I can’t give direct experience here, but this is exactly the use case I’ve been meaning to spin up mailpiler for: https://www.mailpiler.org/. One of these days that will rise to the top of the priority list.

If you want an image, it doesn’t matter what the underlying file system is. You should be able to use a tool like Clonezilla and get a 1:1 copy. Depending how you’ve set up partitioning, you could also use sgdisk to set up the proper partitions and zfs send/recv for the new data portion of the drive and install a boot loader. That’s probably the way I’d go in this instance.

There was a recent conversation on the Practical ZFS discourse site about poor disk performance in Proxmox (https://discourse.practicalzfs.com/t/hard-drives-in-zfs-pool-constantly-seeking-every-second/1421/). Not sure if you’re seeing the same thing, but it could be that your VMs are running into the same too-small volblocksize that PVE uses to make zvols for its Vans under ZFS.

If that’s the case, the solution is pretty easy. In your PVE datacenter view, go to storage and create a new ZFS storage pool. Point it to the same zpool/dataset as the one you’ve already got and set the block size to something like 32k or 64k. Once you’ve done that, move the VM’s disk to that new storage pool.

Like I said, not sure if you’re seeing the same issue, but it’s a simple thing to try.

My go-to for this is a plain Debian or Ubuntu container with Cockpit and the 45Drives file sharing plugin. It’s pretty straightforward and works pretty well.

You can set maintenance schedules in Uptime Kuma and alerts won’t be sent out during those times. I use that for when my backup routines run each night. That seems like a decent cross-platform work around.

I administer a handful of FreePBX systems that run pretty smoothly and are relatively friendly to use. Crosstalk Solutions on YouTube has a bunch of videos on the software if you want to get up to speed about how everything works.

Not sure how your stack works together, but sudo will let you run particular commands as a different user and you can be pretty specific with the privileges. For example you can have a script that’s only allowed to run docker compose -f /path/to/compose.yml restart containername as a user in the docker group. Maybe there’s some docker-specific approach, but this should work with traditional Unix tools and a little scripting.

Cool. That looks right. Have you checked that the bridge is set up properly and that the router doesn’t have anything silly going on for that subnet?

PVE’s network settings are in /etc/network/interfaces and that’s where you can see how the bridge is set up.

It might be beneficial to know more about your network. Is this the only subnet or do you have a bunch of VLANs? Can other devices on the subnet ping outbound? Have you looked at the firewall on PVE?

This really sounds like a problem with the default route. What’s the output of ip route? That should give us some hints about what’s up.

Depends on the seller. It’s pretty easy to drop the seller a line and ask for details (and if they’re unwilling to provide them that could be a red flag). I had two drives die during burn-in once. I try to pick reputable sellers and they were pretty quick to replace them.

I see a ton of price fluctuation in used drives. One way I’ve had some success is in seeking out drives sold in lots. Often I’ll also see SAS drives sell for less than a SATA drive of the same size.

My use of Mikrotik is somewhat limited, but I’m testing I’ve found routing between VLANs to be pretty performant. The key is to offload that routing to the hardware, which not all configurations allow. Check out the Network Berg’s YouTube channel and you should get a good idea.

I’ve not done much with podman, but my first thought is that port 53 is privileged and usually podman runs as a non-privileged user, right? Do you have some mechanism in place that would allow podman to use port 53?

You’ve got some decent answers already, but since you’re getting interested in ZFS, I wanted to make sure you know about discourse.practicalzfs.com. It’s the successor to the ZFS subreddit and it’s a great place to get expert advice.

Is this urbackup-docker in a VM or an LXC? If the latter, you don’t need to add it in storage at all; you can bind mount the folder and use it directly. Here’s some info on that. If it’s in a VM and you want to use the directory directly (as in not just make a disk image inside the directory to pass as a block device) you’ll have to do some file sharing to the VM.

It sounds like you’ve got your solution already, but just in case someone stumbles on this later, I thought I’d mention autofs.

I’m coming to prefer it over fstab entries because it handles disconnections nicely and attempts to reconnect. Worth checking out for those who haven’t played with it.

Could be. If that’s the case, it’s nothing I’ve noticed. I’ve got a 32gb VM and I’m running a bunch of LXC and docker containers on it without issue.

I’ve never heard anyone else mention them, but I’ve had really good luck with https://www.ssdnodes.com for the past several years. I don’t recall ever using their support, but I did have a policy question before buying when I first signed up and they were pretty quick to reply. I think I found them on LowEndBox.

I second mailcow. It’s what I’ve been using for years and it’s pretty great.

One thing I’ll add is before you take the plunge, make sure your VPS address isn’t on a block list somewhere. Pay a visit to mxtoolbox.com and you should find some resources there.