under the 10% rule and also posting about your fantastic FOSS project daily could be equally annoying. That 10% rule could be useful when deciding if something should be removed and obviously free projects should have more relaxed “limits”, but in general what counts as abuse can be decided by community feedback.

Find two more selfhosters and they will criticize both of us!

Absolutely. However I’d argue that some BSD variant is at the other end, not Gentoo, so there’s at least some critics to you ;).

I’m running proxmox and (mostly) Debian on top of that, and I’m sure that there’s someone thinking I’m doing things the wrong way.

With Windows Servers I think the bigger problem is that there’s way less people running things on top of it, so there’s less knowledge about problems and solving them. However, many of us are on corporate IT jobs too and thus have to work with Windows, so that might somewhat cancel out the difference in popularity.

In the grand scheme of things the only thing on my server stack that’s really worth anything is immich. The rest will have very little value to anyone once I’m gone. Plan is to create printed books from the photos and those should stay accessible for the future generations, our archive just needs a ton of work on creating those photos and possibly adding descriptions on who’s on the pictures and when they’re taken.

I don’t really plan for ww3 nor solar flare frying half of the planet, but one thing that’s a real problem is that if something happens to myself. My wife or kids don’t know how to manage/access a majority of the stuff there is even if their everyday digital life is using network and services in it I’ve built. They’ll be just fine without pihole or jellyfin, but data in immich/nextcloud is valuable and bus factor for the digital environment is pretty low.

I should at least verify that all server passwords are on my bitwarden vault and set up dead mans switch on that. Then they can at least get someone to pull the data out of the systems or even hire someone to maintain them. Best option would be if one of the kids would learn the ropes, but so far it doesn’t seem like they’re interested on anything like that.

Obviously there’s a ton in successful email hosting since it’s not just configuring few services. Proper DNS-records and privilege controls are mandatory, you need to occasionally clear up your domain/IP from spamlists (specially at the start) and single mistake can ruin your DNS reputation quite quickly which then takes time to build back.

But it’s still perfectly doable and, when you have proper knowledge on how the whole circus actually runs, not too difficult either. Only problem is that there’s no longer money on just email hosting since cloud hosting offers much more than just emails for the price a small gamer can’t just compete with. At least around here.

I flagree that hosting email servers on residential IPs is a recipe for being filtered and blocked

Unless your ISP gives you a static address and agrees to change PTR record to your server address. Then it’s no different than any other server on the internet. Obviously odds are that you’re not getting one or if it’s an option they’ll likely charge more than VPS is going to cost you, but it’s not unheard of.

But for the actual topic, I don’t get the myth either. I’ve got a good old postfix+dovecot setup running and the only problem I have is that spam filtering isn’t quite as good as with commercial providers, but the handful of trash coming trough is easy enough to take care of manually.

Sounds reasonable approach to me. Also I’d include VPS and other cloud services too. “Is this VPS enough to run NextCloud” is a perfectly reasonable question for this community just like “is my old thinkpad good for…”. I don’t think there should (nor can) be a hard rule about what hardware to use. Questions obviously outside of self hosting (e.g. “what GPU I should by to play minecraft”) should go elsewhere but otherwise I don’t think there’s even a real need to limit activity.

And also there’s a half a dozen of posts here daily (unless mods remove posts really efficiently). My opinion is that even if the post could go to some other community but leans to self-hosting side of things it can stay. Maybe if there was tens or hundreds of posts daily it would make more sense to limit what goes, but as things are now I don’t think any kind of (in a lack of a better word) gatekeeping is beneficial to this community nor anyone else.

Editing original post and including steps which helped would be great. I don’t expect anyone to reply to each an every comment separately, but a summary on what caused the problem and what fixed it would be nice. Specially when someone later finds the post with similar issue.

I would go with separate devices. You can add a button with two set of terminals to trigger both the traditional chime and IOT thingy on the same time. Personally I don’t see the appeal on video/audio with a doorbell, but I’d guess there’s some raspberry pi project around to achieve what you want. SIP just for a single house doorbell at a first glance sounds like a massive overkill, camera with a two-way audio, possibly integrated to home assistant, works equally well without the overhead of running a whole IP telephone system with it.

I’ve used local supplier for years who has spesifically selection for UPS batteries. Even APC ones tend to be pretty standard, just rip the APC stickers off and get the actual battery model number and ask from your local shop for replacement. I got a pair for new-for-me UPS a few weeks ago. Official APC kit would’ve been several hundred euros, the ones I got were ~50 with postage. They might not last quite as long as ‘brand name’ ones and power output is a slightly lower even on spec sheet, but that unit is running at around 15% load anyways, so in my case it doesn’t really matter.

Most likely not. However, proxmox is a bit strict here and there on how it wants drives, networking and other stuff laid out. Also the hypervisor itself is quite strictly only for that. So, if you want to tinker with something without virtualization platform or use your drives for something else than just proxmox-installation it’s likely not officially supported at least and might cause some headache or even bigger problems, like potentially losing data, if you run it in a way it’s not meant to.

However, if you just want a pretty capable hypervisor and run all your stuff on top of that it’s perfectly fine, specially for hobbyists. For bigger enterprises it has some issues and management for a bigger server fleet, at least for now, isn’t as polished as the ‘big players’ have, but, again, for home gamer it’s pretty good solution.

I’m using OVH, not AWS. Their console gives estimation of ~20€/month for the ~2TB I have stored. Versioning is disabled and i’m currently runnign on their signup offer of 200€ credit, so I’m good to go for few weeks more. The storage I’m using includes the traffic, it’s just practically unusable due to verification speeds.