To setup proxmox, you could install it on top of your current debian install : https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_11_Bullseye

Docker in a lxc container is also used quite a lot with proxmox and would allow you to keep some resources without allocating everything for a docker VM.

More server oriented than a classical desktop: https://cockpit-project.org/

I would start by moving the services running on the host to a VM, less downtime for those when switching to proxmox.

Also, if possible, address the data issue before migrating. If you can add more disks, you could setup a new zfs pool, ready to be used by proxmox.

And don’t forget to backup (to external storage), you never know what could go wrong.

Great post, thanks for sharing 👍

I would suggest to give Ansible a try, it would make it really easy to deploy a new service with all required users and config.

Good news, DNS over TCP in musl has been fixed since v1.2.4 released in May https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2023/05/02/1

So if you use alpine >= 3.18 you should no longer have this issue.

It looks like you are trying to reinvent parts of kubernetes.

I would recommend to give it a try, it’s easy to spin up with k3s, even on a single node!

Set imagePullPolicy to Always in your deployments (this is more or less k8s version of compose) and latest tag, then every time you restart a deployment, you get the latest version, with auto rollback. Set the tag to a static version and it doesn’t update as long as you don’t change it.

For gitops, add fluxcd.io and you’re set, it doesn’t even require a CI workflow.

For the data copy, k8s provides Volume Snapshots https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/volume-snapshots/

Syncthing is also an option.

10w is ± 87kwh/year. Depending on your electricity cost, it would take 1 to 5 years to gain anything from switching to a picopsu, that’s it if you even manage to gain 10w, which is not a certainty.

If you really care about those 10w watts, selling the optiplex and getting a second G3 would be a better option I think.

The documentation clearly states that idle vms on free tier could be reclaimed: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm#freetier_topic_Always_Free_Resources_Infrastructure

Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true: CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 15% Network utilization is less than 15% Memory utilization is less than 15% (applies to A1 shapes only)

So don’t create a 4 core 32gb ram vm to run a vpn, and you should be fine :)