There is plenty of tooling for Linux to accomplish most if not all of the same goals but in my experience the difference between the two is the the windows tooling is much “friendlier” and for better or worse easier to get off the ground than a Linux equivalent.

Going the Linux route can and will work but it practically requires you have a a very good admin running the show who truly understands the infrastructure you are working with. I love Linux and greatly prefer working with it over Windows is basically every capacity but I’m not about to go my director and try to convince him we should switch from Windows to Linux as that conversion would be an immense undertaking and I am realistically the only person on staff capable of managing it.

Additional given so many other businesses/partners are also Windows based shops it very often just makes things easier when everyone is playing on the same or very similar field.

Because it’s “easier” to support Windows from a business perspective and it’s easier on users to use Windows as most already do use it and thus need no additional training/decreases support tickets.

I’m a small business environment it’s much easier to manage with Linux but you still need an OK Linux admin on staff.

Once you start scaling up on paper Linux certainly works but there are a lot of factors that most people (such as yourself) don’t consider.

This is coming from a pure Linux admin working on a mixed Enterprise environment where 99% of the infra is windows

What’s bad about it? I’m a Linux admin by nature but an admin of all by profession and overall I have no real complaints about Teams. Has always worked just fine for me and to my knowledge everyone else.

Why tip someone for doing the their job?

I constantly hear this but I just want to be the counter argument here.

Self hosting email is not the impossible tasks that people make it out to be. It is on the more advanced side of things though if you are hosting your primary email that you rely on.

I’ve been hosting my own email forany years now and have had no issues whatsoever but I also have years of experience and know how email works better than many that have no interest in such.

I would NOT recommended starting your self hosting journey with email but I will never discourage people from doing it.

Take your time. Ask questions any time you don’t understand something. Be ready to learn a lot and design a solid plan for disaster recovery.

I don’t understand how to read this graph.

Let’s see the rule(s) then

Just configured your mail clients pop/IMAP server as your fetchmail target and SMTP as your hosted service.

I just recently learned this.

For OsmAnd, go to search, then the categories tab, and then hit “Online Search”.

Voila, address lookup.

You never specified what specs you want/require

In the scope of wireguard it’ll just be a matter of you building appropriate firewall rules.

Since you want their internet traffic to go through you then i assime you’re effectively pushing a 0.0.0.0/0 route to your clients. You then need to add firewall rules on your server to block traffic to its local subnet and in the future allow traffic to only your jellyfin server.

This is also pretty simple and nothing wrong with that setup.

You’re probably better off looking for hardware to meet your spec requirements and then looking into its Linux support.

You did not answer what VPN tech you are using.

Without that knowledge i would recommend setting up tailscale and having your users use that. If you want to be fully self hosted you can also run Headscale as the control plane instead of relying on Tailscales own service.

I recommend tailscale as it is very easy to grant a user privileges to ONLY use an endpoint as an exit node but also grant access to any other endpoints as needed (such as your future jellyfin server) via theor ACLs.

Best practices comes down to what you do or do not want the VPN clients to access. This mostly comes down to routing and firewall rules.

So, what should your users have access to?

Also what is the vpn?

I’m not entirely sure what the actual question is. Can you rephrase what exactly you are trying to accomplish?

If the total data is 3tb and you want disk failure protection I would take your two 6tb disks and put them in a mirror. With the amount of data you have and the drive sizes at your disposal that makes the most sense. This leaves you with 3tb free for growth. If you wanted an additional backup I would recommend storing it in a different location entirely or pay a cloud provider like Backblaze.

I would do this with ZFS but you can also do this via LVM or just straight md-raid/mdadm. I’m not sure what your issues are with zfs on popos but they should be resolvable as Ubuntu supports zfs fine to my knowledge.

An alternative you could consider is using mergersfs to logically pool indivial filesystems on each of the disks and then use SnapRAID to provider some level of protection. You’ll have to look into that further if interests you as I don’t have to much info in my head related to that solution. Its not as safe as a mirror but its better than nothing.

Your title is about backups but your question seems mostly just about how to set up your storage for backups.

You can go about pooling disks in a few ways but you first need to define what level of protection from failure you want. Before going further though, how much space do you project that you will need for backups?

If you want simple you’ll have to manually decrypt each time it needs doing.

If you want it to be “automatic” then your best bet is something network based. A “simple” would be to just have a script ssh’s somewhere, pulls the decryption key, and then decrypts the disks. There’s plenty of flaws with this though as while a threat actor couldn’t swipe a single encrypted disk they could just log in as root, get your script, and pull the decryption key themselves.

The optimal solution would be to also encrypt the root partition but now you need to do network based decryption at boot which adds further complexity. I’ve previously used Clevis and Tang to do this.

I personally don’tencrypt my server root and only encrypt my data disks. Then ssh in on a reboot or power event and manually decrypt. It is the simplest and most secure option.

I backed this: https://www.crowdsupply.com/cool-tech-zone/tangara

Its not yet released and is in the manufacturing process but I think it’s worth considering

The domain doesnt really matter. The mail servers reputation is what really matters. If you aren’t going to run your own mail server then you have nothing to be concerned about.