Mine are mostly IT stuff

• ansible playbook for updating my VMs
• nightly scheduled pipelines for CI/CD to deploy pihole and nginx-proxy-manager
• UniFi devices auto-updating to newest software and firmware
• night light / blue light filter automatically switches on and off on my PC
• all VMs automatically back themselves up to a backupserver
• backupserver syncs itself with offsite-backupserver

They have had their fair share of (sometimes easily avoidable) fuck-ups.

Stuff like:

• letting their websites SSL certificate expire (multiple times)
• telling users to set the date in their OS back to when the cert was still valid as a workaround
• accidentally DDoS’ing the AUR (I think multiple times too?)
• IIRC also some internal struggle about how to use the money donated to them

Especially the SSL cert hurts. They cannot auto-renew their websites SSL cert (and didn’t seem to learn from their first mistake) and they want to maintain a linux distro?

Kinda same when working in IT.

If everything works as expected, people ask “why do I even pay you?”

If somethings wrong, people also ask “why do I even pay you?”

I especially love

Because you finally understood that visibility is not about the work.

Translation: Nobody cares how well your work is done. Being there and looking busy is way more important than the actual benefits you bring to your employer.

I gotta ask some questions:

• does everything work the way it would on SteamOS?
• what about drivers?
• did you test gaming performance?

I was just visiting a friend of mine last sunday with my SteamDeck and we played Unrailed! the whole day :D

The SteamDeck is THE perfect, portable fun-games-machine to just take with you. And every sale there’s another few local-splitscreen-multiplayer games on sale, my library is scared already.

If you did not live through the time of “going to your friends to play games”, this is your ticket to a past you sadly never got to experience.

Oh, that looks really good. I guess I’ll add that to my Phone-Wallpaper-Collection, thank you very much :)

I did not run OPNSense, but I have a direct comparison for pfSense as VM on Proxmox VE vs pfSense on a ~400€ official pfSense physical appliance.

I do not feel any internet-speed or LAN-speed differences in the 2 setups, I did not measure it though. The change VM -> physical appliance was not planned.

Running a VM-firewall just got tiring fast, as I realized that Proxmox VE needs a lot more reboot-updates than pfsense does. And every time you reboot your pfSense-VM-Hypervisor, your internet’s gone for a short time. Yes, you’re not forced to reboot. I like to do it anyway, if it’s been advised by the people creating the software I use.

Though I gotta say, the pfSense webinterface is actually really snappy and fast when running on an x86 VM. Now that I have a Netgate 2100 physical pfSense appliance, the webinterface takes a looooong time to respond in comparison.

I guess the most important thing is to test it for yourself and to always keep an easy migration-path open, like exporting firewall-settings to a file so you can migrate easily, if the need arises.

[EDIT] - Like others, I also would advice heavily against using the the same hypervisor for your firewall and other VMs. Bare-Metal is the most “uncomplicated” in terms of extra workload just to have your firewall up and running, but if you want to virtualize your firewall, put that VM on its own hypervisor.

Sadly, it seems I cannot replace the disks one-by-one. At least not if I don’t upgrade the SSD size to greater than 4TB at the same time.

The consumer 4TB SSDs yield 3,64 TiB, whereas the datacenter 4TB SSDs seem to yield 3,49 TiB. As far as I know, one cannot replace a zfs raid z1 drive with a smaller one. I’ll have to watch the current consumer SSDs closely and be prepared for when I’ll have to switch them.

I’m not all too sure about buying used IT / stuff in general from ebay, but I’ll have a look, thanks!

Thank you very much for your input, I’ll definitely have to go with business drives whenever the current ones die.

Thankfully, I do have monitoring for SMART data and drive health, so I’ll be warned before something bad happens.

Thank you very much for your input. I’ll definitely have to go for the business models whenever the current ones die.

I knew I would make some mistake and learn something new, with this being my first real server-PC (instead of mini-pc or raspberry pi) and RAID. I just wished it wasn’t that pricey of a mistake :(

Yeah, I guess I should’ve put like +50% more money into it and gotten some Enterprise SSDs instead. Well, what’s done is done now.

I’ll try replacing the disks with enterprise SSDs when they die, which will probably happen fast, seeing as the wearout is already at 1% after 1 month of low usage.

What do you think about Samsung OEM Datacenter SSD PM893 3,84 TB?

Thanks for taking the time to answer!

So I just looked it up: According to Proxmox VE “disks” interface, my SATA SSD drives have 1% wearout after ~1 month of low usage. That seems pretty horrible.

I guess I’m going to wait until they die and buy enterprise SSDs as a replacement.

I’m definitely not going to use HDDs, as the server is in my living room and I’m not going to tolerate constant HDD sounds.

[EDIT] I don’t even have a cluster, it’s just a single Proxmox VE on a single server using ZFS and it’s still writing itself to death.

[EDIT2] What do you think about Samsung OEM Datacenter SSD PM893 3,84 TB?

Thanks for your input!

If you don’t want to have any freedom until you have it all, you’ll be slave forever.

You’re letting perfect get in the way of good enough.

I don’t know about tailscale, but it seems pihole has got you covered with local DNS, if you’re willing to set the local DNS records manually.

I use pihole as selfhosted DNS server for all my servers and clients. I don’t have many local DNS records (only 2), so if you handle a great amount of ever-changing DNS records, this might not be for you.

To me it seems like:

• you want to do a lot of stuff yourself on arch
• but there’s quite some complicated stuff to learn and try

I’d try Proxmox VE and, if you’re also searching for a Backup Server, Proxmox Backup Server.

I recommend these because:

• Proxmox VE is a Hypervisor, you can just spin up Arch Linux VMs for every task you need
• Proxmox VE, as well as Proxmox BS are open source
• you can buy a license for “stable updates” (you get the same updates, but delayed, to fix problems before they get to you)
• includes snapshots, re-rolls, full-backups, a firewall (which you can turn on or off for every VM), …

I personally run a Proxmox VE + Proxmox BS setup in 3 companies + my own homelab.

It’s not magic, Proxmox VE is literally Debian 13 + qemu + kvm with a nice webui. So you know the tech is proven, it’s just now you also get an easy to use interface instead of virsh console commands or virt-manager.

I personally like a stable infrastructure to test and run my important and experimental tuff upon. That’s why I’m going with this instead of managing even the hypervisor myself with Arch.

Thank you very much. I sent this to my coworker who expressed interest in switching to vim :)

It seems nobody really tested 11 to 13, or maybe any kind of major-version-skipping and you won’t find direct experiences here.

Your best bet is to follow the official procedure, so 11 -> 12 -> 13. I’ll leave you with the official upgrade guide for 11 to 12 and 12 to 13.

It seems longer than it is, as not every step is actually required for every system. When upgrading VMs, a snapshot pre-upgrade can also help you skip backup-steps in the guides.

Sadly, that did not solve my problems either.

There’s still no voice output except for the first sentence of all of the navigation apps and when I test the voice navigation with osmand development plugin.

GLaDOS voice is working though, just not when navigating. So, when you actually need it.

Uh yeah, GLaDOS voice! I’ll try SherpaTTS tomorrow.

I’ll report back tomorrow, thank you very much!