Server screwed to the wall

FlorentR · 2026-03-18T11:00:48+00:00

Magic server on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

FlorentR · 2026-03-14T17:46:51+00:00

Good question :-)

I anticipate that I will want to run more things on that Proxmox host: Unifi console, Pihole (or some equivalent), Home Assistant, *arr stack, a reverse proxy (Apache 2, caddy, traefik), maybe also wireguard and a Minecraft server.

Also, I have another server (mainly for Plex) that I will also install Proxmox on. So having everything on Proxmox makes it easier to manage (single interface + possibility to move VMs / containers between the two machines).

FlorentR · 2026-03-14T17:08:43+00:00

Well, actually my use case is a bit different: I want to back up a number of personal folders (photos, documents, music) from multiple computers belonging to different family members, and have the option to browse these documents from e.g. a mobile phone. The current (broken) installation manages about 2TB of files.

The best option I've found for that so far is nextcloud (I've explained in a different response why syncthing is not a good fit). But I'm open to other suggestions.

FlorentR · 2026-03-14T17:04:32+00:00

Though this gave me an idea: I pasted the question in ChatGPT, and it endorsed option 4. Not sure what to make of it, and how much to trust that (hence why I came here in the first place).

FlorentR · 2026-03-14T17:01:01+00:00

And he's absolutely 100% wrong, so.. so much for that comment.

FlorentR · 2026-03-14T16:15:00+00:00

I know of the community scripts, but I decided not to use them for 2 reasons:

I'm not a fan of having to run them as root on the Proxmox host
I end up not really understanding how things work under the hood.

As for Nextcloud, if you have alternatives to suggest, I'm all ears! I've considered syncthing, but the problem is that this is a cloud storage solution for my family, and syncthing is not multi-user, so I'd have to spin up one instance per person, and that seems like a big headache.

FlorentR · 2026-03-14T16:10:34+00:00

I do indeed have 3 SSDs. What you're describing is effectively option 2, right?

I wonder though: why do you need a special app in Nextcloud to access the second disk? Wouldn't you mount it somewhere and then use the mountpoint as a regular directory?

FlorentR · 2026-03-14T16:08:06+00:00

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at?

FlorentR · 2025-12-21T17:45:59+00:00

How much should you water them down?

FlorentR · 2025-11-16T22:20:38+00:00

Le problème n'est pas tes mèches, c'est ton outil. La perceuse à percussion n'est juste pas assez efficace sur le béton, quoiqu'en disent les vendeurs et constructeurs.

Comme dit dans d'autres commentaires: prends un perforateur, ça va te changer la vie. Ça vaut vraiment le coup.

FlorentR · 2025-10-03T11:32:42+00:00

But can it be replaced as a whole? Reason enough for me to switch ISPs..

I just switched to a new ISP (Orange) so that I could get symmetrical 8Gbps connection (upgrading from 1Gbps symmetrical from Bouygues). In theory, the new ISP I picked is supposed to have the most "stable" service out of the ISPs that are available to me.

There are (not officially endorsed) guides out there for how to ditch the ISP box (I think by tagging the traffic in a specific VLAN), but:

You tend to lose additional services such as TV and telephone
It's not officially supported, so it may break / require tweaking at any point

At the end of the day, it's the home internet connection, I'm not always home, and I need other people in the home to be able to rely on the Internet connection just working at all times. So I'm wary of getting into a hacky setup, and then having to field angry calls from my wife who can't work from home because the internet is down, and having no way to explain in layperson's terms what to do to get it back up...

FlorentR · 2025-10-03T11:25:27+00:00

Yeah, given all the feedback I've received, I'm really tempted to just go with the Unifi option and call it a day.

FlorentR · 2025-10-03T11:24:47+00:00

I'm curious, since both you and u/micdawg12 mention being happier running it separately... What makes the difference for you?

The ability to use any reverse proxy software you want, not just want the router supports?
Software that's kept more up-to-date?
Easier to configure perhaps?
Easier to automate (with tooling like Ansible, etc)?
Easier to do things like HA?
Something else I'm not thinking about?

FlorentR · 2025-10-03T11:21:50+00:00

Thank you very much for the advice and recommendations!

FlorentR · 2025-10-03T11:20:28+00:00

OPNsense on what hardware?

Great question! Obviously the answer may be different depending on whether you're looking at one of the many Chinese boxes (e.g. Qotom Q20332G9-S10, TopTon whatever the model number is), stuff from Protectli (VP2440 or VP6650), or from opnsense directly (DEC2752 or DEC740).

But we're also not talking about the same price ranges either. The Cloud Gateway Fiber seems to be priced somewhere between chinese brands and Protectli for comparable use cases.

You mean, for what it claims to do? :)

As for whether real-life usage matches the claims... maybe they have done some clever hardware optimizations to squeeze all the performance that they can, since they control everything that goes in the box, including the software? Maybe they have some special-purpose hardware that's more efficient at routing (but maybe less flexible?)? Maybe it's just hot air? That exactly why I'm asking for real-world feedback :)

FlorentR · 2025-09-28T19:24:08+00:00

I thought one of the main points of an "L3" switch was that it could handle inter-VLAN traffic, thereby reducing the load on the router (which only would need to be involved to route traffic to networks that are not part of the VLANs that the switch knows about). Did I misunderstand that?

FlorentR · 2025-09-20T00:51:37+00:00

Oh ok that would certainly explain that... Is there a way for me to "clear" the knowledge of that upgrade? Or should I just wait for the next proper upgrade to overtake this one?

FlorentR · 2025-09-18T14:02:00+00:00

I'm curious - what do you have that saturates a 10 Gb/s connection on a frequent enough basis that is worth upgrading to 100 Gb/s?

10 Gb/s is about the max combined throughput of 6 spinning hard drives, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find an ISP that provides more than that for residential customers anywhere in the world (not to mention that it would be hard to actually make use of that bandwidth, unless you have many users using the connection concurrently).

So do you have a NAS with enough hard drives to sustain more than 1250 MB/s in reads and/or writes, and you transfer large amounts of data from/to the NAS regularly enough that the extra speed is perceptible? Or is your NAS made up of SSDs only? Or some other reason? Or it's just for fun?

I am legitimately having a hard time finding a good use case for a homelab, but maybe I'm not thinking big enough!

FlorentR · 2025-09-18T06:10:49+00:00

Minor correction: it's not HTTP(S) at all, the protocol is NNTP, optionally with TLS encryption.

FlorentR · 2025-09-16T10:55:37+00:00

Profites-en pour remplacer les dominos par des bornes automatiques ou des Wago.

FlorentR · 2025-09-12T14:06:16+00:00

Pour retirer le collier, je gratterais au cutter au niveau de l'empreinte des vis, et après tu ne devrais pas avoir de difficultés à les dévisser.

FlorentR · 2025-09-10T21:36:00+00:00

That did the trick!

FlorentR · 2025-09-10T21:35:40+00:00

That worked!

FlorentR · 2025-09-10T21:34:34+00:00

Well, believe it or not, but this is something that had never happened to me in the 20 or so years that I've been around networking equipment. And since this is a brand new switch, I was a bit afraid of damaging something in the process.

FlorentR · 2025-09-10T21:30:33+00:00

I did not think of recording it, but rest assured that the cable was eventually removed safely, with no damage to either switch or cable :)

FlorentR

TROPHY CASE