I added a cheap PCI 4 slot NVMe expansion card and a couple of SSDs for a new pool and then migrated all the database-heavy stuff over to it. Required some use of local ZFS send/receive which I didn’t know was possible, but it has gone smooth so far. Very happy with it! It no longer sounds like my HDD pool is trying to escape from hell and some of the services are much snappier, especially Bitmagnet. I’d highly recommend it as an upgrade for anyone still running purely HDDs. I thought I could get away with it but ZFS speeds are no faster than single drives and the amount of stuff I had was hammering it non-stop.

I also bought my own domain finally to escape the free-tier dynamic DNS woes and I can finally feel good about sharing links with other people. I slapped a file share container with disabled registrations on a sub domain. I put it all behind free tier Cloudflare to hide my server’s IP, it took a little bit of learning what the different records are but so far much easier than I thought. Although I have yet to do the hardest part of setting up dynamic IP for my DNS records. I see a bunch of scripts floating around, but none seem that easy or well-maintained…

Oh, and the PI I’ve had running Pi-Hole v5 for god knows how long with no maintenance couldn’t run Tailscale, so I wiped the entire thing to start fresh and got it up and running with Pi-Hole v6, Tailscale, and Unbound. I like having these separated from my other services as they are more critical to have at all times and I have had 100% uptime with my Pi so far. Although I chose Dietpi for my OS on a whim because it looked interesting and am not sold on it. I like that it has easy software installs with sane defaults so I probably saved time overall, but the amount of time I spent debugging the weird choices Dietpi made for basic shit like networking options really threw me off.