General Appreciation and Feedback Post
Posted by cprs
Right! Reason. You (Tom) have asked for feedback previously. Purpose. Provide feedback on the SparkBox onboarding experience and document my journey to a 'green' SparkBox. Scope. This feedback will cover my experience since committing to nuke my LXC stack in Proxmox VE and give SparkBox a crack. Context. All of my work was completed from an M1 MacBook Air via Safari and iTerm2. My TrueNAS server and Proxmox box are located remotely from my home. My self-hosting journey started last year after deciding to get back into IT/tech after years of not being able to dedicate time to it. It was my first foray into Linux and I am still barely literate. How did we get here? I have been a TorGuard user for a couple years thanks to your VPN Tier List guide from a few years ago. Well, I had been steadily noticing the lack of development support and decided I wasn't going to tolerate it anymore, so I sought your channel out again. That got me watching arr stack videos again and my qBittorrent and Radarr LXCs conveniently stopped being accessible from their WebUIs after working the day before—there's a theme here with 'why don't things that just work just work for me?" here... Having jumped into Linux self-hosting via Proxmox Helper Scripts and figuring out how to troubleshoot those issues, I now felt like I should take the step back to wrap my head around Docker and Docker Compose. The bulk of my issues were related to mounting shares and configuring permissions, like most Linux noobs. I had spent hours going through threads across the internet trying to cobble together solutions that worked for other people but not for me because there was evidently and unknown unknown keeping me at arm's bay < I had every intention of running your yml from the Gluetun video and expanding it to include SABnzbd as the test of learning objectives, but I ended up deciding to give the SparkBox a chance to reset my everything. SparkBox! My first attempt was to create a Debian 13 LXC in Proxmox to minimise the resource usage; however, it froze for some reason when I tried to switch users, so that got nuked for an Ubuntu LTS 26.04 VM after all attempts to restart failed. My first SparkBox install had issues because of drive space issues. I only allocated 32GB to it not realising how bloody large the Ubuntu install would be which left stuff all space for the actual Sparkbox. After this proved itself to be an unrecoverable state, i nuked the SparkBox and then all of the LXCs excepting my Home Assistant and Plex LXCs so the family wouldn't notice a drop in service. I now had 64GB to play with and was able start fresh! Surfshark Of course following the instructions didn't just work for me! I had the Encrypted DNS issue which I was able to resolve with searching through the Demox forums. Feedback - Forums are ace and I didn't realise how much I missed them. Discord is not a vector for friendly support! - Is there a way that the Encrypted DNS can be turned off automatically if a user has their provider set to surfshark? (Yes, I got the deal that was linked in the aforementioned updated Tier List lol) The Mounting Frustration... Thanks to your reply to another user, I learned that CIFS shares didn't hardlink properly, which was the solution I had initially found to resolve my Unprivileged LXC issue—a genuine and bloody hard-fought solution found from Automation Avenue who I rediscovered during this journey as well. Anyway, I decided to start the TrueNAS bit from scratch with a new dataset and NFS shared (that I intend on RSYNCing my existing media library to now that I have things up and running!) to correspond with the new SparkBox. I still had bulk issues finding remedy to successfully manage permissions on the TrueNAS side and then successfully mount the share on my SparkBox. Hours furthermore were wasted. I bought a licence to try Tom AI... Further caveat, I'm fortunate enough to be able to contribute without trading off life needs; however, I can suggest that the time saved has paid for it enough. I used just over 1% of my monthly allocation and it helped guide me through a solve my issues—yes, there were a few! Feedback - The chat window for Tom AI in Safari doesn't - Scale - Resize - Allow for use of the home/end keys - Has buttons obscured by the edge of the window - The Demox forums post dialog box doesn't scroll with the cursor so I can't see this as I make an edit (I had to write this in Obsidian and paste it in lol) - Tom AI definitely thought on the fly. I had to learn to read the whole response prior to implementing proposed solutions, because he'd catch himself halfway through to propose an adjusted course of action. A less knowledgable user is looking for a guiderail and will default naturally to read step/do step/oh crap it wanted me to do something slightly different based on it's mid-stream response. So, here we are with a stack that's ready to use within a few hours after dedicating literal days of leave to try and figure out why I couldn't bloody login to Radarr even though I could see the container was running and responding. Thank you. Time to go claim my ship and and actually start playing with this.
1 replies
Chris wrote:
Thank you for this — genuinely useful, and reading about the days of leave spent getting Radarr to log in is very real. Glad Tom AI got you over the line. On the encrypted-DNS idea: agreed, and I've logged it for Tom. If the provider is Surfshark, having Encrypted DNS switch itself off automatically would save a lot of people that exact forum hunt. The Safari chat-window quirks (no resize or scaling, home/end keys dead, buttons clipped by the edge) and Tom AI correcting course mid-answer are both flagged for him too — that last one especially, since a beginner will follow step 1 before seeing the correction. Good catch. Go claim your ship.