I don’t have an answer for you but I have one instead. When I attempted to do swarm my biggest challenge was shared storage. I was attempting to run a swarm with shared storage on a NAS. Literally could not run apps, ran into a ton of problems running stacks (NAS share tried SMB and NFS). How did you get around this problem?

Actually pretty helpful!

Interesting tidbit about the performance. It has been a bit of challenge getting “up to speed” with Incus/LXD from a guide and walkthrough perspective. Although I do find their documentation pretty well organized and useful.

Well that’s kinda why I came here to the greater community as I wasn’t really sure if there would be any performance gains or other upsides I’m not aware of. Based on general feedback, it appears that there’s no clear upside to incus.

That’s another fair point. I do have a couple of pi’s collecting dust. As someone else stated, I need to consider the time it takes me to get up to speed with incus. Can you elaborate on your experience going “from 0 to hero” with incus? Just curious.

Fair point. I’m most familiar with docker and proxmox. Sorta doing it for educational purposes but I also have critical services (critical to me) running that must be available.

Strictly from a container perspective, wouldn’t this workflow create more overhead? For example, an incus cluster for me it would be Debian hosts (layer 1), incus (layer 2), lxd container (layer 3), docker (layer 4), app/service (layer 5). A Docker Swarm cluster (for me) would be Debian hosts (layer 1), docker (layer 2), app/service (layer 3).

Granted a docker swarm cluster would negate the possibility of VMs without having to install something else on the hosts but asking since I’m trying to keep my services in containers.

Very true! Thanks.

Haven’t really looked into Podman as I read somewhere (if I remember correctly) that it takes quite a bit of rewrite (from docker compose to podman). Again, might be speaking out of turn here.

Thank you I appreciate your input!

You are probably right. Judging by their GitHub repo, their first release was in October of 2023. If I understand correctly, Incus is a fork of Canonical LXDs which is not so new??? Idk. Their documentation is quite good but there aren’t a lot of “guides” out there so yea.

I believe you are referencing the same post that got my curious about Incus and started playing around with it.

My biggest gripe is the manual installation of all services which I will do if it’s worth it. So far not sure that it is, hence the post to get more opinions.

There’s is a GUI you can install for Incus but it’s optional and not preinstalled.

I appreciate your input.

Honestly I had trouble understanding the inner workings of wine and how I may need to use to install windows software so I just watched a few videos on YouTube, downloaded a sample exe (I think I used notepad++) and try it out. 10 minutes later I was running software through wine no problem. Wrote myself a quick documentation guide for my future self and gtg.

This video helped me most. I’m a visual learner so it was easier for me to follow this instead of a written guide. Just be careful when you are following along tutorials (especially those written more than ~9 months ago) because the majority use syntax for OpenSSL 1.1.1 but that version is now EOL. You will need to use OpenSSL 3.x syntax as it’s the currently supported version of OpenSSL.

It’s not working because it is against Cloudflare’s ToS unfortunately.

First I would ask, do you really have to make Jellyfin publicly accessible?

If yes, are you able to setup a VPN (i.e. Wireguard) and access Jellyfin through that instead?

If you don’t want the VPN route then isolate the NPM and Jellyfin instance from the rest of your server infrastructure and run the setup you described (open ports directly to the NPM instance). That is how most people that don’t want to do Cloudflare are running public access to self hosted services. But first, ask yourself the questions above.

This is the only thing keeping me from moving everything from PhotoPrism to Immich. I have over 40,000 objects (photos and videos) on my server already. If I could somehow get immich up and going on and have immich “recognize” this giant directory of objects without having to reupload everything, I would switch tonight.

OnlyOffice is the only one that I’ve used that has a good looking UI, works out of the box and very good compatibility (across Microsoft and other document standards). Install is just one flatpak away. Highly recommend.

Honestly what really matters (imo) is that you do offsite storage. Cloud, a friends house, your parents, your buddy’s NAS, whatever. Just get your data away from your “production/main” site.

For me, I chose cloud for two main reason. First, convenience. I could use a tool to automate the process of moving data offsite in a reliable manner thus keeping my offsite backups almost identical to my main array and easy retrieval should I need it. Second, I don’t really have family or friends nearby and/or with the hardware to support my need for offsite storage.

There are lots of pros and cons of each, let alone add your specific needs and circumstances on top of it.

If you can use the additional drives later on in your main array, some other server or a different purpose then it may be worth while exploring the drives (my concern would be ease of keeping offsite data up to par with main data). If you don’t like it for one reason or the other, you can always repurpose the drives and give cloud storage a try. Again, the important thing is to do it in the first place (and encrypt it client side).

Well here’s my very abbreviated conclusion (provided I remember the details appropriately) when I did the research about 3 months ago.

Wasabi - okay pricing, reliable, s3 compatible, no charges to retrieve my data, pay for 1tb blocks (wasn’t a fan of this one), penalty for data retrieval prior to a “vesting” period (if I remember correctly, you had to leave the data there for 90 days before you could retrieve it at no cost. Also not a big fan of this one)

AWS - I’m very familiar with it due to my job, pricing is largely influenced by access requirements (how often and how fast do I want to retrieve my data), very reliable, s3, charges for everything (list, read, retrieve, etc). This is the real killer and largely unaccounted cost of AWS.

Backblaze - okay pricing, reliable, s3 compliant, free retrieval of data up to the same amount that you store with them (read below), pay by the gig (much more flexible than Wasabi). My heartburn with Backblaze was that retrieval stipulation. However, they have recently increased it to free up to 3x of what you store with them which is super awesome and made my heartburn go away really quickly.

I actually chose Backblaze before the retrieval policy change and it has been rock solid from the start. Works seamlessly with the vast majority of utilities that can leverage s3 compliant storage. Pricing wise, I honestly don’t think it’s that bad

Hope this helps

I’m currently using Backblaze. I also researched Wasabi and AWS.