I have a mini PC and Proxmox, a Debian VM with a Portainer stack, and plex

Just Google “Booting a pi from an SSD” and follow the steps

I can’t remember the steps (they were simple though) but when my Home Assistant raspi SD card died, I bought a 128gb SSD from AliExpress and a usb-sata cable.

I then did something to the pi that meant it can boot from the SSD, and flashed the SSD using Balenetcher or RUFUS or whatever (same program I was using to flash my SD cards basically).

Then it was just a case of plugging in and turning it on.

Runs exactly the same as with an SD card with less dying because SD cards aren’t meant for a lot of read/write but SSDs do.

Halifax

Hey original commenter here, just read your username and if Brad is short for Bradford I’m just over the hill from you

As a shop floor guy I identify with what you’re saying and if you’re not in one get in a Union.

But those guys do all the paperwork and business shit. If they don’t do it right then it can blow holes in the business, which pays your wages.

For example, this week has been a shit show at work because the IT crisis happened. This has meant parts that we need haven’t arrived, and lines have shut down.

Management have had their heads up their arse trying to keep shit running, sending folk home on holidays, hell lads are taking time off unpaid rather than bum around doing “preventative maintenance”

Someone has gotta make sure all that shit works out and it ain’t me. I’ve just got to get the parts out when they’re there.

All I’m saying is that in a good company there’s less “Us and Them” everyone has a role that’s recognised, and individuals are judged on their work rather than their position. You can have good and bad CEOs and Forklift Drivers

How do I avoid Hoarding? Well I have a total of 2.75tb of space, so when it gets a bit full I go through and delete shit we watched already so I have space for more stuff

Me too, except it’s Adguard for me.

Came in handy yesterday actually. I have a friend who works for a University which was recycling some Chromebooks.

He managed to grab 3 for me, one for myself and one for my kids.

Problem is that one of my kids is being supervised through Google Family Link which means for some reason the Play Store won’t work.

So he is now unsupervised in Family Link just to get the Chromebook working.

So I’ve just given both my kids static IPs and pointed their Chromebooks at Adguard, then turned on Safe Search and adult content blocking.

Now I’m fairly confident they’re protected from a lot of the bad shit on the internet.

When I die my friends will miss me like usual. Then the Plex server will go down and they’ll miss me all over again.

I’ve passed my display through to a VM in Proxmox for transcoding and now I can’t get the GUI for that VM.

Is this something that would allow me to connect to that VM on another PC and use a virtual desktop?

If so, I may have to have a play with it. I mean I’m happy away using SSH but why not have UI if I can?

Good to know, I’ll turn it off when I get home from work, thanks

I got a top of the range one from 7 years ago for £25 on eBay.

How much are pis nowadays?

If I don’t port forward, my friends that I’ve shared with can’t see the instance

Imho easy mode is just throwing it on Plex and making sure your port is set up on your router for external access, then just sharing your music folder in Plex.

No need for a domain or anything

Have you looked into Bazarr? It’ll find and add subtitles to your shows

My problem with this solution was that I have signed in to Tailscale via my Google account, and I have to buy Mullvad through Tailscale, linking my Google account to the Mullvad account.

What I wanted to do was have my own Mullvad account and route Tailscale through it, but that wasn’t possible, I had to have Tailscale manage Mullvad, which just didn’t sit right with me.

Yeah the new VM should just draw from your remaining RAM. My Debian VM is only using a few GB (6? 8?) but my Dell (I have a 7050 so it can’t be so different from yours) still has 10gb to play with.

As for the running out of USBs I guess you could run a usb hub to one of the usb ports and just pass through the one, although I don’t know if that would break something.

I don’t think they do a powered usb c to sata but I could be wrong. I’ve used 3/4 of the ports on the back for HDDs, and the remaining one for my ZigBee stick for Home Assistant VM and have one spare (on the front) plus the usb C. I have passed that usb C through to a VM for a usb c to 3.5mm (to send music to speakers) in the past though.

You could try a usb to sata (powered) and a usb c to usb a to plug in to the usb C socket I guess, try that? I have a few usbc-a adapters knocking around the house so if you’re the same you could try it for nothing

I have also got a dell optiplex and Proxmox and a Debian machine with mostly Arr in containers.

I also have 3 old HDDs that I’m using for it, of various sizes (2x1tb and 3/4tb)

I have used a powered usb3 to sata connector to hook them up to the Dell. As in I have 3 usb to sata connectors, and each one also has a plug socket. I’ve got those 3 plus my Dell in a 4 gang extension lead so it’s only using 1 plug socket in my kitchen. They were about £15 each on Amazon.

I have had a gotcha from using usb that destroyed my setup.

I now have a working solution that will stop this happening again:

So I have 3 usb-sata HDDs hooked in via the usb ports. I set up Open Media Vault as a VM. Then I passed through the USB drives to the OMV VM.

Those drives are then shared via SMB (I’ve just added NFS) to everything that needs it via the OMV VM.

I can then access the HDDs via this SMB share in Proxmox for backups if that’s what you wanna do.

Now the reason I’ve done it this way is because originally I had the drives in Proxmox. I gave them names and then put those names in the Fstab of Proxmox. One of the drives “forgot” it’s name and Proxmox wouldn’t then boot because one of its drives wasn’t accessible.

You could get around this by adding an option to the end of your fstab, I think the option is “nofail” but I’m not 100% so just check up on it.

I’ve used this option in my Debian VM Fstab to mount the NAS drives so my Arr stack can see them, and even got my Squeezebox server using them too. I’m using CIFS so I can see the drives on my Windows PC so I can manage the storage on my desktop.

So there you go, usb HDDs with passed through usb sockets to OMV VM is how I do it. If one of the drives fails OMV still runs and I just find I have no media in Plex and have to figure out why my drive isn’t working anymore.

It’s the same reason I like running things in Docker; you can just wake up and read about something while enjoying your morning shit, then switch the computer on and try and boot it before that thing you’re meant to be doing. If you can’t do it you can just delete it and try again later.

I started Self Hosting with Proxmox 4 months ago and so far my only real snafu has been mapping drives directly to Proxmox with Fstab. If you’re gonna do it, add “nofail” FFS.

I pass my drives through to my NAS VM to handle rather than Proxmox because it’s easier to fix my NAS if it fucks up using Proxmox, than to try and fix a none-booting Proxmox.

Anyway now I’m at a point of stability and dim sat thinking about redoing it bare bones, but I love tinkering so I’m sure this is just the plateau before I discover something new to play with, so I’m keeping Proxmox

I’ve had a usb to sata running to a 2.5" sdd that acts as the main storage and boot for my pi4b, and it’s been in use for 4 years with zero issues so far.

I’ve now got 3HDDs attached to my Proxmox machine for NAS storage via usb ATM. It’s been running since Feb. It’s had it’s issues but those were more my fault for not understanding the flake factor (since my experience with the sdd) I had one drive forget what I named it, so my whole Proxmox died.

But that was remedied by passing the USB straight through to OMV.

Just saying, I’ve not really had the same experience as you with them, they seem fine if you have an idea what may fuck up.

I’m currently in the market for a music server myself.

I want it all, I want something that will fire music at my Google home links, and also some raspberry pis with speakers, and also serve to my phone in the house and away from it.

I have Logitech Media Server running ATM and for a long time, but it is, and always has been a bit hot and miss.

I have a music file system in OMV which I can access on my LAN. This is the source of music for LMS. But I also have Plex pointed at it

This allows me to play the same music from any TV or phone with Plex on it. Plex even have an app called Plex Amp. I use Symfonic though, I liked it enough to buy it.

These apps give me the option to cast my audio to the Google Homes minis I have, I need something for my Pis.

Another advantage I recently found of adding my music library to Plex is I downloaded a program called MediaMonkey to stick music on my old iPod that I have in the car. It picked my Plex library up straight away, although to its credit, it also found my original music Share, it just didn’t advertise the fact.

I use Plex myself but there’s Emby and Jellyfin to look into too.

I’ve self hosted home assistant for a few years, external access through Cloud flare now because it’s been so stablez but previously used DuckDNS which was a bit shit if I’m honest.

I got into self hosting proper earlier this year, I wanted to make something that I could sail the 7 seas with.

I use Tailscale for everything.

The only open port on my router is for Plex because I’m a socialist and like to share my work with my friends.

Just keep it all local and use it at home. If you wanna take some of your media outside with you, download it onto your phone before you leave

This isn’t real life it’s an online forum in a video game

“Dodgy Firestick”

You need to pick a machine (if you only have 1 you don’t lol) to be your web portal, bang a block of code in via ssh or command line (I copy pasted) then you can access Portainer via the web portal.

From there “Stacks” is Docker Compose and you can fiddle with your containers, networking settings and all the other stuff via a UI instead of having to SSH in all the time to look at your compose files.

Then if you wanna use docker on more machines you just bang a block of code into that machine via ssh and it will appear in your Portainer

Far easier imho

I found a lot of the problems I had with Docker were with Docker. Once I moved to using Portainer for Docker it became much more accessible.

This looks like a good shout. I have actually tried it out but it was years ago when I was trying to get a Sonos-like service and ultimately settled on Squeezebox.

Maybe it’s time to try it again, thanks for the idea

It’s a Dell Optiplex 7050

Try a live Proxmox USB, it’s what I did when my machine went unresponsive. Allowed me to look through the logs of the OS when it hadn’t booted to find out what went wrong.

For me it was that I had put my USB HDDs in via Fstab and one had died, which made Proxmox unbootable until I hashtagged the lines out in fstab.

Eh I did all this with a cheap thin client.

Proxmox as the frontend

OMV in a VM with usb passed through

Debian VM for Plex and Docker

Adguard and Nginx and Arr in Docker

Network sharing from the OMV VM

HDDs to USB.

I’ve solved this exact issue and numerous others with samba / CIFS recently. This is how I have my Proxmox on a mini pc with usb mounted HDDs at present:

1 VM Home Assistant OS, not relevant really

1 VM OMV Open Media Vault.

1 VM Debian with Docker installed.

So in my experience over the last few months you want your usb drive to have absolutely nothing to do with Proxmox. Nope.

I had 3 hooked in mounted in Proxmox and when one of them threw a fit Proxmox refused to load.

Better to have a NAS VM installed and have the drive(s, I have 3, 2x1tb and 1x750gb) passed straight through, whole usb, to the NAS VM.

This means if the drive fails Proxmox doesn’t break, and also in my experience with OMV, it’ll still run if a drive breaks

Then what I did was set up the shares and made them samba in OMV then set my other VM, the Debian one, with mount points in the Fstab.

The key for me in this endeavour was to make sure the Fstab entry made sure that the OS wouldn’t fail if it couldn’t find a drive, as happened in Proxmox, so I made sure “nofail” was somewhere in the Fstab config.

For Samba to work in Linux you need to install cifs-utils, then add a line in /etc/fstab. Mine goes:

//omv.local/sharename /mnt/filename cifs credentials=/etc/cifs-credentials,file_mode=0777,dir-mode=0777,auto,nofail,vers=3.0 0 0

You have to create the mount point mkdir /mnt/filename and give it permissions with chmod

You also need to made the cifs-credentials file in /etc/

It needs to contain:

username=yourusername password=yourpassword domain=WORKGROUP

Then what I do for Audiobookshelf and whatnot is mount the mount point as directories in Portainer under the volumes: - /mnt/Downloads:/Downloads

Then in the UI of the service I’m using in Docker I can use the Downloads folder and it’s the mount point.

This is what’s working well for me. If a drive fails I try and fix it in OMV instead of trying to plug a monitor into my mini pc to try and work out from the logs why Proxmox has failed…

Use this comment as a framework for your research and save yourself some heartache. You can mount the CIFS/Samba share to Proxmox and use that, so you can still use the drive in Proxmox for backups and such

I’ve just come back to this comment to get sabnzbd running, thanks again

My budget-friendly solution has been to replace my ISP provided router with a 10 year old Netgear router that handles all the protocols my ISP does off eBay for £25.

I have a 4 storey townhouse so having this on the ground floor is useless when you’re on the top floor.

So I have a power line system installed which I’ve hooked into the modem. I’ve got a wired router in the front room that has all the front room tech worked in.

On the top floor I have an even older Netgear router a friend gave me, with OpenWRT installed plugged into the power line and running as an access point.

In total this whole system has probably cost me £80 to fully install as I was given the older Netgear.

Works beautifully, cost very little, and I’ve got a Guest Mode ap that turns on when I turn guest mode in Home Assistant, a simple “Hey Google turn on Guest mode”

It was one of them 1 week ban and all API tokens revoked things. I just told him to get his hand in his pocket

I gave a mate my username/password and immediately got blocked on Debrid when he used it…

Over the last few months I’ve made a whole bunch of different combinations of VMs, LXC and Docker until now, where I have Home Assistant, a NAS and a Debian server which I deploy docker stacks into.

At one point I had about 15 different machines I could spin up, but now it’s just the 3. The great thing about Proxmox is you can just create and destroy to your hearts content

I went Proxmox when I was in your shoes a few months ago.

It installs like a Linux OS so you already know how to do that.

You get a webui to work from.

From there, YouTube is a massive help. Watch videos on “how to install WHATEVER on Proxmox” and just replace WHATEVER with whatever you want to prod until it works.

My first service was Home Assistant, which I already ran on a Pi. I had that fully migrated in a day giving me a spare Pi.

Next it was Portainer, and used that for Adguard and Uptime Kuma, and then I got fancy and threw secondary servers of those services on my pi and put that on the network as a fail over.

So yeah, just install it and try to do shit, YouTube is your friend.

Holy shit I totally thought I was talking out of my arse lol

So you’re trying to get 2 instances of qbt behind the same Gluetun vpn container?

I don’t use Qbt but I certainly have done in the past. Am I correct in remembering that in the gui you can change the port?

If so, maybe what you could do is set up your stack with 1 instance in, go into the GUI and change the port on the service to 8000 or 8081 or whatever.

Map that port in your Gluetun config and leave the default port open for QBT, and add a second instance to the stack with a different name and addresses for the config files.

Restart the stack and have 2 instances.

This actually sounds like what they’re doing at Home Assistant.

Buy a HA Yellow or whatever, plug it in to your network and turn it on. It loads up and you log in on a web page on your phone. Install an app, sign up for Nabu Casa and get your services working outside the network.

And it’ll pick up a lot of what’s already on your network and set it all up for ya.