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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Its not for everyone but I use Cisco Aironet APs with a virtual wireless LAN controller. Ubiquiti is popular among the community. They’re cost effective and work well in a home/small business environment. Aruba InstantOn are decent as well from my experience, but they’re cloud managed and this is self-hosted after all :)

    I’ve extensively used Cisco, Meraki, Fortinet, Cambium, Aruba, Ubiquiti and Juniper in a professional setting. Avoid Fortinet and Cambium APs if you can, my experience is that they can be pretty unstable.

    Generally speaking if you’re going to have multiple APs, you’ll want something that’s centrally managed so the APs are able to be aware of each other and manage clients effectively.


  • I’m looking into ways to get vGPU to work on VMware with the NVIDIA Tesla series, but as far as retail cards go, you will be hamstrung by the SR-IOV support and lack (or rarity) thereof.

    For now I just use some low end Quadro GPUs passed through to VMs running docker, which then carves them up on a per-container basis.

    Microsoft has GPU-P as you found, which is in Hyper-V on Windows 11 (maybe 10) and Windows Server 2025 and I believe works on retail cards.

    For Proxmox, you have the vgpu-unlock script which will work for some consumer NVIDIA GPUs. I’ve heard of ways of getting this to work on xcp-ng as well.


  • This is the method I use in your scenario, OP. You can use Folder2iso to get the files in that you need. If the OS has official VMware tools, you can also mount the VMware Tools ISO straight from workstation into the VM and this will give you the clipboard service so you can copy and paste files between the host and VM, if this scenario is permitted within your isolation needs.

    Otherwise, go the ISO route. You just can’t bring stuff out of the VM back to the host is all.



  • Its very much still needed and heavily utilised in the enterprise world. Volume size is usually the lowest priority when it comes to arrays, redundancy and IOPS (the amount of concurrent transactions to the storage) is typically the priority. The exception here would be backup and archive storage, where IOPS is less important and volume size is more important.

    As far as replacing sectors goes, I’ve never heard of this and I might just be ignorant on the subject but as far as I know you can’t “replace” a bad sector. Only mark it as bad and not use it, and whatever was there before is gone. This has existed since HDD days. This is also why we use RAID - parity across disks to protect data.

    Generally production storage will be in RAID-10, and backup/archive storage in RAID-6 or in some cases RAID-60 but I’m personally not a fan.

    You also would consider how many disks are in the volume because there is a sweet spot. Too many disks = higher likelihood of total array failure due to simultaneous disk failures and more data loss in the event it does, but too few disks and you won’t have good redundancy, capacity or performance either (depending on RAID level).

    The biggest change I see in RAID these days is moving away from hardware RAID cards and into software-based solutions like Microsoft Storage Spaces, md, ZFS and similar. These all have their own way of doing things and some can even synchronise the data with other hosts.

    Hope this helps!













  • TIL about Fedora, last I knew it was a rolling bleeding edge OS. Clearly lots of movement in the Red Hat camp.

    As for gaming, drivers were not the problem for me. Getting games to run with ease was. On OpenSUSE, I just install Steam, enable Proton and basically go at that point. Red Hat was non-trivial to do this. Could be a skill issue, but I had a better time getting going with OpenSUSE TW.


  • Sort of, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I started on OpenSUSE Leap but had issues getting things like GPU and Steam working. Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.

    TW works great for gaming and the enterprise features I care about (like domain joining) work out of the box. Its certainly harder to set up than something more geared towards home use (typically one of the various the downstreams of Debian or Arch) but that doesn’t bother me.


  • Second to this - for what its worth (and I may be tarred and feathered for saying this here), I prefer commercial software for my backups.

    I’ve used many, including:

    • Acronis
    • Arcserve UDP
    • Datto
    • Storagecraft ShadowProtect
    • Unitrends Enterprise Backup (pre-Kaseya, RIP)
    • Veeam B&R
    • Veritas Backup Exec

    What was important to me was:

    • Global (not inline) deduplication to disk storage
    • Agent-less backup for VMware/Hyper-V
    • Tape support with direct granular restore
    • Ability to have multiple destinations on a backup job (e.g. disk to disk to tape)
    • Encryption
    • Easy to set up
    • Easy to make changes (GUI)
    • Easy to diagnose
    • Not having to faff about with it and have it be the one thing in my lab that just works

    Believe it or not, I landed on Backup Exec. Veeam was the only other one to even get close. I’ve been using BE for years now and it has never skipped a beat.

    This most likely isn’t the solution for you, but I’m mentioning it just so you can get a feel for the sort of considerations I made when deciding how my setup would work.


  • As others have mentioned its important to highlight the difference between a sync (basically a replica of the source) vs a true backup which is historical data.

    As far as tools goes, if the device is running OMV you might want to start by looking at the options within OMV itself to achieve this. A quick google hinted at a backup plugin that some people seem to be using.

    If you’re going to be replicating to a remote NAS over the Internet, try to use a site-to-site VPN for this and do not expose file sharing services to the internet (for example by port forwarding). Its not safe to do so these days.

    The questions you need to ask first are:

    1. What exactly needs to be backed up? Some of it? All of it?
    2. How much space does the data I need backed up consume? Do I have enough to fit this plus some headroom for retention?
    3. How many backups do I want to retain? And for how long? (For example you might keep 2 weeks of daily backups, 3 months of weekly backups, 1 year of monthly backups)
    4. How feasible is it to run a test restore? How often am I going to do so? (I can’t emphasise test restores enough - your backups are useless if they aren’t restorable)
    5. Do you need/want to encrypt the data at rest?
    6. Does the internet bandwidth between the two locations allow for you to send all the data for a full backup in a reasonable amount of time or are you best to manually seed the data across somehow?

    Once you know that you will be able to determine:

    1. What tool suits your needs
    2. How you will configure the tool
    3. How to set up the interconnects between sites
    4. How to set up the destination NAS

    I hope I haven’t overwhelmed, discouraged or confused you more and feel free to ask as many questions as you need. Protecting your data isn’t fun but it is important and its a good choice you’re making to look into it