I agree with division/multiplication issue. Or maybe just simply an assumption that VAT is always there and sanity checks on the systems just won’t allow 0 (or negative number) as a tax percentage.

I meant that in general even ‘official’ systems have stupid bugs or practices just because things have been in a certain way for long time. Years ago I wrote a small invoicing program which had obviously manage VAT and it would’ve been a simple mistake to assume that VAT (or any tax percentage) is just a whole number since that’s what I’ve ever seen before. That particular piece of software is well obsolete now, but that would’ve managed the decimals since it handled all the numbers in the same way just to keep things simple and monetary values obviously need decimals. However, without any verification it wouldn’t been a crazy assumption to store tax percentages as a two digit integer everywhere.

I’ve used local supplier for years who has spesifically selection for UPS batteries. Even APC ones tend to be pretty standard, just rip the APC stickers off and get the actual battery model number and ask from your local shop for replacement. I got a pair for new-for-me UPS a few weeks ago. Official APC kit would’ve been several hundred euros, the ones I got were ~50 with postage. They might not last quite as long as ‘brand name’ ones and power output is a slightly lower even on spec sheet, but that unit is running at around 15% load anyways, so in my case it doesn’t really matter.

How could you possibly build something this stupid?

Out gereric VAT rate changed to 25,5% about a year go. It’s been a whole number since current implementation was introduced in 1994. There was quite a few big systems running on accounting, cash registers, payment processors and whatever which couldn’t store decimals on VAT value. And obviously all the official information never stated that VAT couldn’t have decimals at some point, it just never had them before and thus vendors have just stored it as an plain integer and quite a lot of systems needed upgrade or on some cases full replacement.

So, apparently it’s pretty easy to build something that stupid.

Most likely not. However, proxmox is a bit strict here and there on how it wants drives, networking and other stuff laid out. Also the hypervisor itself is quite strictly only for that. So, if you want to tinker with something without virtualization platform or use your drives for something else than just proxmox-installation it’s likely not officially supported at least and might cause some headache or even bigger problems, like potentially losing data, if you run it in a way it’s not meant to.

However, if you just want a pretty capable hypervisor and run all your stuff on top of that it’s perfectly fine, specially for hobbyists. For bigger enterprises it has some issues and management for a bigger server fleet, at least for now, isn’t as polished as the ‘big players’ have, but, again, for home gamer it’s pretty good solution.

Router has 35d uptime, WAN interface stats shows Tx/Rx 3,9TB / 28TB. Most of the downstream is obviously IPTV and other streaming services, upstream is mostly offsite backups.

No errors and I have separate local backup server with spinning drives too which works just fine. Local backup server has ~5,7TB of data and verifications complete in about 5,5 hours. Actual (incremental) backups to S3 take about two hours with that ~2TB on VMs which seems decent enough.

I’m using OVH, not AWS. Their console gives estimation of ~20€/month for the ~2TB I have stored. Versioning is disabled and i’m currently runnign on their signup offer of 200€ credit, so I’m good to go for few weeks more. The storage I’m using includes the traffic, it’s just practically unusable due to verification speeds.

Local server has SSDs with zfs and well enough memory for arc.

150W or so for the main server now that I upgraded it to full SSD setup. Maybe a bit more when under heavier load. Another maybe 100W for router, main switch, frigate-server and other bits and bobs with full load. And then backup server with 4 spinning drives another maybe 150W. Haven’t really measured anything, just ballbark figures.

So around 500W total. But I’ve got electric heating anyways and hobbies tend to cost something.

really helps for that antenna to be on the 2nd floor, in a window, with clear view unobstructed by aluminum siding.

It’s on a roof already and quite capable of receiving signal, we just haven’t used OTA broadcasts for a while as IPTV used to work good enough. So no problems with the antenna, I’m just wondering what I should plug in to that.

Hardware is too wide to tell anything useful out of the blue, depends on what you can get your hands on (as in what’s available locally) and what you actually want to run. Used corporate desktop might be fine, raspberry pi might be good too, mini-pcs are popular and so on. All have their pros and cons.

For the OS proxmox is a solid choise. It has both containers and ‘full’ virtual machines as an option. Debian is good too.

And for the utilities, build something you actually want to use. Pihole is pretty nice. Gaming severs are good to practise with if you’re into that stuff. But if you just build stuff for the sake of it you’ll of course learn on the way but it leaves very little to actually enjoy on what you’ve built.

I really like my immich and nextcloud servers and they’re well worth my time to keep up and running. But with those there’s additional challenge to keep them backed up. Losing pihole server wouldn’t be that bad, it’s easy enough to rebuild, but losing a terabyte of photos is a bit another thing.

It was the idea. Law only states that data has to remain in EU, so Microsoft servers in Ireland is enough to fulfil that requirement. They still have exceptions on their TOS that they can move that data to where ever they want if there’s a ‘technical need’ or whatever and there’s exceptions on EU laws (or maybe it was a separate agreement) which spesifically permits this. And USA can still get any data as they have leverage over the ‘main’ company, so Microsoft and others just bend the knee and give whatever is requested, no matter where the data is physically stored.

And now as all kinds of as-a-service -platforms, AI solutions very much included, are apparently the best thing since sliced bread, everyone just jumps on the bandwagon and don’t really worry about hanging themselves with a single provider nor it’s country of origin.

Me too.

That’s been going on for a while already. Stellantis was founded only a few years ago and they already have a ton of different brands in their pockets. Obviously PSA and FCA already had a ton of those brands before merging, but similar merges have been happening for decades, for example GM has been gathering different brands since 1920s.

I haven’t really paid attention on prosumer-hardware lately as my RB4011iGS+RM just keeps on working. 6 watts is really low tho, according to spec sheet my router pulls 18W 24VDC. Few links I checked from your original post however give 15W TDP, so maybe some seller is pulling numbers out of their sleeve or there’s differences between models. Either way, those are pretty damn efficient boxes.

With that celeron CPU I think they have less troughput than what I’m running, but if your internet connection isn’t several hundred megabits I don’t think that’ll be an issue. I had issues with some edgerouter, while it claimed to do full gigabit in practise it managed only up to ~700Mbps and even less than that with even slightly complicated routing.

I don’t have any direct recommendations, but I’d stay away from TP-Link and other budget brands which often promise a lot more than they can actually deliver. My switches are from HPE and they are pretty cheap second hand (or even free if you happen to stumble in a office renewal somewhere).

In most common case you can think VLANs at the firewall end like whole different physical networks. On port LAN1 you have a switch and whatever else you happen to have, on LAN2 similar setup and so on. All the networks can (and should) have their own IP range and it’s the firewall who decides what traffic is allowed, like is a machine in LAN1 allowed to talk with printer on LAN2.

Virtual LAN just bundles that all to one set of cables and network devices with the obvious benefit that you can have benefits of multiple networks for security, access control or whatever but you don’t need extra hardware for each setup. In theory it is possible to break out of VLAN separation, but in practice it’s really not something a home gamer should worry about too much.

What you need is a managed switch (or multiple if needed) so that you can assign ports to different VLANs or a combination of many VLANs in a single port, commonly known as trunk. Some unmanaged switches pass trough VLAN frames as is, but it’s not guaranteed, so safe bet is to get only managed switches.

For the firewall/router, the best option would be to either drop the ISP router totally or if possible use bridged port on it so that you can get ‘raw’ internet to your own device. You can make it work with ‘LAN’ port on your current router too, there’s just one set of port forwarding and firewall rules extra to manage before anything even hits your own network. Instead of firewall PC I’d recommend an actual router. They are often more suited to the task, are physically smaller and tend to consume less energy. Also dedicated firewall/routers are often a bit cheaper (at least less than 600$, I paid ~150€ for my router). I personally have a Mikrotik device and I like it, but there’s plenty decent ones to choose from. PC will work as well, but they tend to have more potentially failing components than dedicated routers.

But in general, at least I can’t see anything fundamentally wrong with your plan. Remember to have fun while setting it up.

Fixed headaches with my proxmox backup server. It has a SAS-controller and 4 spinning drives running backups at detached garage and the old fujitsu desktop I dug out of office dumpster pile just kept crashing. Flashed controller to IT-firmware, updated bios on motherboard and did everything else I could figure out but the system just lost the drives pretty much daily and required a hard reset. Turns out, or at least that’s my conclusion, that the PSU on the machine just didn’t have enough juice for the whole setup and that caused instability. I dug out old (2010 or so) desktop from my own pile and threw 600W PSU on the box, it’s now been stable for at least a week.

I would’ve liked to keep the fujitsu-machine as it’s in a more compact case and couple of generations newer CPU, but that thing has propietary power supply so it was easier to swap out the whole system and just move drives from one to another. So, the current setup consumes maybe a bit more electricity, but at least it’s doing what it is supposed to.

Also known as Schrödinger’s Backup.

Zfs can become painfully slow if you don’t have RAM for it. I tried to run ZFS on my old setup with 64GB RAM and with moderate amount of virtual hosts and it was nearly useless with heavier io-loads. I didn’t try to tweak settings for it, so there might be some workarounds to make it work better, I just repartitioned all the storage drives with mdadm raid5 array and lvm-thin on top of that. Zfs will work with limited memory in a sense that you don’t risk losing data because of it, but as mentioned, performance might drop significantly. Now that I have a system which has memory to run raidz2 it’s pretty damn good, but with limited hardware I would not recommend it.

LVM itself is pretty trivial to move on a another system, most modern kernels just autodetect volume groups and you can use them as any normal filesystem. If you move full, intact, mdadm array to a new system (and have necessary utils installed) it should be autodetected too, but specially with degraded array manual reassembly might be needed. I don’t know what kind of issues you’ve been getting, but in general moving both lvm and mdadm drives between systems is pretty painless. Instead of mdadm you could also run lvm-mirroring on the drives so it’ll drop one layer off from your setup and it potentially makes rebuilding the array a bit simpler on another system, but neither approach should prevent moving drives to another host.

Lvm-thin is more flexible and while it might be a slightly slower on some scenarios I’d still recommend using that. Maybe the biggest benefit you’ll get from it is an option to take snapshots from VMs. Mounting plain directories will work too, but if your storage is only used by proxmox I don’t see any point in that over LVM setup.

Well, you’re not wrong, but that would still be a catastrophe modern world hasn’t yet seen. Those millions would become refugees and absolutely overwhelm European immigration system even with mass casualties due to riots, loss of water/food/medicine and who knows what else. Current oil prices would seem pretty cheap and global economy would take a massive hit causing homelesness, bankrupts, humongous loss of crops (due to fuel and fertilizer prices) and all kinds of havoc.

Global west would suffer badly, China would become even stronger, Russia would benefit from that as well causing even more problems around Europe. Global trade with USA would practically collapse and pull USA down as well. In the global scale it doesn’t even matter that much if there’s a nuclear explosion somewhere too as results will be pretty nuclear anyways.