I’m in a lot of the same landscape as you, currently running a mac but ubuntu/fedora with gnome is looking at me from behind the corner. What’s blocking me at this time is client IT policies, in order to access stuff in their network it has to be their device and they don’t ship linux so. Next year it is.

Yeah, I’m planning to spin them down so infrequently that it shouldn’t matter in the long run.

I currently have exactly this setup but I really want to migrate to a single machine :)

I’ll consider this!

I’m possibly biased by the amount of initial fiddling with all the disks and pcie cards and hunting down where the noise was coming from. Will keep in mind.

This could be an option I guess - however the current case is a HP z440, which is SO convenient for building in that I need an extra good reason to get rid of it. Zero screws, just latches. Carrying handles.

Thanks - from what I see myu CPU doesn’t support VT-d, only VT-x, which at a glance makes it not suitable for passing through these drives safely. I’ll get to dismantling the NAS VM setup actually.

Thanks! This sounds like an option.

I’ll gladly take the advice on the NAS VM, I see so many tutorials virtualising TrueNAS and not a lot of the opposite viewpoint. If it’s not a good practice I’d indeed rather recycle that setup while I’m at it.

I don’t need to keep using Proxmox, or TrueNAS for that matter. If I need to DIY this with bare metal Debian, I will. My constraint is to have both always-on services and on-demand HDD backed services on the same machine. Sky is the limit after that…

Scheduling doesn’t sound the best indeed, which is why I’d ideally want a simple button that I can click from a GUI.

Not an option, because it will also run some essential services off SSD’s. :/

Cool! Saving for later.

Huh.

There’s a time and place for a DIY solution and academia can well be like that sometimes.

The latest Mac Mini can’t run Linux though. It’s M4 and asahi doesn’t even support M3 chips yet. But if you actually got the previous model with M1/M2 you can do Linux if desired. I might not attempt, and just use the Mac as a server as-is. It’s not too different from Linux. Asking the duck for “how to xx on Mac” when you already know the Linux equivalents should make your life tolerable.

I mean, there are quite a few others than Arch+family that package a very recent kernel too. Fedora as you mentioned, but also NixOS, openSUSE Tumbleweed and even Gentoo if you’re that kind of a person. I bet I missed some.

But yeah Ubuntu is not necessarily one of them

Me, because someone at my work picked it for servers back in the day

Wanna share more details? Sounds like something I should actually put on my 32gb

Something to consider, advice given to me, is that ZFS support on Linux regularly breaks with newest kernels so if you go for ZFS long term, be prepared to run a lts kernel at least as a backup.

I use both. LUKS+btrfs being nice on the Arch desktops, and ZFS on a serverside pool, managed by a TrueNAS Scale VM.

I have an external storage unit a couple kilometers away and two 8TB hard drives with luks+btrfs. One of them is always in the box and after taking backups, when I feel like it, I detach the drive and bike to the box to switch. I’m currently researching btrbk for updating the backup drive on my pc automatically, it’s pretty manual atm. For most scenarios the automatic btrfs snapshots on my main disks are going to be enough anyway.

Oh yeah and I did enable Proxmox VM firewall for the TrueNAS, the NFS traffic goes via an internal interface. Wasn’t entirely convinced by NFS’s security posture when reading about it… At least restrict it to the physical machine 0_0 So I now need to intentionally pass a new NIC to any VM that will access the data, which is neat.

A wrap-up of what I ended up doing:

• Replaced the bare metal Ubuntu with Proxmox. Cool cool. It can do the same stuff but easier / comes with a lot of hints for best practices. Guess I’m a datacenter admin now
• Wiped the 2x960GB SSD pool and re-created it with ZFS native encryption
• Made a TrueNAS Scale VM, passed through the SSD pool disks, shared the datasets with NFS and made snapshot policies
• Mounted the NFS on the Ubuntu VM running my data related services and moved the docker bind mounts to that folder
• Bought a 1Gbps Intel network card to use instead of the onboard Realtek and maxed out the host memory to 16GB for good measure

I have achieved:

• 15min RPO for my data (as it sits on the NFS mount, which is auto-snapshotted in TrueNAS)
• Encryption at rest (ZFS native)

I have not achieved (yet…):

• Key fetch on boot. Now if the host machine boots I have to log in to TrueNAS to key in the ZFS passphrase. I will have to make some custom script for this anyway I guess to make it adapt to the situation as key fetching on boot is a paid feature in TrueNAS but it just makes managing the storage a bit easier so I wanna use it now. Disabled auto start on boot for the services VM that depends on the NFS share, so I’ll just go kick it up manually after unlocking the pool in TrueNAS.

Quite happy with the setup so far. Looking to automate actual backups next, but this is starting to take shape. Building the confidence to use this for my actual phone backups, among other things.

Really good to know. Planned to keep using very mainstream LTS versions anyway, but this solidifies the decision. Maybe on a laptop I’ll install something more experimental but that’s then throwaway style.