I don’t know about long term, but it’s running on my pile of virtual servers and does it’s job just fine. The openmediavault itself is a pretty good web-interface on top of Debian and it’s just configuring the underlying operating system so you can get exactly the same setup by writing configurations manually for the services. OMV is just a convenient tool to manage simple fileshares.

I use it only for samba and wireguard, so can’t really say if it’s as solid with other extensions, but for me it’s been a decent tool for the job.

Just for comparison, my VPS server has ~20 active email boxes (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,clamav), a few small-ish active wordpress sites (apahce,php-fpm,mariadb), radicale and some other smaller services running with 2 cores and 4GB RAM and it’s mostly just fine. Occasionally, specially during heavier updates on wordpress-sites, memory tends to get pretty full, but it’s still just fine. Tweaking memory cache for php (or running something else than php) would increase performance by a lot, but even without optimization the 5€/month VPS is quite capable to keep your internet presence around and on your own hands.

Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.

I personally would get Lenovo, but both should be just fine. Just drop the multiboot and you’re good to go ;)

Just that they are not built the way “traditional” thinkpads are. I don’t have personal experience how durable they are, but in general they aren’t as easy to repair as T-series (for example). With T-series it’s pretty straightforward to replace nearly every component separately (wifi, ram, keyboard, display…) which is either way more difficult or straight impossible to do with X1. Also spare part availability is generally better with T-series.

But to be honest, newer T14s aren’t as service-friendly either as older T-series. But if repairability is a deciding factor then I’d skip X1 and get some T-series instead.

Worth spending time researching models rather than just assuming every thinkpad is built like they used to be.

A very brief version: Look for T-series with specs you like. W works too if that branch is still around. Xnnn series is pretty good too, X1 not so much. L series is a consumer brand, a bit better today but specially first L-models were just trash.

My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE9107-ARIN

OrgAbuseName: ABUSE

OrgAbusePhone: +1-313-516-8908

OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@hostodo.com

OrgAbuseRef: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/ABUSE9107-ARIN

They have options. No idea if they actually do anything for the reports, but it’s worth a shot.

I’m running Dahua cameras. They can pull new firmware straight over the internet, but they don’t rely on any cloud services. All kinds of flavours available and they do run on POE.

There’s a better way. Here in Finland it’s pretty common that you can just call/text your boss that you have a common cold and you can be on a sick leave for few days (3 days is pretty common limit) just self-diagnosing it. With longer sickness you’ll need a doctors note, but at least on my company with common cold and other minor stuff it’s taken care of either over text chat or via a call with a doctor.

Obviously if the doctor thinks the whatever you have requires more in depth examination they can schedule a meeting, but for seasonal flu and stuff like that it’s pretty rare you need to see a doctor in person at all. And of course they’ll follow the numbers, so that if you call in sick every monday or whatever the rules are more strict and examinations are done more frequently, but for vast majority a few days laying in bed with a fever isn’t any kind of issue.

Another recommendation for storagebox from here. Cheapest option I’ve found and they are pretty reliable. I use proxmox backup server to sync my VMs there (encrypted of course).

There’s plenty more reasons than filesystem corruption to use clean shutdown and even just plain UPS without any status information to the host. I haven’t seen a full drive corruption due to power loss ever. Various levels of corruption, yes, but not ‘all the data is gone’ scenario due to filesystem being broken. But I have seen multiple hard drives which have died on host shutdown without any warning (no smart errors or such), after power loss they just refused to start again.

Just today we had multiple short (~30 second) power outages and without UPS that would’ve put considerable strain on my hardware. Gladly those are pretty rare and those were well short enough that my UPS kept the system running, without one that would’ve meant that my hypervisor would’ve crashed and that would’ve resulted on several unclean reboots for the VMs.

Also, back to filesystems, with selfhosting, some kind of hypervisor is often in the picture, so the drive activity is generally much higher than with single workstation and corruption on a single file or some part of filesystem is way more likely. Total data loss is pretty unlikely, but a corrupted VM image can be a pretty big deal, regardless if it’s filesystem or single file which is the main issue.

there’s no standardized mechanism for forcing applications to save

On Linux (and I guess BSD and other *nix variants) there is. SIGTERM is exactly for that situation. Sure, programs can choose to ignore it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen at least any FOSS software which wouldn’t respect that. Of course the program might crash and cause loss of data, but the mechanism is there.

You’re of course generally correct about modern filesystems being more resilient to power loss, but they’re not immune to problems and also you’ve omitted a large chunk of other reasons why people like to have UPS on their system, with or without monitoring them.

For me personally the hardware is least interesting part of running a homelab. I’d happily run everything on VPS if there was no constraints on money or bandwidth (among other things). But as the limitations are there running things on my hardware is a necessary evil and for that an UPS or two are practically must to have to prolong life span of hardware and prevent data losses. Of course that’s just one box to check on the stack, but when planning for a home server setup for anything I’d say it’s a pretty vital part for the whole setup.

But in the real world it doesn’t really matter if it’s the whole filesystem or an idividual file which is corrupted. Either way the data is compromised and nitpicking that the filesystem is actually just fine doesn’t make any difference.

Modern filesystems can corrupt as well with unclean shutdown. They are just less likely to do so. My server stores photos of our life over couple of decades with other nearly irreplaceable data so having the UPS and clean shutdown on power loss gives at least some confidence that the files stay where they are.

Of course I also run backups of the data, but it’s another layer on data safety setup.

I’ve been using refurbished business laptops, thinkpads spesifically, for at least a decade. Both for business and for personal use. They just work and at least in here you can get pretty good deals from companies which re-sell previously leased machines. For some I’ve upgraded RAM and/or storage drive, but that 300-400€ gets you something far better than a new Acer from grocery store aisle. And reputable vendors even offer some kind of warranty even on used machines.

Other brands might work just fine too, but as I’ve had thinkpads since the brand was owned by IBM I’ve just stuck with them. T, W and X series are all pretty solid. And there’s a reason why you don’t see Acer or other consumer brands on refurbished market.

Meh. As long as it’s a local only field on /etc/passwd or whatever I don’t really care. Actually I’d be for it if browsers and other internet-thingies could send rough idea of users age to the services. Not actual age, but something like child/teen/adult -scale. That would make it super simple to reputable services to block underaged users and parents could set that to their kids accounts as they see fit.

But obviously the surveillance tool “they” are building is something totally different where the age is actually verified via some online service. For that I’m strictly against and if that becomes mandatory on Debian or whatever distro I’ll start my own with blackjack and hookers if nothing else is available.

this community is dominated by the systemd fanboys

Hey now. There’s dozens of us who had that thing force fed for us. I’ve been on Debian for decades, so even if I don’t really like systemd it’s the lesser evil than switching a distro to something without it.

Immich itself is running on docker, so it’s the same than every other setup. For me it just makes more sense to run that on a separate VM than keeping all the docker containers in a same operating system due to backups, manageability, access control and so on, even if it costs a bit of memory to run a full operating system. Biggest consumers on the host process list are immich-api, postgres-processes and immich. Actual used memory is around 2,5GB for the whole system with ~5GB on buffers/cache.

But I often import hundreds of raw photos at a time from DSLR and/or 4K video footage from my drone and processing those takes quite a lot of memory. With less memory and slower drives the whole thing crashed when importing bigger batches to out of memory erros, but I suppose it could run just fine with even less than 4GB of memory, if the usage pattern is just to upload photos from your cellphone in a relatively slow pace.

It’s a full VM, so OS and docker creates some overhead, but before I upgraded the server it ran on far less resources and specially big imports were painfully slow. Also that’s just the number from proxmox console, so there’s likely some cache included, but stats show that the VM pulls over 10G every now and then with shorter spikes over 20GB of consumed RAM.

As I mentioned, it can run on way less, but it feels a lot more responsive when it has enough resources.

16GB of ram is a bit low for the load you’re planning. That can work, but Nextcloud and Immich are pretty hungry for memory. My immich instance right now is using 7GB of RAM and nextcloud uses a bit over 4. I have the hardware to give them pretty much all the memory they want, so those are not absolute minimum amounts, but I wouldn’t try to run either with less than 6GB allocated memory on my load (few users, about a terabyte of data on both).

With 16GB you can pretty much forget using ZFS, but that’s not a big loss. LVM works just fine and with thin provisioning you can use snapshots too just fine. Bigger SSD/NVME for drive cache would be good. And of course all-SSD setup would be nice, but that gets expensive pretty fast. Second ethernet port might be nice to have, depends on how you’re planning to build your setup. Otherwise that hardware looks pretty good, altough I’d search for something second hand. CPU is most likely a bit overkill for what you need, I have Xeon E5-2620 v3 @ 2.40GHz and it’s running on around 10% load most of the time.