Maybe trying with some Raspberry Pis for your services (takes up less space, low power) and building a dedicated machine for the NAS, as suggested by @hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip, but that’s a whole different budget.

Otherwise, maybe going for some mini-pcs, more recent second-hand PCs (stronger CPU for video encoding) or just more RAM and more disks.

I guess the final price will depend on what exact machine you can get your hands on.

Nice project!

Given the tight budget, here is what I would do, especially if you are not too constraint by space and don’t mind a few extra watts of power consumption. The Raspberry Pi are getting expensive, and the 200USD will barely get you a RPi5 nowadays. You said there is no market for you for second hand sever hw, but I’m guessing it should not be too hard to get used office desktop PCs.

• Get two of these. Maybe Optiplex or Thinkstation. You can probably get something decent <50USD each.
• Get two small SATA SSDs for the OS (128 - 256GB), around 30USD each.
• Get your storage drives. You should get 3 of them so you can have ZFS raid redundancy.
• On one machine, install TrueNAS and your storage drives. Default RAM is probably enough.
• On the other one, upgrade the RAM to 8 or 16 GB (~50USD), install your favorite Linux distro, and you can run your services, accessing the storage with NFS!

To me it feels safer (against my own mess-up) to separate the storage and the services, plus this setup is fairly upgradable. You’ll probably have space to add more storage drives, even maybe a cache SSD; increase the RAM; add a third machine etc.

Of course it’s just one idea, maybe other another layout might fit your use-case better, idk.

Good luck!

Does it need to be a new piece of software though?

I’m thinking it might be a lot easier to put some effort building a professional community on Mastodon (maybe on it’s own instance) than building it from scratch as a new platform.

Personally, I’d rather use Python with matplotlib when I need to plot stuff, but Octave is great if you have to deal with Matlab code!

Damn that’s a good looking mini rack! Great job!

I don’t have much experience or advice about Proxmox, just wanted to show appreciation ✌️

100Mbps up because copper T^T

Thanks for the detailed reply! You’re not the first to mention gitops for k8s, it seems interesting indeed, I’ll be sure to check it!

I see, that makes sense actually! Thanks for the message!

I saw the landscape website before, that’s a LOT of projects! =O

My goal is to have a k3s cluster as a deployment env and try and run the services I’m already using. I don’t need to have any advance load balancing, I just want pods to be restarted if one of my machine stops.

How about I’ll do anyway? <3

I’ll check it! Thanks!

Wow that’s a lot of detail and information ! Thank you so much for taking the time to write all of this !

For the note taking part, it should be okay, I’m putting everything in my org-roam notes, including my current Ansible setup and my microOS combustion script!

For the rest, I’ll need to try it step by step; at the moment I think my problem is actually how to access the services with Traefik, I guess it will be an important step once I’ll figure it out.

Thanks again for the help!

Never heard about this way to use podman before! Thanks for letting me know!

Thanks, I’ll check these more in detail!

I set and update my containers with Ansible. It works well, but it’s a bit slow and it’s a whole setup on top of your deployment!

Always advocating for that but Aeon Desktop (immutable OpenSUSE) has been great for me: rock solid base system, latest Gnome desktop, all the apps in Flatpak. Distrobox for all the terminal applications needs works better for me than the toolbox on systems like Silverblue. Give it a try!