That doesn't sound right, I'm betting it's a bug due to some in the series being bought and some on the time limit deal. Reach out to support.

No the scenario a VM protects from is the T110s motherboard/cpu/PSU/etc craps out and instead of having to restore from off-site I can move the drives into another enclosure and then map them the same way to the VM and start it up. Instead of having to wait for new hardware I can have the fileserver up and running again in 30 minutes and it's just as easy to move it into the new server once I've sourced one.

And in this scenario we're only running the fileserver on the T110, but we still virtualized it with proxmox because then we can easily move it to new hardware without having to rebuild/migrate anything. As long as we don't fuck up the drive order or anything like that, then we're royally fucked.

Yes, but in the post they also stated what they were working with in terms of hardware. I really dislike giving the advice "buy more stuff" because not everyone can afford to when selfhosting often comes from a frugal place.

Still you're absolutely not wrong and I see value in both our opinions being featured here, this discussion we're having is a good thing.

Circling back to the VM thing though, even if I had dedicated hardware, if I would've used an old server for a NAS I still would've virtualized it with proxmox if for no other reason than that gives me mobility and an easier path to restoration if the hardware, like the motherboard, breaks.

Still, your advice to buy a used server is good and absolutely what the OP should do if they want a proper setup and have the funds.

Sure, I'm not saying its optimal, optimal will always be dedicated hardware and redundancy in every layer. But my point is that you gain very little for quite the investment by breaking out the fileserver to dedicated hardware. It's not just CPU and RAM needed, it's also SATA headers and an enclosure. Most people doing selfhosted have either one or more SBCs and if you have more than one SBC then yeah the fileserver should be dedicated. The other common thing is having an old gaming/office PC converted to server use and in that case Proxmox the whole server and run NAS as a VM makes the most sense instead of buying more hardware for that very little gain.

There's absolutely no issues whatsoever with passing through hardware directly to a VM. And Virtualized is good because we don't want to "waste" a whole machine for just a file server. Sure dedicated NAS hardware has some upsides in terms of ease of use but you also pay an, imo, ridiculous premium for that ease. I run my OMV NAS as a VM on 2 cores and 8 GB of RAM (with four hard drives) but you can make do perfectly fine on 1 Core and 2 GB RAM if you want and don't have too many devices attached / do too many iops intensive tasks.

Well good part there is that you can build everything for internal use and then add external access and security later. While VLAN segmentation and overall secure / zero-trust architecture is of course great it's very overkill for a selfhosted environment if there isn't an additional purpose like learning for work or you find it fun. The important thing really is the shell protection, that nothing gets in. All the other stuff is to limit potential damage if someone gets in (and in the corporate world it's not "if" it's "when", because with hundreds of users you always have people being sloppy with their passwords, MFA, devices etc.). That's where secure architecture is important, not in the homelab.

I find that very unlikely actually. What SoC would it run? AMD hasn't released anything stronger than the Z1 Extreme (which is just a power constrained laptop part) so the only alternative would be a variation on that, maybe one that works better under a tight power budget just like the AMD chip in the Steam Deck? However I'd argue, as a ROG Ally owner, that battery life improvements aren't really that high on my wish list. If I could get anything it would be optimizations making the experience more stable and improve 1% lows. But most of that I don't think is even on Asus, it's more on AMD to tweak their drivers and on the game makers to tweak for the Z1 Extreme, which thankfully is in more than just the ROG Ally so it does make sense to do so.

My best advice is use that your old setup hasn't died yet while you can. I.e. start now and setup Proxmox because it's vastly superior to TrueNAS for the more general type hardware you have and then run a more focused NAS project like Openmediavault in a proxmox VM.

My recommendation, from experience, would be to setup a VM for anything touching hardware directly, like a NAS or Jellyfin (if you want to have GPU assisted transcoding) and I personally find it smoothest to run all my Docker containers from one Docker dedicated VM. LXCs are popular for some but I strongly dislike how you set hardware allocations for them, and running all Docker containers in one LXC is just worse than doing it in a VM. My future approach will be to move to more dedicated container setup as opposed to the VM focused proxmox but that is another topic.

I also strongly recommend using portainer or similar to get a good overview of your containers and centralize configuration management.

As for external access all I can say is do be careful. Direct internet exposure is likely a really bad idea unless you know what you're doing and trust the project you expose. Hiding access behind a VPN is fairly easy if your router has a VPN server built in. And WireGuard (like Netbird / tailscale / Cloudflare tunnels etc all use) is great if not.

As for authentication it's pretty tricky but well worth it and imo needed if you want to expose stuff to friends/family. I recommend Authentik over other alternatives.

Espionage and counter-espionage are some intense, high stakes and callous games. War really is terrible.

More like I-da-hoe

Stupid, evil and risky sure. But nothing will ever be as effective at absolutely and surely decimating the opposition. Vaccines / Antidotes and very careful, deliberate and sinister targeting while limiting ability to mutate can mitigate most of the MAD aspects making a far more terrifying weapon than nukes in how virtually guaranteed to end a nation, continent, planet you can make them.

Spoken like someone that hasn't been working very long, or if at all.

While school can be very pressure intense around exams in ways many jobs aren't you at least have summer and other breaks. For work you get vacation time sure, but it's nowhere near in terms of time.

Further adult life has a whole slew of responsibilities on top that you need to handle. Most 30+ can't subside on the crap we ate during college, we can't fuck off from our responsibilities when we can't be arsed with minimal consequences and we sure as shit won't find social stimulus without putting in effort, neither friends nor romantic. Sure if you live where you've always lived then you hopefully have childhood/school friends left at 30 but if you've moved then it's not a given at all.