The Wolfe Pack

The Wolfe Pack

Stick a fork in it, it's done. My network is finally rebuilt to a single physical server hosting a pile of VMs. After 2 days File History finally did its thing. I'll still almost certainly switch away, but at least I'm backing up to a remote ZFS volume in the meantime. Next up, probably in a week or two, is automating off-site backups to rsync.net using zfs send.

Proxmox's web UI is a pile of inaccessible, but I'm super pleased with the command line so far. Yesterday I spun up a small virtual server for Audiobookshelf, and had the whole thing up and running in my network and integrated with backups in about 10 minutes. Next I need a couple small Windows VMs for CI which, well, at least I'll only have to set those up once and clone them, so there's that silver lining.

@nolan I'm curious to hear more about your experience with Proxmox. I've thought of using it as a virtualization solution, but was worried about the inaccessible UI. How easy is it to e.g create a Windows VM and connect to it with audio?

I don't know that specifically, that's a "next week" problem. 😀 But based on what I know so far, I imagine it's a bit like:
  • Download a Windows installation ISO and upload it to the server.
  • Import it into the local list of VM templates/ISOs, probably using some incantation of the pveam tool.
  • Run an initial qm create ... incantation, followed by a few runs of qm set .... These essentially build up a human-readable and editable config file somewhere in /etc/pve.
  • Run qm start .... Probably fail, but since the qm set incantations update a config file, I don't have to sling around long qemu_kvm command lines. I can just individually tweak settings, with built-in sanity-checks, and restart the VM until it runs.
Note that you do have to run the installation yourself somehow, so I'll have to figure out how to either install remotely with Narrator or OCR it. But at least the command line is sane, and I like that it checks and maintains configs for you.

@nolan That sounds promising. I see that there are also Terraform providers and probably Ansible modules for Proxmox which could hopefully make this easier.

Probably, if that's your thing. Given that all the tools write to /etc/pve, and I believe that's included in backups, I figured I'd use them directly and cut out the middleman.

@nolan Curious about audiobookshelf. What is it and how’s it work.

It's basically Plex but for audio books and podcasts. Dump your audio files in a folder structure with some fuzzy rules for title/author/year-matching and it gives you a remote library with cross-device playback sync and other features.

The accessibility story isn't super great right now, but it's usable, and I'll probably find time to fix some of the rougher edges in the next few weeks.

https://audiobookshelf.org

@nolan Ah I found it. Can it be put on a nas without much trouble?

I guess so. See the list of package options on the main site. I went with the Debian package in an LXC container but there's also a Docker image as well.

@nolan @ner You might also find https://github.com/izderadicka/audioserve interesting. Admittedly I haven’t tried audio bookshelf, but this is a very similar concept and all entirely web based. The dev is also very responsive to accessibility suggestions and the UI now works great on both desktop and mobile screen readers.

Nice, I'll keep an eye on this one for sure. One minor nit is that Audiobookshelf isn't quite this minimalist. Its podcasting support is rather new, but it does let you search for and subscribe to podcasts from at least iTunes, and I think I saw a directory option in the menu so you could presumably opt out of connecting to Apple if you didn't want.

Anyway, not making a value judgment as I haven't even used this one for long enough to decide to keep it. 😀 It does a little more than serve up directories, though.

@nolan @ner This is pretty awesome, and I had no clue it even existed. Thanks for the great find. ☺️
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@nolan I forgot to ask, what server are you using to install Proxmox onto? And how was the process of installing Proxmox onto that hardware? I assume that initial installation wouldn't be accessible

It probably isn't accessible, but I didn't try too hard to make it work. My sighted partner helped. It isn't too hard if you have someone able to read screens and process the weird ways console interfaces work. I think by default it assumes it should use all of whatever drive you point it at. For me it was just a matter of typing in my network config, enabling ZFS, checking the advanced options briefly (I didn't need to change any), setting a password, then booting up. The rest is accessible via SSH, and the admin guide has sections on the various command line tools with example usage: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html Server was just my old desktop with 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB of built-in storage, plus an 8 TB spinning disk added as a second ZFS pool for Samba/backups.