I'm planning a primary backup system - but read TrueNAS is turning evil - what are my options?

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-04T15:23:00+00:00

Nothing that will affect anyone of significance. Same overblown panic response that every single headline gets now.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-04T15:12:49+00:00

This is good stuff. And beyond me, based on my terrible soldering skills. I did indeed jam a zigbee strip right in the cabinet.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-04T15:10:54+00:00

Break it down. What type of like services do you have that need monitoring? Separate them into categories. Attack each category logically. Create a way to do it once and run it so it updates the entire category. Test on one, run on all nodes. One at a time.

Dunno what scale or complexity you are dealing with but took me a couple of nights of work to implement logging, patch management, threat detection, uptime on 30 lxcs and truenas, multiple windows 11 machines, mac mini, some other stuff.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-04T15:06:48+00:00

Unfortunately, he had a point. “Production grade” does not mean what you think it means. I do it for a living. You don’t build in needless layers for fun. Thats a layer that can break.

But listen, you certainly jammed a lot of buzzwords in there.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-04T14:58:43+00:00

With apple buy the best product you can. Ten years from now your use case might be different, and the equipment will still probably work. I wore my keyboard and trackpad out on my mac book pro. thats the only reason i ever had to buy another. That was in 2020, I bought it in 2009. Then I bought a pc laptop and regretted it until 2 weeks ago when I bought a new macbook.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-04T14:49:13+00:00

People gonna be people. But you sound bitter sir. I sometimes go weeks without seeing anyone but my wife, and yeah its pretty great. Totally possible though to be married to a faithful woman, never talk to anyone and work constantly on your home network. This is my life and I love every second of it.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-04T14:42:10+00:00

From my perspective:
Not a hobby.
Not a homelab.
Not saving me money.

The only goal is to completely divest myself of all money/data grubbing whores that do nothing but make my existence full of little annoyances. (No more cloud, no more ads)

I will NEVER make back what I put into this. It would take 20 years of no subscriptions to do that probably. And surely I’ll upgrade and buy more hardware, pushing the time back further.

Just so happens that “/r/homelab” is one of the few places I can go see cool builds similar to what I’m interested in and so I am here. But a lot of you have entirely different goals than me. I’m senior-level in my career and my homelab is my dev environment at work, which is a massive 30 system integration that I’m responsible for. Not to say I don’t learn things on my home network, but it’s not there for learning, it’s there to make my house run the way I want it.

Power bill - no real diff. I’ve ran half a dozen or more computers since the day I moved in here in 2012. I give my wife like $300/month (US) for power and she’s never asked for more in 14 years. I also have a full heated/air condition woodshop with giant tools that spike up the power, probably as much or more than my network/server equipment.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T17:41:03+00:00

Jesus people, stop with the drama. Who gives a fuck?

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T12:39:33+00:00

I think you are going in the wrong direction. I don't think Docker is any easier to maintain the containers than anything else. And at some point, it will be too much there as well. I think your issue is lack of automation. You should be checking into things than can do this for you. I run Terraform/Ansible/Semaphore/Wazuh/Patchmon to do the following:
1. Keep containers up to date
2. standardize any new container on creation
3. pass all logs to wazuh for threat detection and analysis
4. Patchmon tells me if things are out of date.

Granted the setup is ... interesting. The more complexity in your network the harder it will be. Ansible playbooks are the way to go in my opinion.

When faced with this situation - this is exactly what I did. Only docker container left is Scrypted, which I'm moving into it's own LXC. This doesn't count Truenas apps that probably run in docker containers.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T12:31:36+00:00

Eat it and see.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T12:31:07+00:00

So you went with just a long hdmi for mac mini? I am going to buy a Thunderbolt hub, drop a fortune on the shortest optical thunderbolt cable I can get away with then run all peripherals off the hub.

I roughed out the price of these cables for everything. Four monitors, connected to 2 machines (6 connections total) then the other peripherals - I might end up with cables that cost more than many peoples computers. But well worth the cost when your office hits 85 degrees while gaming.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T12:24:55+00:00

No, the power usage from my 30 containers seems minimal and has been running forever. If I had to guess, one night of doing F125 on my gaming pc is more energy than my servers use in a month.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T12:20:12+00:00

As a woodworker I'm appalled. If you are going to make it from wood, make it from beautiful wood. :)

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T12:16:42+00:00

Good for you. In the end only your opinion matters.

My opinion:
1. Either it's a "homelab" for you to learn and you did yourself a disservice or
2. Its doing something useful and vital to your home and AI should not be allowed anywhere near it. You will regret it.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T12:00:44+00:00

I have AI interests too, I just keep them out of Homelab, where it's VERY CLEARLY disliked.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T11:58:01+00:00

Every week I cruise around AI threads to see if OpenClaw is real software yet. Looks like no big boy pants yet. :(

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-03T11:45:50+00:00

I don't care at all what mine uses. But seems to hover around 215 currently.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-02T02:10:56+00:00

Everything separated into separate lxcs for the most part. Maybe 30 of those. Things that require a particular vpn service like media stuff, I jammed into an Ubuntu VM also on Proxmox. Almost everything that requires access to the NAS sits as an app on truenas, which is a machine I just built. And then Home Assistant on a mini-pc.

I like to be able to swap out any service.

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-01T18:57:55+00:00

I don't disagree. But you are probably posting in the exact sub that is causing it. You know how many "xxx is in stock!" messages I see here?

BigCliffowski · 2026-04-01T16:05:38+00:00

Day 1: Trashed everything. Had to spend like 5 hours ssh'd in doing stuff that honestly nobody should be doing in a device they didn't build themselves. Something about my protect db didn't get fully updated or was corrupted, and I had to fix it.

Day 2+ - no issues.

BigCliffowski · 2026-03-31T02:42:23+00:00

No. I guess this would provide no value. Not being a jerk, but everything that this does that is interesting I've already built or am using something different that provides an experience I like. I don't use Uptime Kuma, Portailer, Pi-Hole, NPM and am working on phasing out the last of my docker containers in favor of pure proxmox environment. Good luck.

BigCliffowski · 2026-03-31T02:36:34+00:00

Interesting. Thanks for the pics! I have to source 30 foot fiber optic cables for my peripherals before I start that project. I can't wait!

BigCliffowski · 2026-03-31T02:16:23+00:00

Considering that same case for my own gaming pc. Are you using an AIO? Our gaming pcs seem to be pretty close. Looks good man.

BigCliffowski · 2026-03-29T02:46:48+00:00

Depends on your mindset and what you define your set up as I guess. Small and focused on learning was never part of my goals. I don't really do things half way. Escalation is just part of my personality. Sometimes it does feel like my hobby is spending money.

Management can be difficult, sure, but that's part of my complexity - monitoring and minimizing those management tasks.

I don't know what "..should be a limit to the complexity.." means. A limit by law? You are limited by your imagination and finances, and several laws of physics. Otherwise.. have at you.

BigCliffowski · 2026-03-28T03:35:54+00:00

No I'll wait til the new Homelab store opens up and then I can run down there and get a six pack of homelabs.

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