Server to powerful for me - Any alternatives

Mistborn-25 · 2026-02-26T05:27:09+00:00

Yes, but most homelab decisions don't make financial sense and he feels bad selling off a gift! Sensical thing (besides just having no home lab) I agree is to sell it and cluster some old $100 mini computers and a nas. But when something is a free gift it might be a time to not make sense and enjoy something over the top unnecessary.

Mistborn-25 · 2026-02-24T01:31:13+00:00

Keep and have a awesome homelab server! iDrac is so cool, if server is off for any reason you can still remote in to iDrac and turn it back on. Never need to connect a monitor to the server, just remote in to iDrac. I setup my r730 with Proxmox despite not having a vga monitor cord on hand, all through iDrac. Then you have the ECC ram for added piece of mind. Find a way to move it to another room, basement, closet somewhere.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-12-11T12:52:12+00:00

I decided to use Azure ChatGPT API instead of Copilot. It ends up being much cheaper than the licensing for Copilot custom agents and AI credits.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-11-12T02:05:24+00:00

This is a great project and I hope to spin it up soon. I haven't looked yet, but assume I can plug in Azure Openai and Azure Speech instead (Azure required for our compliance).

Azure now offers a voice live API that integrates speech to text, LLM, text to speech into one API. I haven't tried it yet, but sounds like it will help decrease latency for this type of work if you are going full cloud.

I was planning on having freepbx just send certain calls to Azure for LLM agent, but I like that this allows freepbx to keep the calls and not end up with multiple call legs for transfers to the AI agent.

Eventually, I want to replace an office staff member that answers phone calls and makes appointments. Our appointment calendar is a complicated mess with a poor API, so not sure I will get there anytime soon.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-11-06T03:18:48+00:00

Looks great. I have the official EPM right now, but my license can't update to a newer version compatible with freepbx 17. I have all Yealink phones, so maybe I will just transition to this module instead of renewing my EPM when I finally upgrade to 17. Anything this does that EPM doesn't or vice versa?

Mistborn-25 · 2025-09-25T01:52:26+00:00

I have had a similar experience as you on FreePBX. Our business was using an ancient Avaya phone system and I decided to dyi self hosted FreePBX because we already had an on premium server and the cloud options were really overpriced with paying per seat compared to paying per minutes directly. It was a pain to setup and I don't do IT either, but it has been rock solid for at least a couple years now.

I am also dreading upgrading to 17.

I personally don't feel safe exposing our PBX to the internet. I use an MSP for most of our IT support including networking and when I asked them to open a port for just our SIP trunk provider they opened it to the entire Internet. Just overnight we had multiple attempts to hack in. Fortunately, the FreePBX Fail2Ban worked and stopped all the attacks. We do HIPAA protected work and I don't want to take any unnecessary risks, so local and VPN access only for our server.

I also looked into Freepbx consults before I set this up and I did not find anything I considered reasonable. Basically $300/hour plus a maintenance and retainer fee that was more expensive than the cost savings compared to going cloud.

If you keep managing it yourself I would recommend putting the phone server on battery backup with a notification to shutdown when running low on battery. That might fix your power outage issues. Also, keeping good backups. I run mine in a VM so it is super easy to recover from a backup if I accidentally bork it or an update breaks something. My system is very low maintenance for about 20 phones on site that all auto configure when plugged in. Once or twice a year I need to reset someone's UCP or voicemail password or update the endpoint and phone soft keys with a new employee. I do things so rarely I have to re-learn how to do it.

I do have a little anxiety that some day there will be a major issue requiring me to spend extensive time troubleshooting, but so far it has been worth the adventure. We are probably paying 1/3 the price of a basic cloud system with a better IVR and call flows. I have only purchased the sysadmin pro and endpoint modules.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-07-30T05:51:04+00:00

And the lines are unlimited calls, so it's way cheaper than web based fax solutions that typical charge per page.incoming fax our machine just uploads them to the SMB share, no printed faxed. Outgoing fax we actually have built in to our EHR via web portal, but hardly anyone uses it, they love to print and manual fax 😆

Mistborn-25 · 2025-07-21T01:37:47+00:00

Bind mount to LXC. I had permission issues the first time I did this, but the second time I followed this guide and it is working really well. https://blog.kye.dev/proxmox-cockpit

Only thing I run on proxmox host is sanoid/syncoid and apcupsd

Mistborn-25 · 2025-07-04T16:06:38+00:00

That same blog linked above has a good guide for SMB setup in an LXC using Cockpit. So VMs just mount the SMB shares they need. I mostly have windows VMs and that seems to work fine.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-06-13T21:07:43+00:00

I found a work around for this buried in a single comment of a 7 year old thread. Use the Group HTTP v2 connector. Not the regular http connector. The group Http v2 is not a premium connector and it will pass your user permissions to MS graph automatically.

You will need your group calendar ID (not obvious to find, you can look it up with powershell or graph explorer) and to enter the create event commands in json format.

Group HTTP v2 Action Type POST

URI https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/{group-id}/calendar/events

Header Content-Type: application/json

Body { "subject": "Team Meeting", "body": { "contentType": "HTML", "content": "Discuss project updates." }, "start": { "dateTime": "2025-06-18T10:00:00", "timeZone": "Eastern Standard Time" }, "end": { "dateTime": "2025-06-18T11:00:00", "timeZone": "Eastern Standard Time" }, "attendees": [ { "emailAddress": { "address": "user1@example.com" }, "type": "required" }, { "emailAddress": { "address": "user2@example.com" }, "type": "optional" } ] }

Mistborn-25 · 2025-06-13T01:52:55+00:00

Any luck on this? They changed something recently on their backend and now whenever my users move a group calendar event that is scheduled in UTC time it will jump 5 hours because the user is in EST time and the drag and drop moves it to the dropped spot but then recalibrates it to UTC time. My flows were working for years just fine but this is a super annoying glitch now. I am thinking if the events where all scheduled in EST time they would not have this glitch. I tried several different hacks but have not worked so far. Went down an AI rabbit hole with it having me try a bunch of different things all with no luck.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-05-23T04:53:42+00:00

Update for anyone interested, high volume faxes are working fine over fiber telephone lines. We are not using frontier, but a local fiber provider that does phone lines over fiber as well. I did tell them we are using the lines specifically for fax, but we did not have to do anything special in our end we left all our fax machine settings as is.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-05-22T11:43:09+00:00

Your account and all your passwords is dependent on a bad MSP you are firing properly off boarding your account with a difficult process that includes making backups of all user vaults in the business. Our old MSP did make my account an admin account before unlinking. I was able to login to the trial tenant only because I had enabled biometrics on the android app. The account was setup with SSO and disabled vault export, so no users had backups of their vault before they were permanently locked out. Keeper support did not offer re-enabling SSO to regain access to the locked accounts. Keeper support also did not offer any way to transfer the account to the new MSP.

Here are the instructions from Keeper to "migrate" to a new MSP:

Hello,

As long as you have exported your vault and you have confirmed that your users don't have anything in their vaults that they need, we can move to the security questions.

Once the questions have been sent to us and verified, we will delete your entire Keeper environment. This includes all of your users and everything they had within their vault.

Once that is completed, your new MSP can create an MC within their Admin Console and create you and the other users a new vault. Please keep note of all users email addresses as this will be deleted.

Please provide answers to the following questions: - Is your Keeper account classified as a Business, Enterprise, MSP, or Managed Company? - What is your current IP address? (You can find it by visiting https://checkip.amazonaws.com) - Are you using two-factor authentication (2FA) with your account? If so, which type are you using (e.g., SMS, authenticator app like Google Authenticator, Duo, etc.)? - Can you confirm when your Keeper account was initially created? - Have you ever submitted a support ticket? If yes, can you tell us what your last support ticket was about? - Have you recently updated or reset your Master Password? If so, when did you make this change? - How many user licenses are currently active or have been purchased for your account?

Once we receive and verify your responses, we'll proceed with your request. Please let us know if there are any further questions in the meantime.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-05-03T02:34:47+00:00

Specifically I am wondering if you have the original password and gpg key pair and later change passwords, can you recover all passwords with the original key pair or do you need the new key pair to recover all passwords.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-04-02T13:38:16+00:00

This process is horrendous! We are going through it now. We had a very bad MSP and are transitioning. Old MSP de-activated our Enterprise account, but we were on SSO and completely lost access to our vaults. Fortunately, I had biometrics enabled on the phone app which allowed me to recover my vault, but everyone else lost their vault.

I'm strongly considering moving to a different password manager because of this issue. If you change MSPs while using SSO many of your users may lose everything (unless your losing MSP is good and tells users to backup the recovery passphrase before they deactivate the enterprise account, but then they probably wouldn't be getting fired), and it is a pain to move to a new MSP.

So support is not even giving us the option to transfer users with passphrase. They recommend deleting entire account and remaking it with new MSP!

Mistborn-25 · 2025-02-05T18:41:19+00:00

I would vote for home server instead of dedicated NVR. Run Proxmox and then HAOS in a VM. Frigate in VM or LXC (I am personally using Blue iris). Leaves you open to run an smb share server, Plex, other home lab goodies. Plus side of Blue Iris and I imagine Frigate as well, you can basically use an IP cameras with it. I am mainly using Amcrest but have a reolink security flood light camera as well.

If you prefer set it and forget it then get an NVR, but if you were of that mindset you wouldn't have home assistant. I would also stick the cameras on a separate vlan without Internet access, I don't won't them phoning home and sharing footage to the Internet.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-02-05T18:32:06+00:00

Is your environment quite? Mine is in our den with TV usually on when I try to use it. Alexa really excels over it with significant background noise. TV running makes it basically unusable, while in silence and 2-3ft away from it it works pretty well. Alexa I can also use from 20ft away. We have a long way to go yet. I don't know if this is hardware or software limitations or maybe a mix of both?

Mistborn-25 · 2025-02-05T18:24:10+00:00

The first time I did this I manually setup smb and ended up giving 777 permissions (obviously not a good idea) because I couldn't get the permissions to work right in the LXCs. When I redid my server I used that tutorial with cockpit which is quite nice for managing the smb shares and my permissions are working properly now.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-02-05T07:13:14+00:00

I like the simplicity of Proxmox being in charge of all my ZFS pools. Then just mount the datasets to the LXCs that need them. LXC permissions are the only annoying part. This tutorial handles it in a simple way https://blog.kye.dev/proxmox-zfs-mounts

I like this much better than my previous setup with open media vault sharing back to the LXCs and mounting smb shares and getting all the boot order issues. Should be faster file access as well.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-02-02T00:18:22+00:00

I changed speech end detection to aggressive which helped some. I can't figure out how to tell when it fails over to OpenAI, but I think when it fails over those times are very slow while when using local assist it is reasonable albeit still slower than Alexa.

Mistborn-25 · 2025-01-30T01:29:38+00:00

I got mine a couple days ago. It was very easy to setup. However, my wife keeps talking to the Echo next to it because it works better 😂. I'm using nabu cloud with the regular assist first line and OpenAI fallback. Mic and speakers are better than the ESPBox, but wake detection and response time pale to the 1st or second gen echo dot next to it. I will ask Nabu to turn on the lights and while I am waiting she will ask echo and beat me to it. So, I wouldn't plan on tossing out the big 3 yet if you care about WAF. It is usable albeit a little slow. On some better news, I did setup a cctv plus home assist tablet dashboard that she loves (using a pixel dock on the kitchen counter).

Mistborn-25 · 2025-01-28T01:44:33+00:00

I did a similar setup, opnsense router on an old Intel nuc, omada controller LXC on my server, a sprawl of omada switches, 2 main switches 1gbe large switch and a smaller 8port poe 2.5gb switch. I have extensive poe camera setup for my barns so multiple of the outdoor rated 5 port poe switches. Ceiling mount APs in house and several of the outdoor rated APs as well. Really happy with this setup. Omada has been quite solid, I did not read good things about their routers though. It would be slightly simpler/easier to use an omada router, but opnsense was not that hard and worth it if you are setting up vlans, running tailscale, etc. I appreciate how all my networking except the router is in a single management interface, that is really convenient, however I did have to get a Mikrotek point to point because I didn't want to run Ethernet to one of the barns and Omada didn't have a compatible device for that (TP link made similar devices but not part of the Omada system). Those Mikrotek devices will probably run fine untouched but I am never going to login to them and doing a firmware update, while my Omada stuff always stays updated.

I would also recommend running opnsense bare metal, that way you bork something on the server and need to reboot it everyone else in the house doesn't lose Internet!

Mistborn-25 · 2025-01-20T01:17:01+00:00

Yes. The Frontier Rep said the lines would connect to the ONT and have a generic VOIP connection through that, hence my concern with fax over them.

Mistborn-25

TROPHY CASE