What was confirmed:

  • you don’t need a separate box for “servers” – it’s big and with its own fans (noisy).
  • you do not need an uninterruptible power supply – the power supply does not turn off (during this time there was not a single interruption with the power supply, and somewhere in the last 10 years there was one after a thunderstorm), and if it turns off, then it is not such a problem to wait until it turns on – the main thing on laptops is, and there are their own batteries.
  • raid is not needed – if there is an auto-installation of the system and data backups, this is something superfluous for the home system. There are no requirements for corporate systems to work non-stop at all costs.
  • WiFi as the basis of the network – works well, all client devices (phones, laptops, computers and others). I note that my servers are connected by wire via a 1Gb switch to a WiFi router, because it’s easier this way. Wifi in the tests may be a little slower than a wire, but it’s still faster than my internet, so there’s no difference.
  • .local domains – work well, automatically register, I plan only to increase usage.
  • install the system on a usb flash drive, and use the only internal disk exclusively for data (folder /cloud). I knew it for a long time, I used it for the first time in practice when testing UNRAID. I didn’t like it then, but now I’ve already appreciated it.
  • I use an ultra-compact USB flash drive. So that they don’t hang out in the connector. No problems were noticed, the flight is normal.
  • TP-Link TL-SG108E switch – works well, no questions asked.
  • Proxmox VE is better than Cockpit for creating virtual machines. Mainly due to the better connection quality to the screen – as soon as the Cockpit improves in this regard, then I don’t need Proxmox VE either. You can use the free version while it is available and better than Cockpit.
  • Cockpit – the web UI for configuring Linux – is quite good. Of course, I always want to be better. There are essentially no alternatives.
  • ZFS didn’t cause any problems, Goode.
  • Automatic shutdown by time and activation by wake on lan – showed itself well, I like it. There was an article earlier in more detail.
  • Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS is clearly weaker than the Raspberry Pi 4, but network tasks are dragging, and cheap relative to the Pi. In general, if you need to put something low-power somewhere, then this is a good option. At the same time, it sometimes freezes (from overheating?) and there is no hdmi – it is quite difficult to connect and see what is there at this moment, it is only clear that the network is not working.
  • KopiaUI it still works well on the mac.
  • podman is still the best thing for containers at home – it allows you to run multiple linked containers, and this is any non-trivial application.

So-so:

  • TrueNAS – works well as a NAS. There are complaints about applications - they run through Kubernetes (inefficient in terms of resources and there is no point on one node) and the applications themselves had to be rearranged with data loss (an incompatible change to helm charts somewhere in the gpu configuration area, even for packages that do not need a gpu). As a result, it seems to be normal, but you can put something easier. BTRFS, tasks (scrubbing, snapshots, smart and rsync), SMB and SFTP are enough. Let’s see, maybe I’ll move to a lighter piece of hardware and OS.
  • An external hard drive case – it’s USB 3.0. It’s like a good USB stick. In principle, it is enough, but it could be better. From an interesting point: at some point I actually plugged it into the USB 2.0 port on the mini PC (for beauty, I didn’t notice that the 2.0 was only on the back). And in this form it worked for several months, fully fulfilling its role.
  • Now almost all USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 flash drives. The marketing names USB 3.1 Gen1 and USB 3.2 Gen1 also mean 3.0. It is better to eat, but there are few of them, and they already cost thousands of rubles.
  • SD Card (aka TF Card) is not much better, and on the Internet they say reliability is even worse. But you can use whatever you like.

What didn’t you like:

  • huawei ax3 pro (wifi) – does not allow you to make an L2TP/IPsec server/client, does not allow you to combine several houses into one network, does not allow you to add your DNS records, does not allow you to configure DHCP in almost any way (only ip/name/mac bundle). At the same time, the problem with DHCP can only be solved by manual settings, because the router, even with its own DHCP disabled, does not allow such packets to pass from one device to another - some kind of pseudo-security. There is hope that something from the list will be improved practically, because there are no regular updates to the router. Of the competitors, Keenetic and OpenWRT are the closest. OpenWRT is not installed on this device (although it’s inside with a custom GUI, but you can’t change it to your version and they haven’t added hardware support to upstream). Someday I will move (maybe in the WiFi7 area), so far there is no special priority here. How WiFi works quite well.
  • two out of three Beelink U59 SSDs burned out (stopped being displayed in the system). This is unpleasant, with such reliability, it is better to take the minimum size and change it to a normal locally purchased one, and put these in raid until they die.
  • Pi KVM – using Pi4 as KVM. Somehow it’s troublesome: you put the wire in the wrong place and it doesn’t work, the wires are somehow inconveniently inserted and intertwined. As a result, I bought a wireless keyboard + mouse kit, but with a USB adapter. And I took the HDMI USB receiver from the Pi KVM, connected it directly to the laptop, watched it through QuickTime – I like it much more and the expensive Pi4 is released.
  • Somehow a lot of unnecessary hardware – Pi4 and 2 U59 (despite the fact that 3 minicomputers and 1 microcomputer are used – i.e. about half). One of the unused U59 (pve) is actually half-used – it is only busy because there are no other tasks for it. You can at least put Win11 back on U59. But what to do with Pi4 is unclear, except to sell, somehow I do not have a use for it, anyway (especially when x86 can also be fanless for half the price to buy – BMax B1 Plus (N3350, 6Gb RAM)).
  • Now a lot of fake flash drives and sd cards are being sold on the markets: the size is really 2GB, the brains are tweaked and some 1Tb reports, and everything over 2GB is simply lost. It is necessary to look at the reviews, and without reviews, just do not take them.
  • Still, ARM computers are attractive (first of all, low power consumption and, as a result, fanless), but many things do not work on them yet. The same NextCloud did not take off on Pi4, although it seems like it should have. Or you want to launch some kind of docker image, but there is no one for ARM at all.