Having an environment like proxmox is very handy for learning and testing. When you find something to test, spin up a clean machine and you have a safe environment to learn that can be removed after. You can also try out different distros that way.

I’d recommend setting up Incus instead however, it works fine on a desktop/laptop if you’re running a linux distro they support and don’t have a dedicated machine to use.

They also have a very good tutorial/demo that shows the basics: linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/

It should be easier to port forward SMTP to the mailcow installation for incoming mail and only use NPM for the web interface.

If netbird has enough DNS support you might be able to setup all the mailcow recommended settings there so you have auto discovery from mail-clients on the netbird VPN.

Incoming mail is pretty easy to get working anywhere, but outgoing is restricted if your IP adress is in any way suspicious. Using sendgrid, authsmtp, or something similar is the easy way.

For the hardcore, finding a VPS with a company that blocks outgoing smtp as default but will unblock if you convince them you’re responsible can be fun and/or frustrating. You’ll have a mail relay there for outgoing email at the minimum but can also get incoming email via that server. The smallest possible server should be enough.

Frogger, played a lot of that and had to stop myself before crossing roads for awhile after.

In my mind I was trying to optimize moving the same direction as the car and sneak in before the meeting car got there. I’m lucky to be alive.

If PostgreSQL is also shut down and you dont start the backup before its completely stopped it should be ok. You might need to restore to the same version of PostgreSQL and make sure it is setup the same way. If you dump the data, it is safer, both that you get a known good state, and that it can be restored to any new database. Grabbing the files as you suggest should be ok at least 90 percent of the time. But why risk it?

From personal experience, if you’re hosting Gitlab and make it available to the internet, make sure to keep it updated or your server will be super slow hosting a crypto miner within a year.

The DSA used here has been in effect for a month or so. This specific case is not why it was created in the first place - but previous failures of platform to handle to EU negative propaganda is one reason it was created.

I opted for checkmk as well and don’t want to switch. It’s got a good default for Linux monitoring and it will tell me about random things to fix after reboots, or that memory/disc is getting low so I can fix it quickly.

When monitoring 15 virtual machines on one physical the default of checking every minute for all machines raised the temp over 80 degrees Celsius on the physical machine and triggered a warning. Checking every five minutes is more that I need, so I went with that change.

I installed it with Ansible a few months ago and it’s been solid. It’s really nice to see bug reports with so much detail.

At the same time I also connected my dev environment to it, and it’ s been helpful for webdev getting errors from both front- and backend in the same interface when adding features.

For dev it’s less useful to have the history saved, so I think a standalone binary without setup that’ll simply accept anything and keep in memory would be useful for a small audience.