I apologize in advance. It may become a very self oriented, narrowminded and illogical thread, assuming someone else wanna participate. I do not feel I am overly incompetent nor inexperienced, after all, I have worked within IT since 2000. Not going to drag a list of what I have done or should be able to do in this.
I just need to vent my frustration and while being a member of most forums pertaining to below mentioned solutions/systems/distros I do not feel I can get any answer from a community that might be oriented towards explaining how to do things in their own system rather that finding something that works for me. I have asked about particular challenges in each and every one of those places, at least tried.
This is not hardware related. I have good hardware. The target machine for this is a Huawei RH2288Hv3 server with almost 30TB LFF on a HBA RAIDZ compatible card, or rather it will be once I start implementing my new solution. 128GB RAM, Dual Xeon E5-2683 v4 and GB networking, with optional 10GB available.
What do I want to accomplish? Basically same as what I have today, but with some hosted apps.
I have tried to accomplish above with:
I have installed and uninstalled all of those at least thrice testing different things on a Supermicro test Server I have available with a minimal config I use for testing out stuff..
All fail for one or another reason. Yes they do. Or I am just not feeling safe with how to do to achieve it, whatever it was lacking.
TrueNAS Scale
Wonderful stuff. Perfect for storage. Made pools, made SMB, but it fails in two important aspects, or rather, I fail.
Ubuntu Server / Fedora Server
I list those as one since it boils down to the interface used: Cockpit-Project. Cockpit-Project seems to have intimate ties with 45Drives. Nothing wrong about that, but it also means that most if not all the plugins depends on 45Drives to maintain and develop them. I tried to configure a ZFS storage pool with a SMB share using the Cockpit-Projects plugins and was not able to get it to work despite also using a File-Sharing plugin they also have. There seems to be no backup solution implemented for that either so it kinda fails the prerequisites. Does that mean these servers os's are bad for this? Obviously not, since they seem to be used by others, duh, but I was unable to get almost anything of my prerequisites to run. I tried installing Podman and Portainer to see if that would lead to any working app, but could not get any to work properly, Podman being the worst container management interface I have ever seen. Oh, wait, I have only seen one another. Ah well.
Proxmox
Container management is different and rather full of new terminology like Linux Containers and what not. It's different from any other system I have touched so far and requires additional effort to towards learning new stuff. Again. However, see my post below, I am getting further faster than many others and a lot of functionality you only get with plugins and TrueCharts and stuff like that, comes out of the box so it should be a lot safer, in theory, to use. Some people claim CEPH is awesome.
OpenMediaVault
It seems good enough, but backup woes, rsync and all that. I am very concerned about the future of this solution since it does not seem to have any "mayor players" behind it and I need my stuff to work 10-15 years. Long term reliability?
- - -
So, as a conclusion, you might wonder what kind of miracle system I have today that successfully does everything I want from these others and is simple and reliable enough?
Windows Server 2022 with Hyper-V. I use SyncBack as backup solution that has worked perfectly well for over a decade, no software upgrades broke it ever. I have a virtual machine with a *nux os that can run Docker, and ONLY Docker for any apps I would need to run, see the list above, and do not need that guest OS to do anything else. However, it has it's hickups, Windows acts up sometimes and there are tiny things that are hard to diagnose that occasionally cause a BSOD. Not very cheap either.
I just need to vent my frustration and while being a member of most forums pertaining to below mentioned solutions/systems/distros I do not feel I can get any answer from a community that might be oriented towards explaining how to do things in their own system rather that finding something that works for me. I have asked about particular challenges in each and every one of those places, at least tried.
This is not hardware related. I have good hardware. The target machine for this is a Huawei RH2288Hv3 server with almost 30TB LFF on a HBA RAIDZ compatible card, or rather it will be once I start implementing my new solution. 128GB RAM, Dual Xeon E5-2683 v4 and GB networking, with optional 10GB available.
What do I want to accomplish? Basically same as what I have today, but with some hosted apps.
- An SMB Fileshare. (Have)
- Reliable backup of that FS to a network connected NAS, once a day, mirrored. (Have)
- A couple of Virtual machines , Windows. (Have)
- A webapp from Ubiquiti called UISP or UNMS to monitor my UI EdgeMAX devices. (Have)
- A webapp from Matomo to monitor web site traffic (Want - Docker seems the best way)
- A webapp to monitor websites uptime (Want - Docker seems the best way)
- Maybe something else, also via Docker probably
- Easy to manage. I will not be the only one handling this. I can not force a linux learning curve on relatives without my experience or knowledge. It just has to be easy and and run smooth out of the box.
I have tried to accomplish above with:
- TrueNAS (Scale)
- Ubuntu Server
- Fedora Server
- Proxmox
- OpenMediaVault
I have installed and uninstalled all of those at least thrice testing different things on a Supermicro test Server I have available with a minimal config I use for testing out stuff..
All fail for one or another reason. Yes they do. Or I am just not feeling safe with how to do to achieve it, whatever it was lacking.
TrueNAS Scale
Wonderful stuff. Perfect for storage. Made pools, made SMB, but it fails in two important aspects, or rather, I fail.
- The backup. Rsync. I just don't get it. Tried several methods but it is just like reading a different language. And from what I gather it has to run all the time, syncing all the time. Spent hours reading at the site. So I tried with Syncthing. Never managed to get it properly configured to start with. One backup as mirror daily. Period. How is that not possible?
- Docker. TrueNAS Scale comes with K8. It comes with Truecharts. Many apps available at the touch of a button. Yet, while I was testing the guys at Truecharts made some "feature update" and kinda wrecked the system and nothing worked. For just about EVERYONE, not just me. The only answer I could see was "reinstall the apps". I can very seriously live without that. I don't get why K8 is there, but never mind I try to install a docker Portainer standalone, pulling the image and starting it. No go. I tried altering some system wide setting in K8 and at first it worked, in my second installation it did not.
Ubuntu Server / Fedora Server
I list those as one since it boils down to the interface used: Cockpit-Project. Cockpit-Project seems to have intimate ties with 45Drives. Nothing wrong about that, but it also means that most if not all the plugins depends on 45Drives to maintain and develop them. I tried to configure a ZFS storage pool with a SMB share using the Cockpit-Projects plugins and was not able to get it to work despite also using a File-Sharing plugin they also have. There seems to be no backup solution implemented for that either so it kinda fails the prerequisites. Does that mean these servers os's are bad for this? Obviously not, since they seem to be used by others, duh, but I was unable to get almost anything of my prerequisites to run. I tried installing Podman and Portainer to see if that would lead to any working app, but could not get any to work properly, Podman being the worst container management interface I have ever seen. Oh, wait, I have only seen one another. Ah well.
Proxmox
Container management is different and rather full of new terminology like Linux Containers and what not. It's different from any other system I have touched so far and requires additional effort to towards learning new stuff. Again. However, see my post below, I am getting further faster than many others and a lot of functionality you only get with plugins and TrueCharts and stuff like that, comes out of the box so it should be a lot safer, in theory, to use. Some people claim CEPH is awesome.
OpenMediaVault
It seems good enough, but backup woes, rsync and all that. I am very concerned about the future of this solution since it does not seem to have any "mayor players" behind it and I need my stuff to work 10-15 years. Long term reliability?
- - -
So, as a conclusion, you might wonder what kind of miracle system I have today that successfully does everything I want from these others and is simple and reliable enough?
Windows Server 2022 with Hyper-V. I use SyncBack as backup solution that has worked perfectly well for over a decade, no software upgrades broke it ever. I have a virtual machine with a *nux os that can run Docker, and ONLY Docker for any apps I would need to run, see the list above, and do not need that guest OS to do anything else. However, it has it's hickups, Windows acts up sometimes and there are tiny things that are hard to diagnose that occasionally cause a BSOD. Not very cheap either.
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