You’ve got some good options, but let me mention that if you dig Odoo, there are alternatives to pretty much all the “Enterprise” apps. Just use the Third Party App Store or browse through the OCA (https://apps.odoo-community.org/shop).

As others have said, ersatztv would be the way to go, but apparently is no longer being developed. I’m still using it, but there was a conversation a few days ago that might have some leads on good replacements: https://lemmy.ml/post/44804563

Yeah, I sort of figured it’d be too much. It looks like there are a bunch of booking plugins for Wordpress. That’s definitely where I’d start my search in your shoes.

I’ve been using Odoo CE for some projects and I know that it has apps for scheduling and booking, but if you want to add this to an existing website, that may be overkill.

What platform does your site use? That may help target some suitable options.

Also, check out this list and you may get some ideas: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#booking-and-scheduling

I don’t have a real preference, but one more advantage to the plugin route is that if you need something that’s not available, cobbling together a plugin is much simpler than modify most projects directly.

I recently spent a lot of time doing this with Odoo and I was very grateful for the modularity.

By the way, in case you haven’t found it, there is a pretty decent wysiwyg editor plugin for DokuWiki. I use it at work and it’s been pretty simple for my users.

I’m sure you already know this, but do note that with Z2 compared to mirrors, you should expect a decrease in performance and an increase in rebuild times in the event of a drive failure. Not saying don’t do it, but make sure the perceived benefits are worth the trade offs.

Here’s some more info on the topic: https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/.

I hear you and I’m all for diving in—breaking things is half the fun.

If you’re after something straightforward for NAS software, another thing to consider would be vanilla Debian with Cockpit and 45Drives’ excellent filesharing plug in. I like the combo quite a bit.

Enjoy the journey!

Personally, I wouldn’t bother wiping the asustor. There’s nothing wrong with OpenMediaVault, but it’s not any more straight forward than TrueNAS. If you’re looking for beginner simple, maybe something like HexOS or CasaOS would be more to your liking. But that makes me wonder about Proxmox for this setup. I love Proxmox and use it extensively at home and at work. It’s incredibly powerful and flexible, but it’s a lot less hand-holdy than TrueNAS. By all means give them all a try—thats the fun—but expect a learning curve before things really click.

This sounds like a very fun project. I also run a small local news organization and we use a company that specialize in managing small news sites (Our-Hometown.com, in case you want to give them a look). We’ve been very happy with their service for the past 25 years, so I don’t plan on leaving them any time soon, but, as a self-hoster, I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how I’d put together the infrastructure. I think my preference is Nginx plus Varnish for caching. Also, in case you’re not aware of it, Automattic makes a plugin for newsrooms that adds some industry-specific features (https://github.com/Automattic/newspack-plugin) that looks interesting, though I haven’t tried it.

Lee Hutchinson at ArsTechnica wrote an interesting series about hosting a weather news site in Houston that I thought was awful interesting and might be worth a read. Here’s part 1 and part 2.

Sure. For full disclosure, I also run separate compute and storage. I do think separating storage from a compute cluster can be a good option, but not necessarily for the use case described in the original question.

I’d recommend against separating storage and compute in most small environments. Separating them means you suddenly have higher latency and less bandwidth between your data and whatever you want to do with it. Sure, there are good reasons to do it (centralizing storage for multiple nodes, for example), but go into with your eyes open to the trade-offs.

Here’s one more opinion for you.

Running a NAS on Debian is a great idea if you don’t mind being responsible for all of the details that TrueNAS abstracts away. One thing I’d consider in your shoes is to use Proxmox VE rather than vanilla Debian. I say this because PVE uses a kernel with ZFS built in, so there’s no fiddling with DKMS to get it to work; it just treats it as a first-class file system (including on root). Having said that, either is a perfectly good choice.

If you want a UI, I’d heartily recommend Cockpit, which is included in the repos (just apt install cockpit). If you go the PVE way, you’ve got a couple options. You could either virtualize your existing TrueNAS, passing through the disks or (and this is my preference) let the host handle all the ZFS stuff and create an LXC container that just deals with filesharing. You’d bindmount a directory from the host that could be shared out via SMB and this is where I’d use Cockpit to manage the shares.

The PVE route makes adding VMs and containers pretty quick. I haven’t run into any issues passing through a GPU to either a VM or LXC, which can then be used inside a docker container.

In answer to the common pitfalls question, I think the biggest thing I see is that it’s important to document exactly what TrueNAS is doing for you. Did you encrypt the ZFS pool? Make sure you have the keys to unlock it and arrange for your next OS to do so gracefully. Are you managing snapshots and replication in TrueNAS? Document and adapt that. Something like sanoid/syncoid can manage this on a Debian system. How about monitoring? Don’t forget to set up notifications for disk failures. Any other services you’re using? NFS, iSCSI, cronjobs? Take care notes of everything because that’s the stuff that’ll be easy to miss if you jump straight to overwriting your old boot disk.

The way I handle this is to have two VMs running in separate hosts, each running my reverse proxy along with keepalived. I resolve my subdomains to the keepalived shared address and then keep the reverse proxy config in git with a cron job to pull updates.

Traefik is a very robust reverse proxy, but I think you have easier options. If you want to keep it all in the same stack, have a look at Caddy. The configuration is just a few lines. Another very good option since you’re already using pfSense would be to use the HAProxy plugin. You’ll get a UI to manage everything and Tom Lawrence has some very helpful videos about setting it up from start to finish.

If I remember correctly, that was largely in consideration of the large corpus of docker-packaged projects that could be used as a pre-built app ecosystem. That makes a lot of sense for anyone who really wants an appliance-like all-in-one system with minimal setup.

That’s certainly true in terms of TrueNAS Core, but FreeBSD itself is quite active (15.0-RELEASE dropped this month), as are the others BSDs.

I’m not sure what it is, but Scale has never thrilled me. I’ve tested it a couple times and I just didn’t get along well with it. I’ve tested know Jim Salter (practicalzfs.com) has frequently recommended XigmaNAS as a strong (albeit less pretty) alternative to TrueNAS. I did some tests with that as well and it seemed perfectly fine. In the end I decided that when I migrate off of Core this winter, it’ll be to a bare metal FreeBSD system. I’m using it as an excuse to better learn that ecosystem and to bone up on ansible, which I’m using to define all of my settings.

There’s lots of good stuff on YouTube, including from David Bombal and Jeremy Cioara. If you’re more of a listening-while driving person, years ago the Security Now podcast did a “how the internet works” series that gives a terrific overview of the TCP/IP stack (it’s from 2006, but it’s still very applicable). And if you like to read, Michael Lucas just released a “Networking for Sysadmins” book, which is excellent.

To my thinking the most important difference would be mobility. Using the Synology app would probably make setup somewhat easier, but if you ever decided to leave the Synology ecosystem migration would likely be more complicated. That by itself isn’t a recommendation one way or another, but it should definitely factor into your planning.

Sure thing—autofs is a pretty cool utility and it works with SMB as well.

If the storage isn’t present for PBS, the backup would fail. There are files inside the directory that PBS will notice are missing.

Mounting the NFS export in the PVE host is the simplest way to get shared storage into an LXC container. You have to fight apparmor to mount NFS or SMB inside the container directly.