Yeah personally I’m not a fan and I would rather follow a well-written guide than spend even more time auditing such a script (which would be even more difficult if you’re not experienced with Proxmox). For maintenance’s sake it’s also risky getting your service set up like this as you don’t know how the script set things up and it’s harder to fix things if they go wrong.

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I virtualize my NAS because it’s small (only several TB) and therefore it can be backed up like any other VM with PBS or dumped as a qcow image. A full restoration is extremely easy because I can simply have another node pull the backup from PBS. Also I can migrate the entire NAS to another node so it stays up when I have downtime.

TIFF is a classic storage format, but PNG is common for web images and isn’t going away either. DNG is for RAW sensor output from professional cameras and is not used for edited and published images. However if you’re archiving your photo collection or something than keep the DNGs!

Those mini PCs are actually have extremely quiet fans at idle and you generally won’t notice the noise. The good part about an actively cooled system is that you have the ability to load up the machine without throttling in case there’s a sudden activity spike.

I haven’t run HA bare-metal but I have run HA on Proxmox and I’ve run Proxmox on these mini PCs. In my use case they supplement the main rack server in my cluster.

I run a non-federated Matrix server for my family with synapse, it’s behind nginx and the setup is pretty straightforward if you know what you’re doing. It does chat, voice, and video with screenshare nicely, though I don’t know now well it scales to a large group.

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Homelabbing is an amazing hobby if you’re into this stuff, and you can go as far down the rabbit hole as you like :)

My lab also supports my coding endeavors since I can deploy VMs, run a local Git server, and so forth. Most of my development is done in a SPICE VDI on Proxmox.

The easiest way would be to just bridge the ISP router if it supports that feature. To connect back to the ISP router’s webui you can setup outbound NAT on your second router (generally only available on enterprise gear). Don’t double NAT unless there’s no other option.

If you can bridge, the sky’s the limit in terms of what gear you can have on the backend. My bridged modem is directly connected to a L3 switch which links to my Proxmox cluster, and my Opnsense router exists virtually in the cluster and can be migrated freely between the machines.