I work for a medium size enterprise as a backup architect. All of our backups are crash consistent and we’ve never had an issue.

Windows has an easy way of dealing with this in the form of VSS. As long as the application supports it, VSS can prepare the system and application for a backup, putting it in an application-consistent state before the snapshot is taken. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent for Linux. The best you can do is pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts to put the application/OS in a backup-ready state. Really though, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Unless you are running an in-memory database, you really don’t need to worry about application consistency. If you are running an in-memory database, take database level backups (can also be done with pre-freeze/post-thaw scripts) and back up the backups.

Just remember to test whatever solution you end up going with, and make reminders to frequently re-test your backups. You never know what might change in a year’s time, so re-testing periodically is a good way to make sure everything is still functioning properly and make sure your data is still protected. And testing needs to be more than just making sure the VM powers on. Make sure the application can start up and function properly before calling it a successful test.

I have been using TrueNAS for about 3 years now and couldn’t be happier. It can do all of the backup stuff for you as well. I’m not sure if you would be able to use the key server for booting though, but I believe it would check all the other boxes. I don’t currently run VM’s on it (only docker), so not sure what it can do for VM backups.

Regardless of what you end up going with, I’m curious why you are saying you need to shut down the VM to back it up? I’m not familiar with how you are running the VM so not sure if it’s a limitation of the hypervisor, but I would think as long as you can snapshot the disk, you could just back up the snap. It would be crash-consistent rather than application-consistent, but for a backup scenario that should generally be fine.

I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.

When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.

I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.

Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.

I’m curious what issues you had with TrueNAS? I’ve been using it for about a year now and the only issue I have had has been with one of my pools deleting itself after a reboot, but that was user error because I put the wrong SED password in the settings.

On iOS, I tap on my profile in the upper right, and the VPN-on-demand setting is right below my account.

Yeah, our entire IT org has a vendetta against IBM. We were just looking to start implementing Terraform too…

I’ve been using Tailscale for about 2 months now. It has a VPN-on-demand setting that I keep enabled. That way, anytime I am not on my local WiFi, it automatically connects the VPN. According to my battery health settings, Tailscale has used 5% of my battery in the last 10 days. And I am even using a Mullvad exit node, which would use even more battery.

As much as I hate to send anyone to Reddit, the wiki on the Usenet subreddit is great. They explain the concepts and components and have a list of good indexers and providers.

If you have any other questions or need help setting anything up, feel free to send me a PM.

I would really recommend looking into Usenet. I was in your position a few months ago (starting to look for private trackers), but ended up hearing about Usenet and going that route instead. It has been amazing so far. It has everything I am looking for, I don’t need to worry about a VPN, and I can download as fast as my ISP can go, so I get my content in minutes instead of hours. I also don’t have to worry about my VPN disconnecting for some reason and my ISP sending me a nasty letter. The only downside is, if you want the best, you’ll have to pay for an indexer and a downloader, but it’s not that expensive and is certainly worth it for the benefits over torrents.

I think it’s this one: https://github.com/truenas/charts.git. It has those apps you mentioned.

That is what I ended up doing temporarily, but I think I will just make it temporarily permanent. I could likely set up another Docker container to run a DNS server connected to a DoH resolver, and use that container as the DNS server for Traefik, but that’s a lot of work.

I own 3 different domains and just today set up SSL services for them using Traefik (made another post for an issue I’m having with that).

I ended up doing a subnet router and that got me what I was looking for.

Did some more testing to get some details. The error I am getting from Traefik is that Cloudflare cannot create the record because it already exists (PiHole already has the entries). If I delete the records from PiHole, Traefik can then create the TXT records in Cloudflare.

That is almost the exact same thing I am doing. I have 2 Pi’s running PiHole in HA and I just made one of them the subnet router to allow this access. Since I will be the only one using this, I don’t care to use Funnel right now, but thanks for showing that to me. I am (obviously) new to using Tailscale, and that looks like a very neat feature.

I set that up, but the issue now is that my DNS server is replying back with the private IP, which is not accessible from tailscale.

EDIT: Figured this one out. Need to advertise the routes from one of my machines. Set that up and I am good to go now. Thanks!

Do they not still intermingle their stock? Last I remember, if a 3rd party seller lists a product that Amazon also sells, the stock is all put together in the Amazon warehouse. I’ve gotten counterfeit electronics even when it says “ships and sold by Amazon”. I’ve started buying from B&H.