tvcvt
There was a recent conversation on the Practical ZFS discourse site about poor disk performance in Proxmox (https://discourse.practicalzfs.com/t/hard-drives-in-zfs-pool-constantly-seeking-every-second/1421/). Not sure if you’re seeing the same thing, but it could be that your VMs are running into the same too-small volblocksize that PVE uses to make zvols for its Vans under ZFS.
If that’s the case, the solution is pretty easy. In your PVE datacenter view, go to storage and create a new ZFS storage pool. Point it to the same zpool/dataset as the one you’ve already got and set the block size to something like 32k or 64k. Once you’ve done that, move the VM’s disk to that new storage pool.
Like I said, not sure if you’re seeing the same issue, but it’s a simple thing to try.
It’s been on my agenda for a while to set up a Matrix server with an iMessage bridge with the idea I could interact with all of my message protocols from one place. I haven’t gotten around to it, but it might be worth a look.
I administer a handful of FreePBX systems that run pretty smoothly and are relatively friendly to use. Crosstalk Solutions on YouTube has a bunch of videos on the software if you want to get up to speed about how everything works.
My use of Mikrotik is somewhat limited, but I’m testing I’ve found routing between VLANs to be pretty performant. The key is to offload that routing to the hardware, which not all configurations allow. Check out the Network Berg’s YouTube channel and you should get a good idea.
Since you’re new to this and therefore probably haven’t set up too much infrastructure yet, let me put in a plug for ZFS for the file system underlying your data. That will unlock for you snapshots and the ability to send very efficient backups off site to another ZFS pool.
There are commercial offerings for all this (I think rsync.net will give you a ZFS target), but I essentially have a second NAS set up at another location for the purpose.
Beyond that, I’m also a big fan of BackBlaze B2, which can give you object-based online storage.
As far as what to back up, that’ll depend on your setup. I usually find it simplest to backup my entire VM and do recovery by restoring the VM.
Depends what you’re after, but I’ve always been partial to gparted live.
Hey, it definitely doesn’t have to be just a subdomain. You can have a record for example.com point to your VPS’s IP at the same time you have www.example.com, nextcloud.example.com, and jellyfin.example.com. Have as many services and domains as you like and the reverse proxy will direct the traffic to the correct local server based on the domain name.
One way you can do this flexibly is to have two records in your DNS: an A record pointing example.com to your VPS and a CNAME pointing *.example.com to example.com. That way, any subdomain will go to your VPS and you only have to add new services in the reverse proxy.
I can’t give direct experience here, but this is exactly the use case I’ve been meaning to spin up mailpiler for: https://www.mailpiler.org/. One of these days that will rise to the top of the priority list.
I keep my dotfiles in a got repo and just do a git pull your update them. That could definitely be a cron job if you needed.
SSH keys are a little trickier. I’d like to tell you I have a unique key for each of my desktop machines since that would be best practice, but that’s not the case. Instead I have a Syncthing shared folder. When I get around to cleaning that up, I’ll probably do just that and keep an authorize_keys and known_hosts file in git so I can pull them to needed hosts and a cron job to keep them updated.