LIGISTX

Set up Cloudflare zero trust tunnel, or just use them for DDNS (dynamic dns). Then you could go to “mywebsiteaddress.com” and it would point to your Public IP. Noip.com does the same thing, many options exist for this.

You can’t set a static local IP? Why not? Or do you mean can’t set a static public IP? Why would it down the 100Mbit connection when you are using the other point to point interface? You must have some settings wrong, or there is physical issue with the setup.

I have no idea why you have all this vpn stuff happening…. But as far as the point to point connection, just instal the connectX’s, wire them together, and set up a subnet on both machines in the network settings. For windows, right click the adapter and go to ipv4 settings, set custom subnet that is different from all other subnets being used. Something like 10.10.10.1 (assuming you’re not using 10.10.10.x anywhere else), then do the same on the server but assign it 10.10.10.2. Then on the windows PC, mount your network share as 10.10.10.2 and it’ll go over the point to point link for file transfers. Obviously depending on what OS your server is running will dictate how you set up a static IP on that interface… but that’s how you do this. Also, iirc, they do not have connectx3 drivers for win 11, so hopefully you are on win 10. I had to purchase some newer Intel cards to get this working in my win 11 machine. I *think* x4’s are the newest that there is driver support for, and no, win 10 drivers won’t work. Plenty of info on this on Google, it’s a PITA.

You certainly can, but finding the correct and compatible glycol based coolant can be annoying. If everything is aluminum, or everything is copper, then DI water and biocide will be fine. If there is mixed metals, it just gets more complicated and annoying. what am I not correct about? All AIO mounting is more or less fine, as long as at least a portion of the radiator is above the pump, and the feed tube to the pump will never have air enter it (so either tubes facing down with a top mount rad, or tubes at the bottom on a vertical mount rad). There isn’t much else to it…. It’s just physics.

No…. Do not ask for people to start attacking your house. That’s an incredibly horrible idea. Any PC will work as a homelab. Instal proxmox and start virtualizing environments. Set up pfsense in a vm to start handling vlans, set up different machines on different vlans, maybe get some managed physical switches and put different devices on vlans, set up an AD server, etc etc.

If OP does this, just make sure to figure out if this loop has any mixed metals… if not, DI water plus some biocide is ideal. If it is mixed metals, I wouldn’t even bother trying to flush it, because refilling it would potentially be a massive headache. Could use car antifreeze as that’s usually designed for mixed metal application, but not always a guarantee.

How is it oriented? If you orient it so the pump is physically below the radiator, it’ll pretty much be fine even if it’s a little low on coolant. Basically, as long as the radiator is at the top of the case, it’ll be fine. Second best is a front mount with the tubes at the bottom. Front mount with tubes at the top is the worst option and can easily lead to gurgling noises as it starts to evaporate liquid.

Sounds like you are trying to bypass region restrictions imposed by your company’s IT department… if so, we can’t help you with that. If that is not what you are trying to do, I would figure out how to better describe your use case, because it certainly sounds like you are trying to use a corporate infra system outside of an approved region.

Because if any bots see an open FTP port, they are going to start attacking it... and bots are perminently scanning evry IP that exists. I used to epxose port 22 for SSH one of my r-pi's and I would get thousands of attempted logins per day. Secure your sigical assets, don't assume just because your friend is the only one trying to connect....... that your friend is the only one trying to connect, because it isn't just them trying ;). SFTP isn't any harder to set up, so might as well do it.

Don’t use ftp… hopefully you are at least using SFTP.

Netgate has stuff way cheaper than that for home users anyways. Just stay away from sg1100’s. I have purchased 4, and have had 5 fail or have randomly had corrupted eMMC… yes, you read that correctly. Even the RMA unit had issues. Love pfsense, hate sg1100’s.

Firstly… don’t tie other VM’s to the NIC pfsense is using. Give pfsense exclusive access to that network card in Proxmox via passing that PCIe device through to Proxmox. For VM’s you spin up within Proxmox, let it use proxmox’s ethernet connection (just leave it at default, which would then choose vmbr0 in your case), assign a vlan tag (assuming you checked the box in Proxmox settings to tell it this connection has vlans riding on it, I forget where that setting is…) and it’ll work. From the way you are describing it, it sounds like you have it setup wrong. I agree with @Bdavis, give that Lawrence systems video (and maybe more of his videos) a watch as well.

Switch goes after router…. But yes, this would be fine for 99% of people.

Pfsense or opnsense already exist, and are both free. Finding cheap old PC’s to run them is easy… I don’t think there is much room in this space for yet another solution. As said above, it’s the maintenance and upkeep that makes this difficult. Continually patching software is difficult, but pfsense has enterprise money behind it, thankfully.

I’m running proxmox on a pair of Samsung 980’s…. It’s been fine for 1.5 years, as has my friends running for the same time on a 980 as well, and another buddy for about a year running on a SATA Samsung drive.

Truenas 100% does support SMART… I am not sure why you think it doesn’t? If you are getting checksum errors…. You have a failing drive, bad RAM, or some hardware issue somewhere. You shouldn’t switch away from TrueNAS because it’s telling you you have issues, you should investigate the problem and fix it. TrueNAS is keeping your data healthy… don’t ignore data corruption issues, that indicates you have a hardware problem you need to solve. ZFS doesn’t require ECC. It’s a nice to have, but not needed. In a year or two (hopefully) you will be able to add drives to RAID Z vdevs to expand their storage size, but this is not in TrueNAS yet… it is in upstream builds of ZFS if I remember correct, but it’ll likely be a little while until TrueNAS incorporates it. But, thankfully, it does finally look like it’s actually on the horizon. But, by far the most important is that you are getting checksum errors. You need to figure out what is causing this and fix it. Either you have bad drives, bad controller, bad cables, or bad RAM. ZFS doesn’t throw errors for fun, ZFS is incredibly stable and is used in enterprise… if it’s reporting issues, do not ignore them.

Proxmox as your hypervisor and virtualize truenas under it for NAS duty. Then spin up VM’s for whatever else you need.

This… If you are getting over 2gigabit to a WiFi device, you are doing fantastic.

Pihole, for the most part, only does 1 thing for home users and thats adblocking. So either its working, or its not working.... there isn't much to do once you get it working. You can't really "run it wrong". Just need to spin up a docker container under unraid with it running (or a VM, either works), once its running you need to point your router at it for DNS (make sure pihole is set to use a static IP so this never changes). Once you are pointing your router at it for DNS, your router should then distribute that DNS address to all DHCP clients and boom, you are done. For HA, it really just depends on the devices you have. If they are compatible with HA out of the box, its incredibly easy to set them up. If not, things will get a LOT more exciting for you... Step 1 is really: is unraid up and running? Are you hosting SMB shares to take advantage of it as an actual NAS? Can you spin up VM's and docker containers successfuly? If yes, create a VM and use the HA OS, don't use the docker container. In my experience the full HA OS is much easier to use since you don't need to mess with docker networking at all. Once that is running, you pretty much just start plugging in smart devices and adding their integrations to HA.

Don't try and eat the elphant in 1 bite.... Get unraid working for your NAS needs, get users created, make sure all of that is happy and healthy and leave it be for a bit. Then work on HA. If it is installed correctly, it should see devices on your network that have integrations for them (assuming you have devices that are out of the box HA compaitlbe), and then you can just mess around via following tutorials and watching videos to get the general idea. There are SO many videos on youtube to help with this, just watch a bunch, itll eventually make sense. The key here is... if you can never figure it out in the first place, you wouldn't ever be able to maintain any of it anyways. So if you never put the time in to really learn it, as soon as anything goes wrong (which it will.... many times, thats how homelabbing goes), as soon as you encounter this, its all for nothing anyways. Pihole should be pretty simple as well, but again, don't try and do it all at once. This is the type of hobby that is a slow roll. I have had a home server for almost a decde now (2015), it took me 2 years of having truenas run baremetal to virtualize it, then took another few years to do much beyond just an ubuntu VM or two next to truenas, now I run a fully managed home network, unifi gear, pfsense firewall, proxmox running on my server with nearly a dozen VM's and even more docker containers. That didn't happen all at once, it took gradual learning and incremental improvements in understanding. Put the time in, and you will be rewarded. Thats really the only way this hobby can work.

Look into ZFS replication, it’ll do what you want assuming you set up your datasets decently. If not you may need to move data around to be a better architecture.

Set up zfs under the default raspbian OS for r-pi and use ZFS replication to send backups. You will need a VPN to connect the two together tho, I’d look into WireGuard.

Home assistant is what you want. Itll run on anything, and they even sell little raspberry pi like devices directly from home assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/ Or yuo can run it on a pi of your own, or as a VM, or bare metal.

I run pfsense firewall with unifi switches and AP's, imo, best of both worlds.

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