Adug Melbourne Meeting November 2025

Meetings
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This month, a little off topic but…

Geoffrey will be showing us around his new NAS box a bit.

My guess is that this might be a bit of a showing how things have progressed.

I am sure at least some of us had/have a NAS for storage, general use. And also likely have used the VMWare virtualisation platform, either in workstation or ESXi. They both have been very popular.

I have a now ancient HP N40L Microserver, that still works well, but is powered up rarely, and still use VMWare Workstation on my laptop. With assorted windows and linux VM’s.

This new NAS is mini, and quite powerful.
AOOSTAR WTR MAX

Geoff has installed ProxMox virtualisation which is a bit like ESXi, but newer, better, free’er…

It has traditional virtualisation, but also has Container functionality, for very lightweight virtualisation.

All very handy for running a cloud style backend.

In addition it is running the ZFS file system which seems very clever, among other things allows you to make virtually instant snapshots of your filesystem, so you can for example make a point in time backup relatively easily, without stalling the system.

I always liked snapshots in VMWare (mostly Workstation), you can just go back to the snapshot point and try again until you get it right…

I remember hearing of a very large database backup. A large system with replicated databases, where one of the replicas was synced and then taken offline. Then the raw database file(s) were backed up to tape, (which took a day or two) The replica was then put back online, and allowed to replicate again (which took some time to get re synced) Then Rinse and Repeat.

I think ZFS would be likely good for this.

Things to remember:
Snapshots are not backups.
When you have a snapshot, your disk usage can potentially grow a lot.

Starting 6:00pm (ish) for a 6:15pm start
At the Melbourne Men’s Shed, and on Zoom.

Zoom link will be up here shortly before the meeting starts.

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I’ve also got a few Delphi projects to go along with the talk as well, for controlling Proxmox.

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Is the meeting being recorded? I can’t make it tonight (prior commitment)

I’m a big proxmox fan - been using it for the last 2.5yrs without a single issue. With regards to ZFS, make sure you add as much memory as the machine will take or you can afford - it uses a lot of memory for caching (ZFS Arc) which makes a huge performance difference - it’s dynamic though so it will give it back if needed for a vm.

We have 2 proxmox servers and have vm replication setup between them for the critical vm’s, so if a server goes down replicated instances will start. You can control how often they replicate. We have a have 25Gb direct connection between the machines so replication is fast, same goes for migration - when I update a server I migrate the critical vms off to the other server (takes a few minutes as it uses the replication as basis for that).

We use TrueNAS for backups and file servers - it’s pretty good although we have had lots of issues with it’s Active Directory support - It’s gotten better, but just last week I had an AD issue with one of the servers again. If you don’t need to use it with a windows domain then it’s hard to beat - and you can run it virtualised on proxmox too (I don’t).

I could go on for hours but don’t want to spoil Geoff’s thunder!

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@vincent , I’ll make sure I record it. sounds like you have a nice setup there.

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Topic: ADUG November Meeting - Proxmox and Delphi - Geoffrey
Time: Nov 17, 2025 06:00 PM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney
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Meeting ID: 828 8797 3329
Passcode: 776237

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Adug Melbourne November Meeting Monday 17th November

Geoffrey showed us around his new NAS box a bit.
(Box was remote)
It was quite a dense talk, I have summarised (hmmm…) it a bit.

Device is an AOOStar WTR MAX
The AOOStar is made in Taiwan.

From the images it looks quite compact, but apparently a bit bigger in
real life. approximately 30cm * 30cm * 28cm(high).

Geoff has put 128G ram into it, and 5 * 14TB disks (for approx 50TB
storage running in Raid Z1) as well as a couple of NVME SSD’s (for OS,
etc)

It packs quite a powerful CPU. Ryzen 7 PRO 8845HS (The graphics card
is a bit less powerful) You can connect an external graphics card via an
occulink connector if needed.

The NAS is running ProxMox on Debian.
The web interface to Proxmox seems to be quite nice.
Apparently ProxMox and ZFS go together well.

Geoff has a quite a few VM’s and LXC containers running on the machine.
(It will also run docker type containers)

An LXC container can have multiple things in it, rather than the single
task commonly associated with docker containers.

A docker container is very light weight and portable, and can be spun up
and shut down in almost no time.

The docker (and LXC?) containers can have mounted images (file system
mount points) for non temporary storage.

This is making a fairly major upgrade from his previous NAS which was an
Odroid HC2 connected to a 10T drive. (Looking pretty much like a USB
external disk box, but with an ethernet port on it)

He showed a brief demo of Immich an AI backed photo tool, which allows
him to search for images by name of person in image, or those with dogs
in them, etc.

He showed us how ZFS had pools and datasets, (a dataset is similar to a
filesystem)

ZFS has snapshots.
Can make a snapshot, and use ZFS Send to send it somewhere, can be
imported via ZFS Receive. ZFS Send of later snapshots just sends the
differences. (Can you merge snapshots??)

Once again: A snapshot is not a backup…

A couple of the items I remember (vm’s, containers) currently on his
NAS.

Prometheus - Time series processor
headscale - For tailscale vpn (based on wireguard)
nginx proxy manager

Is going to set up SSO using Authentik. Supports OAuth credentials. Make
so can’t access site unless authenticated.

Mentioned Cloud See? (Container/VM) which Logs login failures and then
block IP addresses.

Wants 10Gbe Networking
Wants to add a Mac-mini to the setup.

Has made a demo Delphi program to drive ProxMox via rest api’s.
He showed how he could power on/off one of the VM’s in ProxMox via his
program.

Docker also has Rest API, only authentication options are no auth or
Client Certificate Auth.

Wants to make a build server with Continua on this system.

The device, at least as setup is perhaps more for business use (which
Geoff seems to be at least partially using it for) rather than a home
lab.

Thanks Geoff
I found this quite interesting.

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Some links (Sorry I forgot)

•Proxmox VE Documentation – Proxmox VE
•Proxmox REST API Reference – Proxmox VE API Documentation
•Immich – https://immich.app/
•Docker - https://www.docker.com/
•NASCompares - https://www.youtube.com/@nascompares
•ServeTheHome - https://www.youtube.com/@ServeTheHomeVideo
•Awesome Open Source - https://www.youtube.com/@AwesomeOpenSource
•VirtualizationHowTo - https://www.youtube.com/@VirtualizationHowto
•HardKernel (Hardware)- https://www.hardkernel.com/
•GitHub: Proxmox API Clients – proxmox-api · GitHub Topics · GitHub
•GitHub: Proxmox API Delphi Demo - GitHub - geoffsmith82/DelphiProxmox-API: Delphi Example of accessing the Proxmox REST API

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