Slightly off topic and something I read from somewhere else, but make sure whatever you use can write the date & time onto the camera images, otherwise it isn’t usable for any police / insurance claims.

I’d guess all systems do this now, but just wanted it to be on your checklist of features.

If the camera doesn’t do it, then the storage server must.

(And make sure the clock is sync’d to something 😉)

Me too (btw).

Zoneminder is an option.

It’s been around since before containers were a thing, so fairly stable.

Not used it myself, but when I get around to needing cameras (I’m in a small house in a low crime area), then thats what I’m planning to use.

It has (had?) an integration in MythTv too, so I can see who’s a the door whilst watching TV at the same time.

Sigh, unfortunately not.

You should see the Linux community asking about which distro to use - now that’s where a pinned post is needed…

Define “properly”…

I see lots of solutions here, but some explanation of the basics are missing for someone starting out… this is not meant to sound preachy…

RAID is not a backup. It’s just better hardware fault tolerance. Delete does the same thing on RAID as it does one 1 drive.

Everyone syncs / copies / duplicates files somewhere, but you need a way of finding the previous backup in case something was deleted. This can be done with various ways / tech, but the point is - have some history not just 1 copy. Many pointers to 3-2-1 in here, but that also doesn’t mean 3 copies of just today’s data…

Backups are nothing without Restores. Test the backups. Various ways, but do it. Often.

And consider what you’re backing up and why… ie just your data? (Ie photos), or all the config files, databases, operating systems, etc to do a full restore on new metal. If the latter, I recommend keeping your data separate from the OS / config files, etc.

Source: decades of tech disasters 😁

Sooo… where’s the self-hosted material coming from if Bluray’s aren’t being produced any more?

If the high seas dries up, are we up shit creek and have to stream?

Oooh, names? (Of ISPs)

Microsoft Windows surely?

/s

Interesting.

I have an old free email provider that’s just passed the email service to another provider

I’m looking to move because I used to be able to use <anything-at-all>@my-email.domain and I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that anymore

I basically do what you’re doing - using email prefixes for the site I’m registering with… I even caught a company out once when I suddenly started getting spam from that email address. They’d sold my details…

Just to address the resourcing point…

VM resources can be over allocated, meaning that the hypervisor will try it’s best to meet their requirements, so you’re not wasting anything and could run more VMs than you have resources for.

Yes, VMs can also be configured to need a certain amount of resources and the hypervisor will have to stop, but I just wanted you to know it’s not fixed.

Performance is going to be the same.

Security is the main point here.

If this is your internet facing firewall then you want minimal layers of software complexity, so bare metal is the answer.

I’m a pfSense user, so I don’t know how regularly OPNsense is updated, but, it’s so much easier to just reboot that 1 box whilst everything else is mostly unaffected.

Better still, do a full device backup before an update and then you have a simple disaster recovery backup in case of any problems.

My journey:

Random stuff --> OwnCloud --> Nextcloud --> syncthing + Radicale

I gave up with the constant changes during upgrades and increasing dependencies for features that we weren’t using.

Now my system’s lean, light, responsive and just works (on a Pi3)

Prosody’s next…

Every way?

Well, apart from simplicity and security I suppose… and networking…

Oh, and storage…

But, before you think I’m arguing with you, I’m not… Containers have their place, VMs also, they are just for different uses.

In this case, I have a NAS, with Immich installed directly on it and I don’t have to mess with any abstraction layers… and it all plays nice with the other applications.

Maybe yours is different… but mine is better on bare metal.

Gotta chime in with a +1 for bare metal too…

How so?

Ah, I read these with a smile on my face because these problems never affect me…

I have individual, manually controlled electric heaters in each room.

Of course, the house heating is totally inefficient, and very expensive 🤔😉

I think this summarises all the other answers here

Backups… with LVM, if you’re trying to do a full system backup (ie with clonezilla, etc) then you have to backup the whole thing - you can’t backup just 1 drive.

I have a media server with 2x 2TB HDDs and 1x SSD in a LVM, split into Music, Video, TV… and the OS … and I can backup the individual files of course, but I can’t backup just the OS drive.

btrfs didn’t exist when I created it, but I use it on my NAS and it’s great.

I’ll be rebuilding my media server one day and change LVM to btrfs.

Hmm, ok, I’d not thought of the remote troubleshooting part.

The NAS is at a family member’s home, so the troubleshooting might come up in the future.

Thanks