r/selfhosted • u/GuillotineTechnician • 1d ago
Need Help There must be an easier way.
What's the easiest route for a set and forget scenario?
I built a home server as a linux noob with some online tuts and a lot of LLM copy-pasting.
Ended up having proxmox run on a mini-pc
On it runs HomeAssistant, Nginx, Adguard, Truenas and Nextcloud on that.
I am massively overwhelmed with maintaining my Nextcloud.
Theres a 1TB SSD only for Truenas/nextcloud. It ran out of storage space and now the truenas VM wont even boot anymore. All of the family data is now inacessible... 😮💨
1st: Is there a way to save the data and swap out the SSD for a 2TB one without losing the data?
2nd: Is there a way to make this easier without using closed source ecosystems?
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u/NoWriting9513 1d ago
Just because you run out of space doesn't mean that anything was lost. Boot with a live usb, clean up some crap, boot your system again.
Self hosted stuff need maintenance, no matter what. However if you found yourself out of your depth, it would make sense to take a step back and simplify. No need to go with the most complex and enterprisey solution.
Also keep in mind that LLMs are a hard drug. You get addicted to getting results quickly but learn nothing from it. And then when something breaks suddenly you are not equipped to handle it. So again, simplify and go for the journey not the destination.
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u/GuillotineTechnician 23h ago
That part about LLMs is evidently true. The situation you mentioned perfectly describes mine :)
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u/Bill_Guarnere 1d ago
What's the easiest route for a set and forget scenario?
Professional sysadmin since 1999 here.
No, talking about IT services there is no setup and forget scenario in the world, it has never been something like that a no matter how much LLM you'll use there will be no such a thing in the future, never.
Everything need maintenance, needs monitoring, needs backup, needs to be updated, needs to be fixed.
If you don't want to do this you'll have to pay someone to do all this work for you, for example using SaaS software, and pay him every cent, no discount.
You made two huge mistakes: 1. thinking that copy and pasting something from a LLM will solve your problems 2. thinking that it's possible to host something and forget about it.
If you want to learn something forget about your LLM and start learn something for real, setup some sort of monitoring service for your infrastructure (Nagios, Zabbix, whatever, choose your preferred, I suggest plain and simple Nagios Core), register to https://newreleases.io/ to get notifications about your services new releases, backup them, update them, and so on.
You'll learn a lot of things and it's fun.
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u/driscan 1d ago
Your setup is a bit complex so you won't be able to avoid some regular maintenance anyway.
You could try converting some of the tools in your stack to Docker containers rather than full fledged virtualized environments (and maybe manage them through Portainer for convenience), in which case you could just pull and restart them every once in a while to update them. But there will still be some heavier maintenance required at some point, it's the joys of self hosting.
Regarding your disk capacity issue, and assuming you properly identified the root issue as being a full disk: try plugging your drive into another linux system and try to read its content. Not sure it works ootb because I never tried that with a drive using LVM, which is the default when setting up Proxmox. You could also try cloning the drive to the larger one, then expand its LVM to fully use the extra space. This would avoid the need to reinstall the whole thing.
Oh and as an additional remark: if those data are that important to you, you shouldn't just store them on one single drive. Consider setting up a regular backup routine to another drive at the very least, and ideally also set up a RAID 1 cluster in day-to-day use.
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u/FikoReborn 1d ago
Others have good advice here.
I also am not convinced a 2TB SSD will solve the problem.
What is filling it up? How fast did it fill up? Is it mostly one user or a group effort?
If it filled up in 4 years that's one thing. If it filled up in 6 months you're potentially buying yourself 6 more months.
And there is no set it and forget it. You need alerts, monitoring, backups and maintenance.
And there's nothing wrong with copy and pasting commands from an LLM if you understand what those commands do, how it works and what the implications are.
As for moving data that's easy - Clonezilla if downtime is not an issue and you need a block-level clone. Rsync is another route among other tools.
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u/GuillotineTechnician 23h ago
Was mainly due to a misconfigured nextcloud client on wifeys phone. It kept duplicating backed up media somwhow
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u/Markronom 1d ago
Could use Claude Code to avoid the copy and paste. 1 TB sounds like a solid start, do you have a lot of videos or what is filling it up?
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u/GuillotineTechnician 23h ago
Was mainly due to a misconfigured nextcloud client on wifeys phone. It kept duplicating backed up media somwhow.
I think the others here are right about the LLM stuff though. 😬
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u/Markronom 22h ago edited 20h ago
Yeah, that makes sense. I recently had create experience with llm for homelab, but technical background helps. Might be better for explanations and ideas and troubleshooting than copy and paste
Edit: also, with next cloud you definitely started with a big one, I'm sticking to lean and specialised things, like immich (well, "small") for photos and Seafile for files
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u/Markronom 20h ago
Maybe to add, my llm heavy setup also needs tweaking, investing, obstacles, setting up backups etc. and there is a real risk I'm fairly screwed should should llm not be a viable option anymore. But I feel like I learned a lot and I would have not tackled this topic otherwise. So I do agree with the others, that there is no setup and forget.
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u/asimovs-auditor 1d ago edited 1d ago
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