Hello everyone,

I am about to renovate my selfhosting setup (software wise). And then thought about how I could help my favourite lemmy community become more active. Since I am still learning many things and am far away from being a sysadmin I don’t (just) want tell my point of view but thought about a series of posts:

Your favourite piece of selfhosting

I thought about asking everyone of you for your favourite piece of software for a specific use case. But we have to start at the bottom:

Operating systems and/or type 1 hypervisors

You don’t have to be an expert or a professional. You don’t even have to be using it. Tell us about your thoughts about one piece of software. Why would you want to try it out? Did you try it out already? What worked great? What didn’t? Where are you stuck right now? What are your next steps? Why do you think it is the best tool for this job? Is it aimed at beginners or veterans?

I am eager to hear about your thoughts and stories in the comments!

And please also give me feedback to this idea in general.

  • hamsda@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE, Hypervisor), my beloved. Especially in combination with Proxmox Backup Server (PBS).

    My homelab would not exist without Proxmox VE, as I’m definitely not going to use Nutanix or VMWare. I love working with linux and Proxmox VE is literally debian with a modified kernel and a Management Webinterface on top.

    I first learned about Proxmox VE in my company, while we still had VMWare for us and all of our customers. We gradually switched everyone over to Proxmox VE and now I’m using it at home too. Proxmox is an Austrian (my country) company, so I was double hyped about this software.

    A few things I like most about Proxmox VE

    • Ease of access to the correct part of the documentation you currently need (*)
    • Open Source
    • Company resides in my country (no US big tech walled garden)
    • Linux / Debian based, so no learning new OS’s and toolchains
    • Free version available
    • Forum available and actually used

    (*) What I mean by ease of access to the correct part of the documentation is: Whenever you’re in the WebUI and need to decide on some settings, there’s a button somewhere on the same page which is going to lead you directly to the portion of the documentation you need right now. I don’t know why this seems like such a great luxury, every software should have something like this.

    Next steps

    My “server” (some mini PC with spare parts I already had) is getting too weak for the workload I put it through, so I’m going to migrate to a better “server”. I already have a PC and most of the necessary parts, I just need some SSDs and an AMD CPU.

    Even migrating from PVE (old) -> PVE (new) couldn’t be easier:

    • PVE (old): create last backup to PBS, shut down PVE (old)
    • PVE (new): add PBS, restore Backups
    • ???
    • profit

    I think it’s great to have a series posting about personal achievements and troubles with selfhosting. There’s so much software out there, you always get to see someone doing something you didn’t even know could be done or using a software you didn’t realize even existed. Sharing is caring.