When I started out, I really wanted to do it this way too. A bare metal install just seemed a little crude, and I thought I might want to run other firewall related services from that node. I had technical issues, and OPNSense just didn’t want to run under Proxmox for me.

Finally, I said to hell with it and went with a bare metal install and, in retrospect, I’m glad it worked out that way.

OPNSense just works, and I don’t feel like there are any opportunities lost due to the bare metal install. Instead, it just feels really clean and sequestered from the homelab cluster as it should be.

I totally get the desire to want to muck about with Proxmox hosting and learn about how it works. That’s the right attitude. But hosting an OPNSense virtual machine isn’t the right starting place.

As a beginner, do beginner stuff. Install a Technitium container and learn about DNS. Install Immich, or Jellyfin or an *arr stack. But not a firewall as a VM.

Yeah, there is a line of units that has a PCI slot that then requires a riser card in order to be able to use it. The problem is that those units, from what I’ve seen, tend to cost at least twice as much as the M910Q/M710Q. Even the M920Q/M720Q are significantly more expensive. Not to mention, a bit more difficult to get hold of.

IMHO, once you’re talking about dropping $300-$350 on one of these models with the riser card, you really have to think hard about whether it’s worth it for 6th/7th generation Core i5 processors. Especially if you’re looking at a cluster of three. It seems highly probable that you could get something with an 11th/12th generation processor and multiple or 2.5GB ethernet ports for only a bit more, and you’d end up only needing two of them instead of three, and price might end up being a wash.

I am really, really curious to see how external USB 2.5GB or 5GB adapters would work. I’m getting the impression that they are a lot more reliable than they were even a few years ago, and might be a viable, cheap option.

All that being said, network speed hasn’t been an issue for me so far, and I’m not convinced that CEPH + HA, is a path I should be going down. Or a path that’s worth it for most self-hosters.

So far, the only thing that I’ve encountered that pushes the CPU on an ongoing basis is Frigate, and even that is performing well and not affecting other containers on the same host. But I’m still adding services to my cluster, so who knows.

I watched a whole bunch of videos about those and it totally looks like they would work electronically. But most of them wouldn’t fit in any of the ports on the back without modification and 3D printing magic. Some people left them “just hanging out”.

I’ve got the article just about ready to go. I got myself swallowed up in a project to implement Frigate (finally) and just didn’t get around to posting it. It should be up tomorrow.

Yes, I saw that comment. I wasn’t sure what “But… it has so many downsides…” meant, and the comment doesn’t clarify.

To me, the big question is how the “improvements” they are going to make would my installation better. I suspect that most of the improvements are ones that allow them to make Music Assistant better, or allow them to add tighter integration with Music Assistant.

As far as I know, they haven’t rolled it out yet. But that thread is almost a year old now.

I would be interested to see what they’ve done.

That reference is in one of the programming articles. You must have poked around a bit to find it. “Set it and forget it!”.

It was in my list of options when I started. I liked the modularity of SnapCast, though. SnapCast just handles the whole-home aspect, and the you pair it with a music player that you like.

Not specifically, but SnapCast will accept a range of input methods and should be capable of taking output from virtually anything that plays sound.

This was a little problematic at first. Part of my shift over to OPNSense was that I bricked my mesh WiFi when attempting to put it into AP mode. So I had to scramble around to get a WiFi AP. Initially it was upstairs and connected to a swtich that was connected to the homelab in the basement through a Powerline AV. The Pi0’s dropped out a lot.

My house is too old for Cat5 in the walls, but does have some coax for cable TV. So I got some MoCa adapters and a second WiFi AP and sorted the WiFi out. After that, no WiFi problems with the streaming. I think the Powerline AV was just too unstable for the SnapCast.

There still are some occasional brief outages, and from what I can see this is caused by buffer overflows or something of that ilk with the SnapCast client software. I’ve adjusted the parameters as much as I can, and it seems pretty stable. I’ll notice a 1 or 2 second outage somewhere in the house every day or so.

Last week the SnapCast in the bathroom was glitching a lot, so I rebooted it and it’s been stable ever since. The one in the front room, which is literally 6" from the WiFi AP has never glitched at all, and it’s been running for about 3 months now.

I have a section in one of the articles where I talk about recovering from glitches that halt the Mopidy stream itself. In those cases, the Mopidy service is still running, but stops streaming. Using the REST API you can get it running again, so I wrote a cron job that checks every 3 minutes and restarts the stream if required.

I just came back from a 3 week vacation and after 2 weeks the Mopidy service itself crashed. I was getting Gotify notifications every 3 minutes from that cron job as it attempted to restart the stream. If since modified the Mopidy service to restart if it crashes, but it could be months before that ever happens.

I’ll wait to see.

Apparently you can run SnapCast on an ESP32 also. For me, the Pi0’s cost about $20 CDN, and the DAC card about the same, and the delivery from PiShop.ca was about 3 days. ESP32 would have cost less, but then require some kind of housing because of the two components flopping around. The Pi DAC’s slip onto the GPIO pins and the pair are essentially 1 thing at that point. Mine are just tucked away behind whatever the amps are.

I point out in Part II or III that these are essentially appliances once they’re set up. As long as they do the job, I don’t expect to upgrading them on a regular basis or anything like that. SendSpin looks cool because it does other stuff besides just stream music, but I’m not looking for that. From what I can see, SendSpin runs on Pi’s too, so it should be fairly simple to add that to the Pi0’s in the future if that’s what I want.

You young punks. :)

Vi

Depending on what you are doing with them, the drives can work just fine running through the USB ports, which can be faster than hard drives in most cases. I have my content - which is like 90% of the data space - on USB hard drives and the databases to manage them on the internal M.2 drive. Works fine for something like Immich.

For decades now, my wife and I have used “Kleeni” as the plural of “Kleenex”.

Seriously, it should be “octopoda”.

Thanks for the feedback. I will make some changes to the article. IPv6 wasn’t even on my radar since I haven’t got around to using it myself yet.