I really wanted it to work, for me it made the most sense I thought, as little virtualization as I could do. VM felt like such a heavy layer in between - but it just wasn’t meant to work that way. You have to essentially run your LXC as root, meaning that it’s essentially just the host anyway so it can run docker. Then when you get down to it, you’ve lost all the benefits of the LXC vs just running docker. Not to mention that anytime there was even am minor update to proxmox something usually broke.

I’m surprised Proxmox hasn’t added straight-up support for containers, either by docker, podman, or even just containerd directly. But, we aren’t it’s target audience either.

I’m glad you can take my years of struggling to find a way to get it to work well and learn from it.

Not at all. Proxmox does a great job at hosting VMs and giving a control plane for them - but it does not do containers well. LXCs are a thing, and it hosts those - but never try to do docker in an LXC. (I tried so many different ways and guides and there were just too many caveats, and you end up always essentially giving root access to your containers, so it’s not great anyway). I’d like to see proxmox offer some sort of docker-first approach will it will manage volumes at the proxmox level, but they don’t seem concerned with that, and honestly if you’re doing that then you’re nearing kubernetes anyway.

Which is what I ended up doing - k3s on proxmox VMs. Proxmox handles the instances themselves, spins up a VM on each host to run k3s, and then I run k3s from within there. Same paradigm as the major cloud providers. GKE, AKS, and EKS all run k8s within a VM on their existing compute stack, so this fits right in.

Just focus on one project at a time, break it out into small victories that you can celebrate. A project like this is going to be more than a single weekend. Just get proxmox up and running. Then a simple VM. Then a backup job. Don’t try to get everything including tailscale working all at once. The learning curve is a bit more than you’re probably used to, but if you take it slow and focus on those small steps you’ll be fine.

I think at this point I agree with the other commenter. If you’re strapped for storage it’s time to leave Synology behind, but it sounds more like it’s time to separate your app server from your storage server.

I use proxmox, and it was my primary when I got started with the same thing. I recommend build out storage in proxmox directly, that will be for VM images and container volumes. Then utilize regular backups to your Synology box. That way you have hot storage for drives and running things, cold storage for backups.

Then, inside your vms and containers you can mount things like media and other items from your Synology.

For you, I would recommend proxmox, then on top of that a big VM for running docker containers. In that VM you have all of your mounts from Synology into that VM, like Jellyfin stuff, and you pass those mounts into docker.

If you ever find yourself needing to stretch beyond the one box, then you can think about kubernetes or something, but I think that would be a good jump for now.

Seconded. If they can’t optimize their code (which, I have never seen applications require 256 gigs of ram even in FAANG so I find that doubtful), then they need to rent a machine. The cloud is where you rent it. If not Google, then AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, any number of places let you rent compute

Researchers always make some of the worst coders unfortunately.

Scientists, pair up with an engineer to implement your code. You’ll thank yourself later.

Sounds like it, I think docker is exactly what you’re looking for

There’s many ways to do this. Saving the disk state is one, I believe that’s what the other person suggested - essentially stores the disk as an image which then you use for future vms as your jumping off point. This is also essentially how workstations are deployed at companies. (Essentially being the key word). Cloud providers have different names for this too, in AWS this is called their AMI.

Another option is Ansible, which essentially handles deploying a VM by running your scripts for you. I haven’t played too much with this, and I doubt it works with VirtualBox, but it’s something you may want to look into, it would definitely uplevel your skills.

Thirdly is dependent on what you actually use your VM for, you haven’t given your use cases but this is one of the reasons containerization became such a thing - because when running an app we mostly don’t care about the underlying system. It may be worth it to learn about docker.

Yeah personally I see it as Microsoft was forced to allow kernel access, and crowd strike proved why the courts shouldn’t be allowed to make a technical decision like that

Is there a site like this for other refurbished items beyond storage? More cases, tam, cpus?

The article said there’s a phone companion app

There’s a good chunk of us who used it with the web, and they’re adding that to the vast Google graveyard. That in and of itself makes me excited to see an alternative because Google will kill the app version on a whim too.

That’s what I thought was happening, There’re no other system things that need to do?

Agreed. Needs to be a required mount in fstab. System won’t even start then if the mount fails, docker always has access

The highest bar to getting into Linux isn’t the technical, the setup, the hardware or anything. It’s the people the ego. Those have always been the largest barrier.

Their site leaves a bit to be desired, but they do have PDF versions along with many others it will scrape in

damn I’ve been out of the loop on that one for a while! Agreed, I set up Immich and it’s pretty much a drop-in replacement now

Did they really kill off free photo backup? That’s so incredibly shitty, they even compressed them!

Did they really kill off free photo backup? That’s so incredibly shitty, they even compressed them!

Yeah, op didn’t say you couldn’t opt out of it. It’s that they’re doing it at all. Every year they ask for a little bit more info, chipping away, making it harder and more obscure to opt out. That’s enshittification.