Linux runs fine on Intel Macs. There are a couple peculiarities you’ll want to be aware of, though.

• Ventoy doesn’t work as an installer. The boot menu will come up, but any ISO you choose will hang
• Not all distros will recognize the wireless card and install the firmware (Be prepared to install it using a USB to Ethernet adapter)
• Same goes for the iSight web cam

Other than those initial hiccups, everything works pretty flawlessly.

The thing that immediately came to mind was mailpiler.org. It’s been on my list to stand up for a while, but I’ve never got around to it.

Awesome. I’m glad it helps. I’d be a little weary of using the same directory in multiple containers. File systems may or may not behave well with multiple machines writing to them. Not saying anything bad will happen, but do keep an eye out for issues.

I’m making some assumptions, namely that you’re using an unprivileged LXC container and the mount point is a bind mount.

Unprivileged LXC shift user ID numbers so that an escape won’t result in root access to the host. The root user (uid 0) in the container is actually uid 100000 from the perspective of the Proxmox host.

What I usually do is set ownership of my bind mounts to that high-numbered ID (so something like chown -R 100000:100000 /path/to/bind/mount) from Proxmox. Then the root user in the container will be able to set whatever permissions you need directly.

Since you’re interested in this kind of DIY, approach, I’d seriously consider thinking the whole process through and writing a simple script for this that runs from your desktop. That will make it trivial to do an automatic backup whenever you’re active on the network.

Instead of cron, look into systemd timers and you can fire off your script after, say, one minute of being on your desktop, using a monotonic timer like OnUnitActiveSec=60.

Thinking through the script in pseudo code, it could look something like:

rsync -avzh $server_source $desktop_destination || curl -d "Backup failed" ntfy.sh/mytopic

This would pull the back from your server to your desktop and, if the backup failed, use a service such as ntfy.sh to notify you of the problem.

I think that would pretty much take care of all of your requirements and if you ever decided to switch systems (like using zfs send/recv instead of rsync), it would be a matter of just altering that one script.

I had never heard of this, but it sounds fascinating — thanks for sharing! Definitely going to try to set this up this weekend.

Dokuwiki (dokuwiki.org) is my usual go-to. It’s really simple and stores entries in markdown files so you can get at them as plain text files in a pinch. Here’s a life lesson: don’t host your documentation in the machine you’re going to be breaking! Learned that the hard way once or twice.

For reverse proxies, I’m a fan of HAProxy. It uses pretty straightforward config files and is incredibly robust.

I can’t give direct experience here, but this is exactly the use case I’ve been meaning to spin up mailpiler for: https://www.mailpiler.org/. One of these days that will rise to the top of the priority list.