Since calendar is an app, but fundamental email service isn’t, one thing that I found is that apps can interact in ways that are completely unintuitive.

For example, I activated the ncdownloader app, and it caused mail to stop showing emails, or I activated nextcloud music and it stopped nextcloud news from updating.

You should check your logs, because usually when there’s a problem it will show up in there. The logs I’m referring to are in your administrator panel. It will be completely unintuitive as to what exactly is going on. The other thing that you can do is just pay attention to which apps you’ve installed, and if there are any that are a little bit unusual, just try to disabling them and seeing if calendar mail works after that.

I personally used 7digital to rebuild my music collection. They sell good licensed mp3s.

I have absolutely nothing negative to say about them. The prices were decent, the files are boring DRM free MP3s, and they had a really good selection of music.

Honestly it looks almost exactly the same as when I used it for the first time like 15 years ago.

I moved to Proxmox a while back and it was a big upgrade for my setup.

I do not use VMs for most of my services. Instead, I run LXC containers. They are lighter and perfect for individual services. To set one up, you need to download a template for an operating system. You can do this right from the Proxmox web interface. Go to the storage that supports LXC templates and click the Download Templates button in the top right corner. Pick something like Debian or Ubuntu. Once the template is downloaded, you can create a new container using it.

The difference between VMs and LXC containers is important. A VM emulates an entire computer, including its own virtual hardware and kernel. This gives you full isolation and lets you run completely different operating systems such as Windows or BSD, but it comes with a heavier resource load. An LXC container just isolates a Linux environment while running on the host system’s kernel. This makes containers much faster and more efficient, but they can only run Linux. Each container can also have its own IP address and act like a separate machine on your network.

I tend to keep all my services in lxc containers, and I run one VM which I use for a jump box I can hop into if need be. It’s a pain getting x11 working in a container, so the VM makes more sense.

Before you start creating containers, you will probably need to create a storage pool. I named mine AIDS because I am an edgelord, but you can use a sensible name like pool0 or data.

Make sure you check the Start at boot option for any container or VM you want to come online automatically after a reboot or power outage. If you forget this step, your services will stay offline until you manually start them.

Expanding your storage with an external SSD works well for smaller setups. Longer term, you may want to use a NAS with fast network access. That lets you store your drive images centrally and, if you ever run multiple Proxmox servers, configure hot standby so one server can take over if another fails.

I do not use hot standby myself. My approach is to keep files stored locally, then back them up to my NAS. The NAS in turn performs routine backups to an external drive. This gives me three copies of all my important files, which is a solid backup strategy.

I set up everything I use “bare metal” or at least in an lxc container I directly build and maintain, but most people don’t. Makes a lot of sense, to be honest. A lot of prepackaged software uses databases and nobody has to care exactly what it’s up to.

I was about to do the same, had the USB stick prepared and everything, then I tried proxmox. Just lucked out.

I moved to proxmox earlier this year and it quickly became a huge deal for me.

One nice thing is that I can easily create lxc containers for each service that has exactly what that service needs. Each service lives in a container that acts a lot like bare metal.

A second nice thing is it’s really easy to administer everything remotely. All your machines end up accessible through the proxmox interface, and you can hop into virtual machines or lxc containers via the web.

A third thing is you can easily handle hot standby and backups through an easy UI.

Totally changed the game for me.

I had to do it for my atom d2550s because of the odd hybrid x86/x86-64 systems they are. I had to install what ended up being linux mint debian edition 5 because that was the best way to get an OS on the odd bootloader system for various reasons, then upgraded to 6 to get to the latest debian, then I installed proxmox and removed all the debian stuff.

What do I do with something as weak as a pair of D2550s? Don’t you worry about that. I’ve found uses for both. :P

It’s an unusual use case, but it’s one reason you might need to install debian before proxmox.

I have to admit, it’s something I’d like to see done a bit better (not that I’d be the one posting about it typically)

“Crocoslut version 12 released!”

Uh… great?

Though sometimes you go to the website and it’s not much better.

Yes.

I use nextcloud and I love it.

You want to follow the 3-2-1 strategy: 3 copies of your data on at least 2 different forms of media, and 1 backup being off-line.

Speedrunning destroying your platform.

Nextcloud with a 3-2-1 backup strategy is ace. Proxmox can auto-backup, it’s slick.

I started on Plex and even considered a lifetime Plex pass, but I felt like it was more interested in showing their content than my content. It was a lot of effort just to show music and movies.

My family and I use jellyfin every day now, and a key thing is it starts off boring but it shows your music, your movies, your books, your photos.

For folks who migrate who were paying, consider a donation to projects you make heavy use of. They don’t usually have big companies behind them and can use the help.

I think Apache has an enterprise resource planning software, but it’s exactly as complex as you’d expect enterprise erp

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I’ve got a similar problem at home, and I use a really straightforward solution: since the problem manifests on my pcs, I just add my services to the hosts file. It’s particularly good when I’m working on my next cloud, because sometimes you end up with a lot of data moving back and forth, and you don’t really want to hit your router to hit the outside world to hit your internal server when you don’t need it. I just sent it to resolve my main services to the internal IP address, and the best part is that even when the internet is down and DNS isn’t available, my services keep on humming away. I might not even realize.

The n280 is specifically limited since it’s 32-bit, but low powered machines can be useful regardless. Two of the servers in my empire of dirt are atom d2550s, and I’m even able to run proxmox on them (since that model is 64-bit), but in terms of bare metal, they were able to run Matrix conduit, ejabbered, a nostr relay, and for a while my searx and yacy instances. (Though as I recall the cpus lack of instructions eventually stopped me from running searx on that hardware) I think I was even able to run invidious.

If it’s just for you, it would surprise you how much you can do with a very small amount of CPU power.

Another thing that a machine like that might be useful for is a jump box. You can just put a very light distribution on it, and make it accessible to the outside world and one way or the other (secured of course) so you can hop into it if you need to do any remote administration.

The one thing that I found when I was using stuff that was particularly low powered is drive latency matters a lot. If you are using an SSD for storage, even much faster processors end up spending a lot of time sitting there waiting for the spinning hard drive to get to where it needs to be so you can be a lot more efficient with less CPU power.

Runs on hardware that isn’t a supercomputer.

I’m using what it’s forked from, conduit, and I’ve hosted my matrix homeserver on an Intel atom D2550 that’s also doing like 3 other things. When I tried the same with synapse or dendrite, opening a big chat room took a few days.

I use Chromecast with android TV, it’s about perfect with jellyfin, and if I were to domit again I’d probably spend the little extra for the 4k model even though my TV is 1080p (more horsepower). You can run a different homescreen to somewhat degoogle it.

Probably not what you’re looking for given what you’ve lined up here, but I live and breathe with it every day and it’s great, and as an added benefit you can cast from a lot of services or websites as well.

Have you donated to your favorite foss projects this week?