To a point. I completely revamped the off site backups when I ditched Veeam. Four (out of probably ten) VM’s were able to be backed up off-site successfully in PBS. I think I restored two of those because they were newer than what I had locally. The rest never made it off-site, probably due to the local PBS VM choking on disk write conflicts.

Second Protectli. They are solid little x86 boxes with no moving parts.

I had a binder full of video CD’s because my laptop only had a CD-RW drive. It usually took two disks to hold an entire film.

I’m still looking for a good solution that includes support for notes. I’m migrating off Exchange Online and using mailcow temporarily but the built in notes feature is sorely missed.

“Lets use Oracle DB for that.”

Statements made by the utterly deranged.

No. But there are a number of advantages of using PostgreSQL over the others.

☹️

CT Scan imagery. Apparently medical clinics have finally graduated from faxes to optical media. This was in 2025.

Not that I know of. The shift to Bittorrent after Limewire’s demise pretty much killed new Gnutella client development. There are a few desktop clients still under “active maintenance” but most of them haven’t been updated in ages.

Gnutella network is definitely still active, athough not even close to the level it once was. It has plenty of drawbacks but one of the few advantages over torrents is that it doesn’t need trackers. Just enough clients online to connect with one another.

You can even still find Shareaza with a quick search.

Those Protectli Vaults are neat little devices.

It definitely makes it more difficult to switch endpoints manually. I have multiple VPN connections with different exit nodes configured for failover in case one (or more) of them is unreachable. I don’t run into geoblocking issues very often but I also don’t route all my WAN traffic over VPN. Just some of it.

What you can automate depends on your routers capabilities. Mine is a Mikrotik which does have fairly extensive support for custom scripts. However, detecting Geoblocking is probably going to involve parsing HTTP responses which is beyond the capabilities of almost all consumer grade routers. You would have to effectively do a MITM attack (aka deep packet inspection) in order to accomplish that on something other than the client device.

TLDR: I manually change routes to a different VPN if needed but I very rarely run into Geoblocking issues.

I exclusively use my router as the VPN client for a few reasons. There are multiple services on my network that use the VPN. I’ve got static routes configured which effectively act as a kill switch and I can use QOS to prioritize traffic. It’s pretty much set it and forget it. You can use any VPN service as long at they offer a protocol your router supports. I use Proton via WireGuard and have for years.

Why not just use what you have until you can afford to and/or need to upgrade? SAS drives are more expensive because they typically offer higher performance and reliability. Hardware raid may be “old” but it’s still very common. The main risk with it is that if your raid card fails, you’ll have to replace it with the same model if you don’t want to rebuild your server from scratch.

I’ve been running an old Dell PowerEdge for several years with no issues.

Self hosting is a great opportunity to learn about some popular technologies and even acquire a few sysadmin skills. Required knowledge of a self-hosted solutions tech stack is not gatekeeping any more than required knowledge of tools and building materials is gatekeeping when it comes to renovating your bathroom. In either scenario, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s going to be a much more difficult job.

reverse proxies

That said, you should not be exposing any of your services to the public if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s a quick way to a bad time.

I use Proxmox for Work and Hyper-V at home. Looking forward to retiring my old Hyper-V host and replace it with Proxmox because Hyper-V is a pain.

Virtualization really helps with reliability. In particular, by allowing you to quickly take snapshots before doing anything destructive and by streamlining backup and recovery.

Agreed. This whole lawsuit is one giant looming catastrophe. If ISP’s are found liable for copyright infringement, that will be the effective end of the open internet. From there, I can already see the argument taking shape that ISP’s, telco’s, and account holders are all effectively accomplices in all sorts of crimes facilitated using communications networks.

OK recording industry. Riddle me this. If you manage to cut off my internet access, how am I supposed to purchase your media?

In this situation it’s not necessarily that it’s the “right” or “wrong” device. The better question is, “does it meet your needs?” There are pros and cons to running each service in its own VM. One of the cons is the overhead consumed by the VM OS. Sometimes that’s a necessary sacrifice.

Some of the advantages of running a system like Proxmox are that it’s easily scalable and you’re not locked into specific hardware. If your current Beelink doesn’t prove to be enough, you can just add another one to the cluster or add a different host and Proxmox doesn’t care what it is.

TLDR: it’s adequate until it’s not. When it’s not, it’s an easy fix.

Yeah, with something that size you’re pretty much limited to containers.

Edit: Which is totally fine, OP. Self hosting is an opportunity to learn and your setup can be easily changed as your needs change over time.