Glad to hear I’m not crazy with different distros haha. I wanted to be able to have different “enviroments” to keep familiar with release schedules, package managers, and just the flow of the distro. I’ve been using nothing but Debian/Ubuntu in my homelab for ~10 years now, at work we use RHEL, and for my desktops I’m on Arch. I’ll have to look into pinning.

I’ve never heard of Nomad(love the name) so I’ll definitely add it to my list of things to research. Looking at their site it looks solid, but want to weigh my options once I’ve loomed at everything.

And thanks for your comment! I’ve been doing this a long time and nothing “tickles” my brain more than something in my homelab breaking and I have to figure out how to fix it and then prevent it going forward.

Thanks! I had no idea about this, wish it was a little more robust but I’ll definitely be sharing this app with others!

Well I found good alternatives(Fossify stuff) or most apps I use already have GitHub releases. I just need to try these apps out and if I dont like them then find other alternatives. Like map apps, calendar, voice recorder, etc. Again I found alts, just not sure how they’ll actually function until using them.

My biggest one is the Steam app for their authenticator. I read some stuff online that Aegis supposedly can work as a Steam auth, but yeah.

I’m about to make the switch myself. I have a Pixel tablet and a P9 Pro. I swapped my tablet over just so I can test things out. I want to deGoogle completely. No play store.

So far I’ve had to make a list of all my apps I have on my phone and go one-by-one seeing if there’s an apk for it somewhere outside of play store, and if not, then if there’s an alternative app, and then website or PWA it is.

I’ve come to realize I have a lot of unnecessary bullshit on my phone to begin with. Think I’ll make the switch this weekend, just need to find a few more alternatives to specific apps.

Read the article, just a bunch of morons who have zero self control.

Isaacs specifically pointed to the 1990s as a time with “a lack of phones, more personal experience, but also still some of the ease of modern technology.”

Just this alone shows they have no idea what the 90s were like.

“Waaah my phone does too much, I just want an iPod!”

Delete social media, download Spotify and boom, your phone is an iPod again. Or turn off all notifications on your phone and buy one of those iPod clones.

“Gen Z” acting like the world was better before social media but they have no idea how to function without social media. If they went in the theoretical time machine back to the 90s they’d have a mental breakdown trying to find their way to the local McDonald’s.

So prohibition 2.0? How’d that work out again?

Just had a conversation at work about using Linux full time. Coworkers asking me what issues I have and what games I can play.

I mean it’s not all sunshine and rainbows…but I told them my Start Menu opens every time I need it. I don’t have explorer.exe randomly crashing. I can search in my Start Menu for things and they actually come up properly. Oh and with btrfs snapshots I can update whenever and if it breaks I just rollback and wait for a fix. Which has happened…once in the last 5 months of using Cachy+Plasma.

I feel like I can actually use my computer now. With Windows I dreaded doing updates. With Linux I update whenever I want and it doesn’t fucking bother me at all.

Honestly if you worked with any government entity at any level you’d see how flawed, inefficient, and broken the system is.

Government contracts out everything to the lowest builder. Yeah we get “more” for our money, which in turns fucks us in the long term as our infrastructure is compromised in different ways, and once it’s truly tested you’ll see the cracks form and the eventual collapse.

What does this mean for the US military going forward? Idk, but it gives me the same vibes we were seeing with Russia back in 2022, all of us expecting a steam roll and huge military force and it turned out to be a gigantic flop.

This has been the biggest and dumbest take I’ve seen come from the GenZ/GenA crowd. Polaroids were a big hit a few years ago and I can’t help but wince at this stuff. Yeah it’s cute or whatever to hold it in your hand, but in 1, 5, 10, 30 years…when that photo or DVD is bent/scratched/lost, you’ll be kicking yourself in the ass for even bothering with it.

Just pirate your content, take photos with your $1000 phones and print the photos out, and learn to backup your own shit. Buy a 2 bay NAS and backup your shit to it. And then backup your NAS to a cloud like backblaze.

My dad has been doing this since the early 2000s. We have our family photos AND videos from 1990-2026 all backed up on a NAS, which syncs to backblaze. ~600GBs of data. And the cloud backup on backblaze is $7.25 a month for that data.

Literally anyone can go buy a a $200 2-bay NAS, then grab two 1TB hard drives for $40 each. $280 for a NAS that will last you YEARS. And then figure out whatever service you want to backup to for a cloud backup.

I ended up just pushing everything behind my tailnet and only leave my game server ports open(which are non-standard ports).

You can check out MediaStack: https://github.com/geekau/mediastack

Here is their “full vpn” compose file here(all of *arr goes through vpn): https://github.com/geekau/mediastack/blob/master/full-download-vpn/docker-compose.yaml

And their “mini vpn” compose(only torrenting goes through vpn): https://github.com/geekau/mediastack/blob/master/mini-download-vpn/docker-compose.yaml

Probably something there will give you the right push towards fixing your setup? Best of luck! I am actually going to be attempting this soon(gluetun+qbit), but with ProtonVPN.

Install Tailscale on all devices.

Then ssh into whatever you need.

If you need desktop remote access the Windows RDP should work for Windows to Windows machines.

For Linux host to Windows client I’ve had good experiences with Remmina Desktop.

Since others were posting end of life style docs, here is another: https://www.erikdewey.com/bigbook.htm

I would appreciate some type of custom attributes, but the notes section works fine as-is, so definitely not a huge “need” IMO.

I have used Monica/other CRMs in the past, but they all felt a bit too corporate or “sales” driven like you said in your OP.

I spun up a quick docker instance in my test environment and I’m using it right now, it’s been quite solid! I do have some confusion with how relationships get applied(from/to in regards to child/parent), but I believe I just need to use it a bit more to get used to the “flow” of how it is supposed to work.

My biggest want/need is being able to select multiple people at once to add to another person, so I guess a “bulk” edit or multi-select. Like adding 10 “child” to one “parent” at once if all of the children have already been created. Or if some logic can be applied where if one parent(dad) has three children, then you add a spouse(mom) to dad, then nametag can auto-add or offer to bulk edit the three children to add the new spouse(mom) as a parent too? Just quicker/better/fluid workflow.

Again, the site as-is is already solid. Just some fine-tuning IMO.

This looks great. I’m running a Teable instance, but sometimes it feels like it is “too much” sometimes.

I think I’ll deploy this for fun to check out. I don’t see anything specific here for things like gift ideas or favorite flowers/colors? Like custom tags/categories/attributes.

I’m using Teable to track things like that, but I love the visualization here, reminds me of my obsidian mind map lol.

I’m as much of a nerd as the next guy, but hanging out with my HOA president? Probably the second to last thing I would ever want to do on this planet, and the last being living in a HOA.

No one is going to be interested in…whatever you’re trying to setup. Sorry buddy

I don’t have any books in particular to recommend, but with homelab’ing we should be learning about the command line of our OS(Powershell, terminal(bash, zsh)).

Learning the ins and outs of something like bash, cron, environment variables, for loops, systemd services(managing, creating your own), command line networking…all things I’ve had to learn to either setup, manage, and/or troubleshoot my homelab.

So maybe basic Linux command line books? Probably O’Reilly has some along with bash.

This is pretty much my setup as well. Proxmox on bare metal, then everything I do are in Ubuntu LXC containers, which have docker installed inside each of them running whatever docker stack.

I just installed Portainer and got the standalone agents installed on each LXC container, so it’s helped massively with managing each docker setup.

Of course you can do whatever base image you want for the LXC container, I just prefer Ubuntu for my homelab.

I do need to setup a golden image though to make stand-ups easier…one thing at a time though!

I run proxmox for my own homelab and another instance for very small services inside my LAN.

Anyway, I have gotten into docker recently and my method so far has been to spin up a LXC container of just a base OS(like Ubuntu or Alpine or whatever) and then install docker and whatever else inside that container and then run my service.

So I have one container per service. Now my problem is how to manage the docker side without having to go into each container individually. I have tried portainer but it’s not clicking with me.

I’ve actually been trying to find a solution to just have docker on a bare metal OS install and that be my hypervisor, but I can’t get a clear answer on anything, so Proxmox seems to be my only option.

Proxmox is a very solid option, but it is not “less intensive” than Debian since it is built on top of Debian. Proxmox does not install a desktop environment(it has a web GUI), so that may help with keeping resources low, but it isn’t some magical solution.

I would recommend trying it 100%, there is a little bit of a learning curve getting to know Proxmox, but it’s the best hypervisor I’ve used for homelab so far.

Your situation sounds like a two server solution for local. So one server for hypervisor/vms and then snapshots and backups go to a separate box like a NAS. As for “house burning down”, a solution for that is off-site backups. I’m guessing building a small TrueNAS server and installing it at a friend’s house or your parents or whatever and then find a backup solution to sync(syncthing may be an answer here for you?).

I don’t care about my homelab much, but I do care about my family photos. For that I follow my own 3-2-1 where:

3 copies of my data

2 copies are local

1 copy is off-site

I have a NAS at my house and another NAS at my parents house. They are both linked with syncthing and I do a one-way backup to the other NAS. Now, my parents are a 10 minutes away by car, so I consider that NAS “local”.

And then I backup my NAS to backblaze for my off-site backup.