Admittedly I'm not very knowledgeable about different pruning ways. I'm friends with a gardener and usually follow their recommendations. We have one very old and large apple tree that we would like to keep alive as long as possible (fruit bearing or not) and some new trees where we don't cut too much except for inwards-growing water sprouts. Generally prioritizing harvest and tree resilience, plus some extras with the old tree.
What's not working? I just set up TrueNAS for the first time, went with 25.04 and figured I could just update my way out of potential bugs, but the updater is broken :D
I get that, I plan to add another pihole ad some point so I can enter 2 nameservers at my router. There are solutions to sync all config between the piholes.
I also planned to do the same (bare nginx instead of NPM but otherwise the same). Did you just remove the nginx container from docker compose and use the same arguments in NPM or do you double-reverseproxy or something else?
I would run Debian from a stick and install Proxmox with the installer and not on top of Debian unless you have to. While the latter works, I found some settings around network interfaces to differ between the installation methods which caused me problems here and there.
If you want to have domains assigned to local IP addresses, you can also use Pihole as a local DNS! It's a very nice tool for adblocking on network level anyways, can only recommend it.
Personally I'm mostly involved with my homelab migration so there's not too much on the selfhosting page except os updates. I set up meshmini earlier to access my thin clients via vPro/AMT but I need to configure the clients before being able to actually using meshmini. Once I'm done with that I'll finally be able to set up Lemmy and Pine pods.
My selfhosted stuff currently works fine without me doing much which feels good and lets me focus on hardware stuff currently.
Not answering every single point but generally: I'd set up proxmox, test everything, make notes, reach a state/config that you like, and then start over doing it "properly" from start.
Personally: ZFS yes, quemu/lxc depends on use case
I shy away from running all services as Docker on the same machine for backup/restore purposes and rather have VMs per service. Is there anything wrong with this approach?
No, but you'll have much more overhead. I have a VM that hosts all Docker deployments which don't need much disk space (most of them)
Some snowdrops came out during the last days, other than that I didn't notice anything. Need to trim the apple tree soon - just ate the last apples from last year :)
Use whatever you have and test different setups. I would start by installing Proxmox and setup ZFS on some drive that not the boot partition. For just checking it out with some lightweight VMs and containers any CPU that's not 20 years old will suffice, the more RAM the better. Play with VMs, backups etc in small scale. You can use your old external USB HDD, etc, just to figure out things like ZFS.
Don't buy anything before getting some experience and having some kind of plan.
Admittedly I'm not very knowledgeable about different pruning ways. I'm friends with a gardener and usually follow their recommendations. We have one very old and large apple tree that we would like to keep alive as long as possible (fruit bearing or not) and some new trees where we don't cut too much except for inwards-growing water sprouts. Generally prioritizing harvest and tree resilience, plus some extras with the old tree.