The casting bit is the missing piece for me.

I’ve built a RasPi with Kodi for our caravan, to use Plex and stream our free-to-air TV here in Australia (using Musk’s space innernets). I just miss being able to cast from my phone, for the occasional thing I can’t do with a Kodi add-on.

+1 to everything you just said - I’ve been using Immich for a little less (370 days, thanks to the same button). It’s feature rich and rock solid.

Only thing I hope they add to the mobile app is the Years/Months/Days option, to make it easy to quickly group, then find, your photos. It’s the one thing that keeps me using my phone’s own Photos app (locally - no cloud sync).

Do yuo have IDP/IPS turned on on pfSense? My OPNsense on my 1Gbps fibre will easily drop from an average of 900Mbps down to around 300Mbps-500Mbps, if I turn on IDS.

I’m still using it via mbasic. It looks like shit, but I can get to my messages and reply, etc.

In your mobile browser, instead of m[dot]facebook[dot]com, try mbasic[dot]facebook[dot]com.

Very no frills FB for mobile, that lets you access Messenger. It looks like arse, but it beats using their spyware.

Yes - I do this with Pi-hole. It happens to be the same domain name that I host (very few) public services on too, so those DNS names work both inside and outside my network.

It all depends on how you want to homelab.

I was into low power homelabbing for a while - half a dozen Raspberry Pis - and it was great. But I’m an incessant tinkerer. I like to experiment with new tech all the time, and am always cloning various repos to try out new stuff. I was reaching a limit with how much I could achieve with just Docker alone, and I really wanted to virtualise my firewall/router. There were other drivers too. I wanted to cut the streaming cord, and saving that monthly spend helped justify what came next.

I bought a pair of ex enterprise servers (HP DL360s) and jumped into Proxmox. I now have an OPNsense VM for my firewall/router, and host over 40 Proxmox CTs, running (at a guess) around 60-70 different services across them.

I love it, because Proxmox gives me full separation of each service. Each one has its own CT. Think of that as me running dozens of Raspberry Pis, without the headache of managing all that hardware. On top of that, Docker gives me complete portability and recoverability. I can move services around quite easily, and can update/rollback with ease.

Finally, the combination of the two gives me a huge advantage over bare metal for rapid prototyping.

Let’s say there’s a new contender that competes with Immich. They offer the promise of a really cool feature no one else has thought of in a self-hosted personal photo library. I have Immich hosted on a CT, using Docker, and hiding behind Nginx Proxy Manager (also on a CT), accessible via photos.domain on my home network.

I can spin up a Proxmox CT from my custom Debian template, use my Ansible playbook to provision Docker and all the other bits, access it in Portainer and spin up the latest and greatest Immich competitor, all within mere minutes. Like, literally 10 minutes max.

I have a play with the competitor for a bit. If I don’t like it, I just delete the CT and move on. If I do, I can point my photos.domain hostname (via Nginx Proxy Manager) to the new service and start using it full-time. Importantly, I can still keep my original Immich CT in place - maybe shutdown, maybe not - just in case I discover something I don’t like about the new kid on the block.

That’s a simplified example, but hopefully illustrates at least what I get out of using Proxmox the way I do.

The cons for me is the cost. Initial cost of hardware, and the cost of powering beefier kit like this. I’m about to invest in some decent centralised storage (been surviving with a couple li’l ARM-based NASes) to I can get true HA with my OPNsense firewall (and a few other services), so that’s more cost again.

I’ve written my wiki so that, if I end up shuffling off this mortal coil, my wife can give access to one of my brothers and they can help her by unpicking all the smart home stuff.

I’m using self hosted wiki.js and draw.io. Works a treat, and trivial to backup with everything in Postgres.

OK, I can definitely see how your professional experiences as described would lead to this amount of distrust. I work in data centres myself, so I have plenty of war stories of my own about some of the crap we’ve been forced to work with.

But, for my self-hosted needs, Proxmox has been an absolute boon for me (I moved to it from a pure RasPi/Docker setup about a year ago).

I’m interested in having a play with LXD/Incus, but that’ll mean either finding a spare server to try it on, or unpicking a Proxmox node to do it. The former requires investment, and the latter is pretty much a one-way decision (at least, not an easy one to rollback from).

Something I need to ponder…

I’m intrigued, as your recent comment history keeps taking aim at Proxmox. What did you find questionable about them? My servers boot just fine, and I haven’t had any failures.

I’m not uninterested in genuinely better alternatives, but I don’t have a compelling reason to go to the level of effort required to replace Proxmox.

No headaches here - running a two node cluster with about 40 LXCs, many of them using Docker, and an OPNsense VM. It’s been flawless for me.

Might be time to look into Proxmox. There’s a fun weekend project for you!