I'm curious as to which tools and technologies you all are using to keep track of all those services you are deploying, whether it be resource tracking, network traffic, logs, traces, or uptime.

As a bonus question, how have you organized your network or your services to reduce the overhead of implementing observability?

Fine, fine. You asked for it, here it is. I hope you're happy :)

I had to use GPT for the documentation and final spit-and-polish, because I had absolutely no intention of releasing this thing, let alone documenting it for wider consumption.

Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)

Furthermore, here is the actual tale of the tape:

• Design - HUMAN
• Implementation - HUMAN
• Testing - BONE-FUCKING-CRUSHINGLY HUMAN
• Documentation - GENERATED
• Review - PAIR

A couple of notes:

• Remote access: outside the home, the nature of the beast means you need something like Tailscale to get back into your home lab. That’s a quirk I deliberately kept for the sake of simplicity, as the browser needs HTTPS for things like GPS/geolocation. The private Tailscale HTTPS path solves both problems neatly without me having to do shit.

• Portability: I didn’t build this for you; I built it for me. That said, I detangled the original home-lab-specific mess enough that you should be able to deploy it elsewhere.

The repo separates the application from the regional data bundle, and the documentation covers installation, other regions, routing, Wikipedia/Kiwix, Tailscale, updating and the various caveats.

In other words: it is now usable by other people (and immediately usable if you happen to live where I do), but you'll need to do the work. Additionally, that should not be mistaken for me volunteering to become your unpaid support department :)

"Fork it, fix it or fuck it" - dealers choice :)

For a growing number of reasons, as with most people here, I am more desirous of self-hosted solutions to replace proprietary ones, yet, as with many others, I am not in a position to fully self-host with a server at home. Any comments on kinda-self-host, where you rent a server from a third party and do all the same shenanigans on it? Specifically, I'm thinking of data storage and streaming.

Please share any information resources if you can.

This post is an update of the second part of my Moto server series: https://lemmy.zip/post/72142441

Rumor has it that keeping an 8-year-old phone permanently plugged in with its equally ancient Li-ion battery might not be the greatest idea ever conceived.

Some even claimed that a phone needs a battery to work.

Very negative people.

Anyway, I removed it.

Pettyl did not care.

nginx: UP PHP-FPM: UP MariaDB: UP WordPress: UP cloudflared: UP sshd: UP

The battery is currently sitting next to the phone, contributing absolutely nothing to the project.

Pettyl is now running entirely from USB power, at around 37°C, while continuing to serve the website like this is completely normal.

There is, however, one tiny detail the haters may enjoy:

It can’t boot without the battery.

So the official Pettyl disaster recovery procedure is now:

1. Insert battery
2. Boot Pettyl
3. Connect USB power
4. Remove battery
5. Pretend this is enterprise infrastructure

The battery is no longer a battery.

It is the starter motor.

I see no problems with this architecture.

Anyway, Part 3 is going great.

I'm thinking about buying a Raspberry Pi to start my self-hosted journey. I have three usecases in mind: Navidrome server, Jellyfin server and a Pi-hole network ad-blocking. Can a single machine (like a Raspberry Pi) run these operations simultaneously? Thanks in advance!

I usually connect with my server via ssh in a terminal and run basic commands. What's a better, more efficient and modern way of doing that? Especially considering ai and documentation along the way? I wonder if there's a better approach than "connect from remote and act local". Is there a method to "code local and push to remote"?

I use a fedora server with podman, caddyfile and vi.

Why isn't there one service that combines rss reader and bookmarking?
@selfhosted

We did it boys! Battery is no more: https://lemmy.zip/post/72181546

This post is a follow-up to my original post: https://lemmy.zip/post/71885626

Surprisingly, it wasn’t that tough to set up.

My original plan was to install postmarketOS and turn the phone into a proper tiny Linux server. Unfortunately, my Moto E5 Play is the pettyl variant, while the available postmarketOS port is for james. I decided that turning the phone into a brick probably wasn’t an essential part of the project.

So I went with Termux instead.

It’s now running nginx, PHP, MariaDB, WordPress, SSH and cloudflared directly on the phone. Everything starts automatically on boot, and I even made a tiny WordPress plugin for anonymous Today / Total / Online visitor stats.

And yes, the website is being served by the exact phone in the photo.

1 GB of RAM. Somehow this thing is now a production server.

I named it Pettyl, after the device codename.

You can actually visit it at https://moto.dimitrium.org/.

The website is barebones, I plan to push it to the limits. Also, this project will soon be available on my GitHub page https://github.com/tradicije

Next problem: figuring out how long an old Motorola can tolerate my bullshit.

I stumbled upon a post that tells about a project not by the author, and the project has signs of AI. The post is clearly saying the project is good, so I interpreted it as a promotion, but maybe I am wrong. Should that kind of post still be marked as [AIP] ?

The post is https://lemmy.world/post/52316345

TL;DR of the TL;DR: Private, self hosted, GPS enabled, local search and offline routing map engine in under a gigabyte, on a $55 SBC, accessible anywhere.

Ok...I've been working on this for a while and it is SO satisfying to see it to completion.

I'm calling it "Pi maps" (because the Pi hosts it) but it's really MapLibre GL JS, served locally by nginx. The Western Australia basemap is a single PMTiles archive, clipped from the Protomaps daily build to the WA boundary, zoom levels 0-15. The finished stack is about 300 MB.

300MB!

PMTiles is one of the bits I particularly like. Instead of running a tile server and maintaining millions of little tile files or a tile database, nginx just serves one archive with HTTP Range requests. Then MapLibre asks for the byte ranges it needs.

The map-serving path is:

Browser
  ↓
MapLibre GL JS
  ↓
PMTiles JS
  ↓
nginx HTTP Range requests
  ↓
WA.pmtiles

And the best part is that I needed no PostgreSQL, PostGIS or live calls to Google etc.

But wait...there's more! Search and routing!

Rather than install something heavy, I put together a small search service using Python, from the OSM extract.

The source data is converted into a SQLite FTS5 database and the current index contains about 300,000 source records, for a whopping...78 MB. The runtime search service uses about 11 MB RAM at idle.

Driving routes are calculated locally using BRouter, which runs as its own container and nginx proxies the route API internally to it.

The routing dataset for turned out to be remarkably small - roughly 20 MB, with a single worker and a 128 MB Java heap.

The browser gets route geometry, distance, ETA and turn instructions without calling an external routing service.

TL;DR: The current stack is basically three containers:

• pi-maps - nginx + the MapLibre frontend + PMTiles
• pi-maps-search - Python + SQLite FTS5 local search
• pi-maps-brouter - local driving-route engine

After testing, the individual Maps components were around:

nginx/frontend       ~7.3 MiB
search service       ~11.2 MiB
BRouter              ~168 MiB
--------------------------------
total                ~187 MiB RAM

The complete thing - map, search database, routing data, local web assets, metadata etc ends up at roughly 300 MB (excluding the optional ZIM file).

So - a Raspberry Pi 4 is locally serving a zoomable map, POI/address search and actual driving routes for comfortably under a gigabyte of application data.

What's more, I can use it remotely via Tailscale if I want and/or download the tiles directly to my phone and use it with something like GeoLibre or Atlas.

OSM / Protomaps data
        ↓
   Raspberry Pi
        ↓
 ┌───────────────┐
 │ WA.pmtiles    │ → map
 │ SQLite FTS5   │ → search
 │ BRouter       │ → directions
 └───────────────┘
        ↓
 Browser / phone / apps

It's not yet a Google Maps replacement. Yet. Right now the routing profile is driving-focused; there is no live turn-by-turn rerouting, spoken navigation, traffic data, or giant commercial address database. But...I have ideas and too much free time (actually, I think I can solve the 4 of those 5 pretty simply).

Case in point: there was a cool technical problem in that the the POI polygon centroid can be a valid map location but NOT a valid driving destination. That was fun to solve.

The next thing I'm going to try is adding a wikipedia layer - or rather, a self hosted ZIM wikipedia layer - so that POIs actually resolve to clickable entries.

There. For once, I win.

PS: This was much easier to do that the whole "family chat" bullshit. Never work with children or animals.

PPS: Also, I may have broken the family chat IRC server, or at least, misunderstood how IRC uses connection resets. So..XMPP might win after all, much to my chagrin.

EDIT: As requested - https://aussie.zone/post/36966090

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/45939555

See my post on their forum, which I hope is well received.

Hi y'all looking for advice here

I selfhost a nextcloud server and a NAS for backups, and one of my challenges has been data corruption after power failures.

I went and bought some consumer UPS units about 5 years ago, which helped, but now the batteries are starting to fail, and I'm not protected from power outages until I replace them.

I have the router on UPS as well so the computers can communicate with each other that the power has failed and it is time to gracefully shut down (using NUT).

However the router itself uses quite a bit of power and I am hoping to make a smarter decision this time around when getting a UPS.

The router's power supply is 12V5A with a barrel style jack, so i have been searching for "DC UPS 12V 5A" to try and find something compatible that wastes less energy converting from battery DC to AC for the power supply to then convert back to DC.

But the only thing I've been able to find are these units designed to power electric doors: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VLPRN2/

I'm not sure if this would even be safe to use with a router, and i don't know how i would wire it up to the router either.

I think i just don't have enough knowledge to know how to shop for an appropriate DC UPS, or if such a thing even exists.

Anyone been in a similar situation?

Probably old hat to some...but documentation is important. Just for once...I am trying to keep documentation AHEAD of the inevitable bork that destroys everything... so that in 3 months time I don't have to reconstitute everything out of thin air and swearing.

Anyhow, I came across this lovely little repo a while ago and though "yes, next time, use this"

https://github.com/Zavy86/WikiDocs

And so I am :)

I'll let the author speak to the perks (no affiliation, I just like wikidocs and wanted to share it)

• Open source
• Plain text files
• No database required
• Markdown syntax
• YAML Frontmatter
• Editor full WYSIWYG
• Support for KaTeX math
• Support for Mermaid diagrams
• Unlimited page revisions
• Uploading and downloading attachments
• Uploading images (also from clipboard)
• Content can be categorized in namespaces
• Public and private browsing
• Desktop and remote sync
• Syntax highlighting
• Multiple languages
• Dark mode

While I show off a happy snap

tl;dr: Proxmox or bare metal? Containers yes/no? What is your use case?

I used a Dell R710 when I first started self-hosting, it ran ESXi with one VM for each service I wanted. Restarting the server required me to first shutdown each VM in order and then the whole host. When setting up a new service to host I had to create a new VM (allocate RAM, disk etc), install the OS (I ran Debian) and then follow instructions for how to setup the service. This mostly was not a problem but one software I never managed to get working was Apache Guacamole.

Nowadays I have a Dell Optiplex I salvaged for parts, got a new case and all my HDDs from my R710. Because it has much less RAM and an old Intel i5 (6th or 7th generation), I decided to get into Docker. With Docker containers you write your compose file and it will just work. No more need to dig through documentation for which version of a dependency to use, how to handle if two services on the same host need different versions (this was part of the reason for one VM/service). With Docker, I can try out a software in seconds and have it configured to my liking in minutes.

Today I have NixOS (bare metal) and it comes with Podman which uses systemd. Hence restarting my OS (albeit not that often, almost never unless I mess up my config) is a no-brainer because Podman via systemd will manage everything. Adding, stopping or removing containers in general is easy. I have a script running as a service which will stop a container, create a BTRFS subvolume snapshot, start the service again and start borg backup to backup from the snapshot.

For me using Proxmox would just an extra layer of complexity I don't need. I only have one server and I am the only user.

Questions:

• Do you use Proxmox instead of a bare metal installation?
• Do you use containers or do you install manually?
• What is you use case that requires your setup the way it is?

Good news, a security issue that was blocking the draft for the new DNS-PERSIST-01 challenge mode for TLS certificates has been resolved, meaning the challenge can resume moving forward.

Some background for those who aren't up to date:

• TLS challenges are how self-hosters and many other TLS certificate users prove who they are in order to automate cert renewals.
• The most popular challenge methods are HTTP-01 (which involves having a live web server answering on port 80 somewhere) and DNS-01 (which involves putting a key given by the TLS authority in your DNS zone in a TXT record temporarily).
• All the current challenges are conducted "live" and require active online participation on the part of the domain owner each time a cert is approaching expiration.
• The new DNS-PERSIST-01 challenge would let owners keep a proof in their DNS zone indefinitely (or with self-imposed expirations), eliminating the need for those online sessions.
• DNS-PERSIST-01 was slated to come out in Q2 this year at the latest and all the popular tools (ACME bots, reverse proxies etc.) have been chomping at the bit to implement it.
• Unfortunately there's been a security snag. Trying to do things the way DNS-01 did (record only the server-provided proof in DNS) would open DNS-PERSIST-01 to middleman attacks, because unlike DNS-01 where the proof is only there temporarily for a few seconds or a few minutes at the most, in this case the proof would be long-term.
• Hence issue #64, which has been trying to come up with a way to keep only a partial proof in DNS, and combine it with something issued by the server and something issued by the domain owner to make the whole proof, thus rendering the stuff stored in DNS impossible to use for malicious purposes, yet still sufficient for verifying ownership periodically.

Hopefully now that this hurdle has been passed things will proceed faster and we'll get to use this in the near future.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52289547

Hey Lemmy, longtime open source developer here. After about a year of work on a side-project I dropped the first release candidate of Plume, a self-hosted, Markdown-powered, flat-file publishing platform and I'd love this community's feedback. Read the release announcement or check out the demo and let me know what you think.

What is Plume?

Plume is a publishing (i.e. blogging) platform. It's designed to make writing and publishing frictionless. Your content is just files, plain Markdown in a flat-file structure without a database. You can write locally and upload via SFTP or keep everything in Git and sync automatically. It's Dockerized out of the box for easy set up. Full-text search (powered by YetiSearch) is built in so there's no external service to wire up. Plume also includes details you'd expect like Shiki syntax highlighting, automatic light and dark modes and an auto-generated RSS feed.

The stack

Plume is written in PHP using Slim Framework + PHP-DI, tested with PHPUnit, statically analyzed with PHPStan, styled with PHP-CS-Fixer. The front end utilizes Alpine.js bundled with Vite. The architecture leans on Directory Lister, a project I've maintained for years.

But why?

I primarily developed Plume for my own use. I occasionally like writing short-form on Bluesky (or previously Twitter) but have been growing tired of handing my content to someone else's platform. And long-form writing came with too much friction, killing my motivation before ever actually getting published. With Plume, publishing is as simple as creating a file and writing.

The AI caveat

Most software ships with heavy AI involvement these days. However, Plume was developed in my spare time over the past year, initially without any AI assistance. I've only recently adopted AI, and only sparingly, mainly for debugging, tests and help with documentation. However, every line committed exists because I put it there with intention. I'm not claiming perfection but I know how and why everything works, which matters for the long-term maintenance of the project.

Feedback wanted

Despite being designed for my own use, Plume was intentionally built so it could be shared. So try it, break it and tell me what's missing. Ideas and questions can be posted on GitHub Discussions or Bluesky. For bugs open a GitHub Issue.

Resources

Plume is fully open sourced on GitHub with full documentation is available at docs.plume.pub.

I'll be hanging out in the comments, so ask me anything.

CBH]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/48313374

Promotional

Im not affiliated to Fermi/Harmony chat in any way, im just a user who liked it and want to share my experience of the app i find worthy of sharing

so i wanted to share a promising project that I have been using for a few months.

made this post to promote and share this platform since it needs more people, theres arent many atm and it deserves way more.

Fermi/Harmony Chat is free and open source discord like guild/community centered chat platform with most of the features that are expected from those platforms like message channels, vocal chats, threads, screensharing and more. Importantly the chat platform has a strict stance against LLMs AIs and AI generated slop like vibe coding and other abusive usage of AI that replaces human work and slop it in the process. sadly fermi/harmony is unique of having a strong stance against AI. (other similar projects sadly uses AI and excuses AI usage and vibe coding)

the platform also allows users to create their own client for the platform. harmony chat is the API and fermi is just the currently only working client on the platform (was a spacebar client previously until harmony was created as a spacebar fork with the goal of fixing the many issues and bugs present on spacebar) and in the future, instances are going to be federated and the process will be managed directly by the client (fermi and other clients) without being tidious and for advanced users like on matrix, so more easy and beginner friendly.

the platform also is more lenient on its acceptable policy and have a no bullshit moderation. (sadly not the case for other alternatives which sucks very much)

IMPORTANT

currently the project in its early stage and still has lots of bugs, glitches and various issues.

it is currently only accessible through a web browser (there is no app neither on desktop or on mobile)

lots of features are not finished and the platform still need major improvements. but i hope it is going to grow and become a viable alternative.

currently there are around 800 people are registered on fermi/harmony chat.

fermi.chat the main website currently (use this one to register) melodychat.org the organisation's website (its called melody on codeberg and on the website since harmony was taken)

codeberg link of both harmony and fermi :

https://codeberg.org/MelodyChat/Harmony https://codeberg.org/MelodyChat/Fermi

credit to Mathium5, eliza, devs and contributors for developping and maintaining fermi and harmony chat.

Recently it's come to my attention that Caddy has an AI sponsor so I have been looking at moving away from Caddy.

I'm currently looking for another reverse proxy to use in place of Caddy. For TLS I am looking into using CertBot and it appears there's a module (https://github.com/desec-io/certbot-dns-desec) I can use that works for https://desec.io/ to handle my certs.

I have two questions, the first is about CertBot. Since Caddy is handling my certs automatically, how often would I want to renew my certs? Desec.io has this command to obtain a cert:

certbot certonly \
     --authenticator dns-desec \
     --dns-desec-credentials /etc/letsencrypt/secrets/$DOMAIN.ini \
     -d "$DOMAIN" \
     -d "*.$DOMAIN"

Would I be required to run the same command periodically to renew my cert?

My second question is a bit more open ended. I am looking to hear any suggestions or experiences about different reverse proxies that are preferably free of AI. There is a list here with some suggested alternatives: https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#web-servers

Update is here: https://lemmy.zip/post/72142441

Hey guys, since I got into hosting my own servers, any electronic device I see I wonder - can it become a server?

This is probably not a crazy and new idea with android phones, but I had to share it with you. If you don’t know, there’s this thing called postmarket OS, full linux experience on an android phone.

Of course, not all phones are supported, but a phone like Galaxy Note 9 is a great candidate - it supports LAN over usb, postmarket OS fully supports it (the Exinos version) and setting up a phone as a selfhosted server has it’s real perks. Pis got really expensive, not to mention they don’t have a built-in UPS (phones have batteries), they use slow SD cards, while phones have faster UFS memory, phones draw way less power.

What do you guys think? I will for sure get a used Galaxy Note 9 and explore this idea, and if all goes well, I might even buy more of them and create a cluster.

I just spent the past 2 weekends migrating from Lightroom CC with just under 1TB of photos, mostly RAWs, making up about 50,000 files. I kind of made it up as I went and I spent a lot of time testing and validating. I'm going to do a writeup here to hepefully help ayone else coming acrross this and/or in case someone has ideas.

My Requirements:

1. Move all photos off Lightroom and preserve both RAW files and snapshot renders at high quality. I intend on staying on Lightroom because it's my editor of choice. I've litigated Darktable in comments on Lemmy, and while I love the software and the concept, I use Lightroom for my semi-professional work
2. (The hard part) Metadata. I absolutely need my album organization, my picks, and my star ratings from Lightroom. More on this below
3. All data must move to my self-hosted Immich with a TrueNAS pool behind it. The stack is Proxmox running a Truenas VM and a Debain VM. The Debian VM runs docker where Immich runs. Connectivity is driven by Netbird mesh VPN. That is a limitation for sharing and I'm ok with it.

Getting your pictures out

• Adobe doesn't make this easy just below the surface. There are open source tools intended to help one migrate from Lighroom Classic catalogs to Immich, but CC is very different. The export options are very particular.
  • Adobe lets you export a massive dump of pictures and renders as a real export option. It's through their website and it will email you when a dump is ready. Said dump will contain multiple zip files each with RAWs and renders. NO Metada or structure is included and NO edit data.
• You can "Archive" from Lightroom CC (tested on Mac) and that will output originals + the edit file AND it will preserve the root album from which your photo came. But no metadata beyond that (no ratings, folder structure, picks). The bad part is that this deletes your files once it's done. You can still restore fromTrash but this is definitely a hostile action against users.
• You can just output EVERYTHING. This is for the truly insane as you sit there and wait for Lightroom to render each one of your pictures individually. If you do original + edits, that returns the same thing as Archive but without structure.
• The secret 4th option: you can (as of this writing) parse Lightroom's internal catalog and get Albums, picks, star ratings, and folder structure. This was a massive unlock for me. This file was at ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/

My solution going forward

Because I was discovering this as I went, I tried some version of all of the options above, but going forward, I have a process which should be much easier.

First, I will parse the catalog which is a SQLite db and extract the newest "version" of each picture and the content I care about. I will store it in a CSV for long-term holding.

Once metadata is stored, I'll go and request the archive through the website. That will take a few hours to possibly days (it took me about 2 hours on a Friday night). Once that's done, you get an email and a link to a personalized site. You have to parse the (for me) 50+ links and download them sequentially. It took me a few hours to download 1 TB limited by my local bandwidth (for which I'm eternally grateful). With my TrueNAS storage, I have the luxury of landing the data and uploading it to Immich separately.

For XMPs, the edit data, you have to get that from a local source so either export originals or the desktop app "Archive All" option.

You'll have to decide what you need and maybe you have fewer requirements than me.

Landing the Pictures

The next challenge is grabbing all of that data, pictures and ratings and applyhing them in Immich. Luckily, it has a fantastic API so I can script the whole thing. Most of the mapping happened by picture name and there were a few times where I had to dig into exif to identify a picture. Overall, i think I had 40 or so files out of 50k+ which couldn't be mapped.

Encountered Problems:

• As mentioned before, this was a try-it-until-it-works situation for me. I had to download all of my pictures 2 times by 2 different methods (I didn't document this but there was an SMB share involved).
• Stars are a new object and I had to manually enable it in Immich
• I couldn't replicated nested album functionality in Immich and chose to keep the root album name + a tag of the folder structure. That worked well for me
• Lightroom tags could not be exported. I don't use them a lot but that could be a blocker for some.

Disclaimer

• Every word in this write up was written by me on my keyboard
• I used a self-hosted local AI to do this work.
• I know enough to be in control even at a technical level, but the time savings on this project with AI really made it possible
• The AI found the catalog and parsed the data out of it. It would not have occurred to me.

Future

• I have all of this work on my personal Forgejo and if there's enough interest, I may post publicly, though this write-up should serve as a starting point for anyone who wants to replicate my process

Firstly: Yes, I like Synapse / Cinny / Element too...don't hate me...but needs must when the devil drives...

For reasons that are too complex to get into (TL;DR: hodge podge of equipment from the dawn of time, from intransigent family members, complexity over HTTP vs HTTPS...they usual nonsense when you volunteer to become the family sysadmin) I've been looking at different methods for a persistent, family chat experience that I can "self host".

Does anyone know much about Jami?

https://www.jami.net/

From what I can see, it has the following worthwhile features:

• FOSS/GPL
• Android, Windows, Linux, macOS and iOS.
• Text messaging ,group chats, video calls
• File sharing, E2EE etc etc
• It apparently works over a LAN with no Internet connection at all, which is particularly interesting to me.
• Federation not required.
• CA not required
• Transparent handoff with Tailscale

From what I can see, there's a headless jami-daemon for Linux. Jami's own docs specifically suggest putting an existing account on an always-online server to facilitate message exchange, with multiple servers possible for redundancy.

So...that's...good.

OTOH, there isn't a Synapse-equivalent central Jami server holding everyone's accounts and rooms. Accounts and conversations are distributed across the participating devices, though as I said above, it looks like Jami does support an always-online daemon/device to improve message availability.

I dunno what to make of it. It seems...too good to be true.

Has anyone use it? Particularly, is the always-online jami-daemon actually dependable for store-and-forward behavior in practice?

https://github.com/savoirfairelinux

EDIT: This was an interesting experiment, but Jami is far too unreliable even without UnifiedPush / DHT (which I think is the main issue). I presented the work done so far and the consensus is to look at using IRC (as most of the users are familiar with that) and having Janus as the video chat / WebRTC server. It seems to work on all of their devices and doesn't have any of the cute issues we encountered with Synapse / Matrix

TL;DR the fam has settled on -

• Ergo as IRC server: https://ergo.chat/
• The Lounge as PWA IRC client: https://thelounge.chat/
• Janus for video calls: https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/index.html
• I will host all this on the Pi at my place and they can tailscale in.

I'm tied, boss. Never volunteer.

I’m currently running Proxmox on a single Lenovo ThinkStation P330 Tiny. As my VMs workloads have grown, the 64GB of RAM is consistently sitting near capacity.

To spread the memory load and get proper HA, seamless VMs migration, and easier node maintenance, I’m considering adding two more matching units to build a 3-node cluster.

Planned Per-Node Specs:

. Chassis: Lenovo P330 Tiny . CPU: Intel Core i9-9900T ES . RAM: 64GB DDR4-3200 (running at 2666MHz platform limit) . Boot/Local Storage: 1TB NVMe

Networking: Upgraded to 2.5GbE

Shared Storage:

Synology NAS via iSCSI (SSD cache enabled) over 2.5GbE

Does this setup still offer good value for money, or are there better alternatives in this form factor?

I’d especially appreciate feedback on:

1. 9900T ES stability: Long-term reliability and virtualization quirks under Proxmox.
2. 2.5GbE bandwidth: Is it sufficient for 3 nodes sharing iSCSI, especially during backups or migrations?
3. Synology iSCSI + SSD cache: Practical experience with this as primary VM shared storage across multiple P330 tiny nodes.
4. Any other bottlenecks, hidden traps, or limitations I might be overlooking?

As much as I love Google (not even a little, my love for that company is negative and becoming more negative per second) I would love to run far far away from it. Here's another ball and chain I need to break.

Where can I find a simple parental control access system for my phone and or computer that I allow my kids to use?