I’m not familiar with the Ben Eater series, but there are certainly a couple options to check out.

Mark Ferneaux did a fantastic series on the workings of pfSense. It’s a little dated, but the core concepts are still sound and apply to networking generally.

There are also several sites that do in-depth networking topics with a focus on certifications. My favorite of the bunch is Viatto.

I also quite like The Network Berg, though his videos are specifically focused on Mikrotik.

The thing that immediately came to mind was mailpiler.org. It’s been on my list to stand up for a while, but I’ve never got around to it.

Awesome. I’m glad it helps. I’d be a little weary of using the same directory in multiple containers. File systems may or may not behave well with multiple machines writing to them. Not saying anything bad will happen, but do keep an eye out for issues.

I’m making some assumptions, namely that you’re using an unprivileged LXC container and the mount point is a bind mount.

Unprivileged LXC shift user ID numbers so that an escape won’t result in root access to the host. The root user (uid 0) in the container is actually uid 100000 from the perspective of the Proxmox host.

What I usually do is set ownership of my bind mounts to that high-numbered ID (so something like chown -R 100000:100000 /path/to/bind/mount) from Proxmox. Then the root user in the container will be able to set whatever permissions you need directly.

Since you’re interested in this kind of DIY, approach, I’d seriously consider thinking the whole process through and writing a simple script for this that runs from your desktop. That will make it trivial to do an automatic backup whenever you’re active on the network.

Instead of cron, look into systemd timers and you can fire off your script after, say, one minute of being on your desktop, using a monotonic timer like OnUnitActiveSec=60.

Thinking through the script in pseudo code, it could look something like:

rsync -avzh $server_source $desktop_destination || curl -d "Backup failed" ntfy.sh/mytopic

This would pull the back from your server to your desktop and, if the backup failed, use a service such as ntfy.sh to notify you of the problem.

I think that would pretty much take care of all of your requirements and if you ever decided to switch systems (like using zfs send/recv instead of rsync), it would be a matter of just altering that one script.

I had never heard of this, but it sounds fascinating — thanks for sharing! Definitely going to try to set this up this weekend.

Dokuwiki (dokuwiki.org) is my usual go-to. It’s really simple and stores entries in markdown files so you can get at them as plain text files in a pinch. Here’s a life lesson: don’t host your documentation in the machine you’re going to be breaking! Learned that the hard way once or twice.

For reverse proxies, I’m a fan of HAProxy. It uses pretty straightforward config files and is incredibly robust.

I can’t give direct experience here, but this is exactly the use case I’ve been meaning to spin up mailpiler for: https://www.mailpiler.org/. One of these days that will rise to the top of the priority list.

If you want an image, it doesn’t matter what the underlying file system is. You should be able to use a tool like Clonezilla and get a 1:1 copy. Depending how you’ve set up partitioning, you could also use sgdisk to set up the proper partitions and zfs send/recv for the new data portion of the drive and install a boot loader. That’s probably the way I’d go in this instance.

There was a recent conversation on the Practical ZFS discourse site about poor disk performance in Proxmox (https://discourse.practicalzfs.com/t/hard-drives-in-zfs-pool-constantly-seeking-every-second/1421/). Not sure if you’re seeing the same thing, but it could be that your VMs are running into the same too-small volblocksize that PVE uses to make zvols for its Vans under ZFS.

If that’s the case, the solution is pretty easy. In your PVE datacenter view, go to storage and create a new ZFS storage pool. Point it to the same zpool/dataset as the one you’ve already got and set the block size to something like 32k or 64k. Once you’ve done that, move the VM’s disk to that new storage pool.

Like I said, not sure if you’re seeing the same issue, but it’s a simple thing to try.

My go-to for this is a plain Debian or Ubuntu container with Cockpit and the 45Drives file sharing plugin. It’s pretty straightforward and works pretty well.

You can set maintenance schedules in Uptime Kuma and alerts won’t be sent out during those times. I use that for when my backup routines run each night. That seems like a decent cross-platform work around.

I administer a handful of FreePBX systems that run pretty smoothly and are relatively friendly to use. Crosstalk Solutions on YouTube has a bunch of videos on the software if you want to get up to speed about how everything works.

Not sure how your stack works together, but sudo will let you run particular commands as a different user and you can be pretty specific with the privileges. For example you can have a script that’s only allowed to run docker compose -f /path/to/compose.yml restart containername as a user in the docker group. Maybe there’s some docker-specific approach, but this should work with traditional Unix tools and a little scripting.

Depends on the seller. It’s pretty easy to drop the seller a line and ask for details (and if they’re unwilling to provide them that could be a red flag). I had two drives die during burn-in once. I try to pick reputable sellers and they were pretty quick to replace them.

I see a ton of price fluctuation in used drives. One way I’ve had some success is in seeking out drives sold in lots. Often I’ll also see SAS drives sell for less than a SATA drive of the same size.

My use of Mikrotik is somewhat limited, but I’m testing I’ve found routing between VLANs to be pretty performant. The key is to offload that routing to the hardware, which not all configurations allow. Check out the Network Berg’s YouTube channel and you should get a good idea.

You’ve got some decent answers already, but since you’re getting interested in ZFS, I wanted to make sure you know about discourse.practicalzfs.com. It’s the successor to the ZFS subreddit and it’s a great place to get expert advice.

Is this urbackup-docker in a VM or an LXC? If the latter, you don’t need to add it in storage at all; you can bind mount the folder and use it directly. Here’s some info on that. If it’s in a VM and you want to use the directory directly (as in not just make a disk image inside the directory to pass as a block device) you’ll have to do some file sharing to the VM.

It sounds like you’ve got your solution already, but just in case someone stumbles on this later, I thought I’d mention autofs.

I’m coming to prefer it over fstab entries because it handles disconnections nicely and attempts to reconnect. Worth checking out for those who haven’t played with it.