There are restaurants that sell green ant ice cream as well, I’m told it’s quite nice.

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

Back in the day when the self-hosted $10 license existed I was using JIRA Service Desk to do this. As far as ticketing systems go it was very easy to work with and didn’t slow me down too much.

I know you don’t want a ticket system but I’m just curious what other people will suggest because I’m in the same boat as you.

Currently I haphazardly use Joplin to take very loose notes and sync them to Nextcloud.

If you want a very simple option with minimal setup and overhead you could use Joplin to create separate notes for each “part” of your lab and just add a new line with a date, time and summary of the change.

I do also use SnipeIT to track all my hardware and parts, which allows you to add notes and service history against the hardware asset.

Other than that, I’m keen to see what everyone else says

Power

• 2x feeds into the rack (same circuit but we’ll work on that)
• Eaton 2000VA double conversion UPS on Feed A
• APC 1500VA line interactive UPS on Feed B (bypassed, replacing it with another double conversion 2kVA eventually)

Network

• 2x Dell N2048P, stacked (potentially getting replaced with 2x stacked Cisco 9300)
• FortiGate firewall
• 1000/50 FTTP primary Internet link
• 4G backup Internet link using a different Telco (the dream is to replace this with Starlink)

Storage

• Synology 4-bay NAS with 4x4TB in RAID-10 (for overflow storage from Virtual SAN cluster)
• HP MSL2024 8GB Fiber Channel LTO5 Tape autoloader for off-site backup

Compute

• Dell R520 running VMware ESX for Production (2x Xeon E5-2450L, 80GB DDR3, 4x500GB SSD RAID-10 for Virtual SAN, 1x10TB SATA “scratch” disk, 2x10G fibre storage NICs, 2x1G copper NICs for VM traffic)
• Dell R330 running VMware ESX for backups and DR (1x Xeon E3-1270v5, 32GB DDR4, 2x512GB SSD RAID-1, 2x4TB HDD RAID-1, 8G FC card for tape library)

A second prod host will join the R520 soon to add some redundancy and mirror the Virtual SAN.

All VMs are backed up and kept in an encrypted on-site data store for at least 4 weeks. They’re duplicated to tape (encrypted) once a month and taken off site. Those are kept for 1 year minimum. Cloud backup storage will never replace tape in my setup.

Services

As far as “public facing” goes, the list is very short:

• Bludit
• Lemmy
• Mailcow
• Thelounge

Though I do run around 30-40 services all up on this setup (not including actual non-prod lab things that are on other servers or various SBCs around the place).

If I had unlimited free electricity and no functioning ears I’d be using my Cisco UCS chassis and Nexus 5K switch/fabric extenders. But it just isn’t meant to be (for now, haha).

Depends on your use case, but you can use some Group Policy Objects on Linux (at least with sssd). See: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/windows_integration_guide/sssd-gpo

You can also grant sudo to AD group members in the sudoers file, which is how I’ve done it in a corporate setting.

I believe there are 3rd party ADMX templates you can add to your domain controllers to get more granular as well as additions to the AD schema, but I haven’t gone that deep with it since between sssd and the sudoers file I can achieve what I need to.

Authelia is popular, as is Keycloak. I believe Red Hat develops Keycloak or at least has a hand in it.

I’m on this journey as well, figuring out what I’m going to use. Currently most of my services just use LDAP back to AD but I’m looking to do something more modern like SAML, oAuth or OpenID Connect so that I can simplify the number of MFA tokens I have.

Just as an anecdote you may find useful - Personally I used to run an Active Directory for Windows and FreeIPA for my Linux machines and have managed to simplify this to just AD. Linux machines can be joined, you can still use sudo and all the other good stuff while only having one source of truth for identity.

Thanks for letting me know (and to the others that did as well). I might be able to jump sooner than anticipated, I’ll check my client tonight for the feature. I’m using it on the Apple TV, I think its the Swiftfin flavour of the client.

As a side note, it sure is a refreshing change to not be downvoted into oblivion for simply having out of date information and respectfully informed in the comments.

Whilst some might not find it a huge deal, not being able to shuffle all episodes of a specific TV show is a deal breaker for me. I do have Jellyfin deployed and configured, ready to go for when the feature arrives. Plex feels a lot more polished as well, but I can get over that.

Zabbix can do everything you’re asking and can be connected to Grafana if you want custom visualisations. Most importantly, it contextualises what you need to know on the dashboard, as in it only tells you about things that require your attention.

You’re of course able to dive into the data and look at raw values or graphs if you wish, and can build custom dashboards too.

I’ve used it in both home lab and production scenarios monitoring small to mid size private clouds, including windows and linux hosts, docker, backups, SAN arrays, switches, VMware vSphere, firewalls, the lot. It’s extremely powerful and not terribly manual to set up.

If metrics is all you want and aren’t too fussed on the proactive monitoring focus, Netdata is a great option for getting up and running quickly.

Not that I’m advocating for Apple’s inexcusable behaviour, but as someone who’s worked in IT managing fleets of hundreds of Thinkpads (among others like Apple, Dell, Acer, HP), respectfully, they are far less reliable and durable than a MacBook. The only devices I had with higher failure rates than ThinkPads were Acer laptops.

They are certainly more repairable, but so are others like Dell and HP. Lenovo were one of the earlier manufacturers to pull some anti-repair moves such as soldering memory to the mainboard (on the Yoga models).

I think your statement is far more accurate in the days when IBM owned the ThinkPad brand, but unfortunately Lenovo have run it into the ground as far as quality goes.

All that said, I certainly hope we see more projects like Framework so that these big manufacturers can get some sort of reality check.

Don’t have an answer for you but just wanted to say thanks for highlighting the existence of this software, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for