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I just bought a new VPS with 2 terabytes of storage for only backup purposes. I decided to format the storage using LVM. Feel free to checkout my guide for Getting started with LVM.

Prerequisites

• A server with debian 12
• Storage configured at some mountpoint. I use /pbs-data.
• root access

Add the repository GPG keys

Don't worry about the enterprise url. It's still free to use without a license. Keep in mind that you won't receive any official support.

sudo wget https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg

Make sure that the sha512 matches. At the time of writing (05-02-2024) it is that one. Latest ones can be viewed in the documentation

sha512sum /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg
7da6fe34168adc6e479327ba517796d4702fa2f8b4f0a9833f5ea6e6b48f6507a6da403a274fe201595edc86a84463d50383d07f64bdde2e3658108db7d6dc87  /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg

md5sum /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg
41558dc019ef90bd0f6067644a51cf5b /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-release-bookworm.gpg

Add repositories

Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pbs bookworm pbs-no-subscription

Update repositories

sudo apt update

Install proxmox-backup-server package

This will download the latest release and start the configuration process. It may ask for you to configure postfix (for sending emails) but that will be skipped in this guide. To disable postfix for now, you can select the “Local Only” option.

sudo apt install proxmox-backup-server

Conclusion

The Web UI should be accessible at https://<your server ip>:8007. Please note the https protocol and you may need to open your firewall for that port.

Next Up

I definitely recommend configuring SSL with Let's Encrypt in the Web UI. You will need to create new “datastore” which uses your mountpoint on disk for the actual backup storage. Also create new accounts and restrict their permissions to a specific datastore for every proxmox host you're going to add.

I recently had to extend a normal disk partition. It wasn't fun. That's why I recommend using LVM, it's a lot easier to manage, extend, shrink and remove partitions on a single or multiple disks.

Common Terms

Physical Volumes (PVs) are your physical disks attached to a server. These can be different sizes. That's why LVM is so flexible.

Volume Groups (VGs) are groups of PVs. For example you could have vg00 which includes PVs a, b and c.

Logical Volumes (LVs) are smaller “partitions” of VGs. You can mount these at different mount points and are easily manageable.

Example

Your server configuration:

• Disk /dev/sda, 200GB
  • other partitions like boot
  • /dev/sda2, 199GB, PV
• Disk /dev/sdb, 4TB
  • /dev/sdb1, 4TB, PV
• Disk /dev/sdc, 150G
  • /dev/sdc1, 150G, PV

You can either split those into multiple VGs or combine them into one. I recommend combining them, because you can only assign a PV to single VG.

Currently your total allocatable storage for vg00 would be 4445GB. Now you can split that into one or more LVs and mount them to your system. I usually have different /, /var, /home and swap partitions.

Requirements

• A server
• An unused disk partition on the server
• LVM2 installed apt install lvm2 (on debian)

Creating a PV

sudo pvcreate <disk>

Example <disk> values:

• /dev/sdb
• /dev/sdb1

List PVs

sudo pvs

Creating a VG

sudo vgcreate <VG name> <PVs>

Example:

• sudo vgcreate vg00 /dev/sdb
• sudo vgcreate vg00 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc1

List VGs

sudo vgs

Creating a LV

sudo lvcreate -n <name> -L <size> <VG name>

Example:

• sudo lvcreate -n root -L 30G vg00
• sudo lvcreate -n home -L 50G vg00
• sudo lvcreate -n var -L 20G vg00

Formatting

You can choose any filesystem you want. I usually select ext4.

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/<VG name>/<LV name>

Example:

• sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg00/root

Final Steps

Now you can mount them and store files. Remember to add them to /etc/fstab in order to automatically have them mounted.

sudo mount /dev/<VG name>/<LV name> /mnt

List LVs

sudo lvs

Extend a LV

sudo lvextend -L +2G /dev/<VG name>/<LV name> -r

The -r flag automatically resizes the filesystem. If it's not provided, you need to manually run the resize2fs <volume> command.

Example:

• sudo lvextend -L +2G /dev/vg00/root -r

Verify Changes

You can run df -h and it should show the new amount. If it still shows the old one, you can try running resize2fs /dev/<VG name>/<LV name> command.

lvextend -L +2G <volume> -r

The -r flag automatically resizes the filesystem. If it's not provided, you need to manually run the resize2fs <volume> command.

The <volume> should be replaced with /dev/mapper/<volume group>-<volume name>. For example if I had a volume group called vg00 and the volume name would be var. The path would then be /dev/mapper/vg00-var

Verify Changes

You can run df -h and it should show the new amount. If it still shows the old one, you can try running the resize2fs <volume> command again.

I received two helpful links from unixfox (invidious maintainer) with one regarding bypassing Youtube blocks (https://docs.invidious.io/ipv6-rotator/). This instance has now been succesfully configured to use IPv6 in Docker (and watching Youtube videos over IPv6 works now! Yay!! It didn't previously...).

The IPv6 address is changed every 12 hours to avoid a block from Youtube/Google. This instance has access to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses (specifically /64 block). I also changed the server to a better one (it can burst now up to 2.5 Gbps).

The most important part is that, you can watch 1080p or higher videos now if you have an account on this instance! Google also doesn't get your IP address.

PS. For a little moment there was https://proxied.invidious.fi (with an unblocked IPv4 and DASH enabled), it was meant to be a temporary solution to this problem. This server will now be shut down. About 1 TiB of data flowed through it.

Soooo... this one comes a little late. Been a bit busy with my life.

• Server 34€
• Another server (for the proxied.invidious.fi) 30€

Total for this month = 64€

As I am writing this article, logged in users haven't been able to watch videos for couple of days with DASH enabled.

From docs.invidious.io:

On Invidious you often don't have the same quality options as on YouTube. This is because the audio and video streams are separated and Invidious currently can't sync them together.

DASH is a streaming technique used by YouTube to provide resolutions higher than 720p by providing multiple files for a client to use depending on network and user preferences.

You can enable DASH by selecting the appropriately named video quality in the settings or by appending &quality=dash to the end of a video's URL. With this option enabled, the stream is proxied through Invidious for you to then watch at a higher or automatic quality.

DASH allowed users to bypass geoblocking and watch higher quality than 720p. DASH would also hide the user completely from Youtube. Even the video would be loaded through the invidious server.

Previously Google had blocked this server just one or two times in three months, but now we have been blocked two times in the past two weeks. First blockage was avoided by buying a new IPv4 but after just a few days, it stopped working. Google had blocked it also. Buying new IPv4 addressess is just too pricey.

The instance could use a big IPv6 subnet to load videos from Youtube, but here comes my problem. I couldn't configure Docker and IPv6 to work correctly together. I got to a point where Docker containers would get an IPv6 address but they would still be blocked from Youtube. At that point debugging became very hard.

I think that the most important thing for this service is to keep running, even if this would mean dropping DASH/proxy support. I can consider implementing some sort of solution to this later, but be prepared that for the next months this instance won't offer video proxying. This also greatly reduces network load (the instance was multiple times using the whole 1 Gbps port and service started struggling due to that).

I decided to improve the donation counter and report exactly where the money has went every month. I hope that this would build up trust (that I am not buying new cars with the money) and be interesting for boring Sundays.

• Server 34€
• Additional IP 8€ (for evading the Google blocks)
• Mullvad 10€ (tested using this to evade Google blocks but there were problems with accessing YouTube)

The IP didn't last long. Just a couple days until Google blocked it again. I will either try to setup a big IPv6 subnet or a VPN (client –> invidious –> VPN –> Youtube).

Total for this month = 52€

Hi! I wanted to add comments to my writefreely blog and it was quite easy. Here are the steps for it.

1. Create a new public github repository with discussions enabled
2. Install the giscus github application and grant access to that repository
3. Open giscus.app
4. Change the settings like you want them to be! I recommend using the light theme, unless you have custom CSS in your blog.

5. You might experience problems when trying to copy-paste the script to writefreely blog customization. For security writefreely sanitizes any <script> tags. However we can use a workaround:

   Place the following code to the custom CSS section

   </style>
   
   script here
   
   <style type="text/css">
   

   It will throw syntax errors in the editor, but you can ignore those. It will still work :)

6. And now the script should load. To get the comment section placed correctly you will need to include at the end of a blog post.

   <div class="giscus" ></div>
   

   Without this giscus will create the comment section in the <head> tags which can be useful if you want to hide it for specific posts.