Comment on My Ultimate Self-hosting Setup
SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 1 day ago
this is great! i was intrigued by nix and nixOS early into my linux venture and this has probably pushed me to start moving my stuff from Debian, though i am kinda addicted to proxmox.
but the way you’re doing truenas is how I’m running my stuff too. way more planning on your end really cleans it all up!
I really do encourage experimenting more with NixOS. It’s the strange combination of feeling safer (because of the rollbacks) and more powerful (because of all the modules and packages already setup by the community)
I also spent a while using Proxmox. Almost went with it over TrueNAS. It was a little bit of a tossup, one is a good VM manager with ZFS support and the other good ZFS manger with VM support. I ended up just liking the interface better for TrueNAS, but both are certainly capable
Rolling back is the best thing to have for server tweaks. I achieve the same with docker. Something similar might be possible with FreeBSD Jails, podman, or anything similar like that. (Not that NixOS is a bad choice, I just wanted to share some more options for anybody looking for some to try.)
You can pry proxmox from my cold dead hands.
I do sometimes dream of running everything in Docker though for how easy it is to update. I’ve got the community scripts running and still it’s a bit of a maintenance job.
A TrueNAS + Docker machine is pretty tempting. If I were to migrate, that’s where I’d go.
I was truenas on bare metal for the first year or so, but now I run a truenas VM in proxmox, then use those pools as mounts onto the proxmox. it is really cool!
Until I was in the middle of figuring out how to automate backups of my vms, which paused TrueNas, which was the destination of the backup, was a fun 20 minutes getting it all back running this evening lol
After having my dinky homelab machine on proxmox for a couple years, since the start of the year I am now running basically everything under a clean Debian system using incus and docker on the individual lxc guests.
Incus has completely replaced proxmox for me and it’s so much easier to reason about (for me at least) that I wanted to maybe point your cold hands in that direction too ;)
What you’re describing sounds pretty much exactly like how I use Proxmox at this point (everything in LXCs, most just running docker on Alpine) and I’ve been wanting to make the switch to Incus for a while. Did you migrate your LXCs over from Proxmox? I’m a little worried about how painful that process might be.
I used the recommended migration tool and it worked okay for many containers but iirc the docker ones had to have one of the security options manually changed in their config which didn’t transform properly with the tool (maybe nesting enable?).
May very well have changed in the meantime or I only made a mistake, that was in my experimentation phase.
Ultimately, I did rebuild my instances from the ground since I also switched file system, and to make better use of incus profiles (e.g. one with docker provisioned, one with monitoring and so on) so I couldn’t give you a long-term migration review.
For me that was (relatively) painless by just migrating the docker volumes in place and rebuilding the stacks, of course ymmv.
If you decide on migrating and stumble upon issues don’t hesitate to hit me up - I’m only an amateur but maybe I can still help!
smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 day ago
Funny - same thing here. Got 3 proxmox hosts running, all virtual machines are NixOS though.
I’d love to go full Nix, but between my GF and I, we kinda split the responsibilities: hardware is hers, applications are mine. And there’s not a chance she’ll give up her Proxmox hosts 😄
Got it automated to a single “provision” command though that will spin up any of my nix VMS unanttended, so I’m happy with that.
mirdaki@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Oh that provision command sounds interesting! Did it take a bit of tinkering to get right?
smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 day ago
Yeah, but no dark magic involved.
The only “magic” parts are two nix modules for handling proper networking and hardware setup, and exposing required attributes to the script.
Works really well, zero manual config (beyond the services you want to run…) required on nix or proxmox side.
mirdaki@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Nice! No dark magic being involved is always a good thing haha