NGINX and VDO.Ninja: the most recent additions to my local Proxmox

 I have finally decided to expose some of my internal services to the outside world and thus need some security in place.  I have decided to set up NGINX as a proxy and web host.  I initially looked at Caddy, but found the installation and configuration more than what I was able to do in my spare time.  NGINX allowed me to manage the installation and configuration with small steps.

First, I built an LXC and installed NGINX and ddclient to manage keeping my CloudFlare domain names mapped to the dynamic IP address provided by my ISP.  I installed Debian and used apt to install NGINX and ddclient.  I created and installed an SSL certificate from CloudFlare to allow secure communication.  Lastly, I added a simple test web site and confirmed that I could access it externally.

I then installed VDO.Ninja as a local website and set up a proxy through to an instance of LeanTime that I have been using to track my internal projects.  I added a couple of domain names and confirmed that they resolved correctly through the proxy.  I do have additional services that I will expose in the future, but this is enough for now.

As an aside, VDO.Ninja is going to be something I plan on using to help with production of the Cloud Talk Show going forward.  It allows peer to peer connections for video streams that can be included in OBS Studio as sources.  We have been using MS Teams to coordinate and record the shows and OBS to capture our program locally. We then have a producer mixing the different streams into a program that is uploaded to YouTube and published.  The main issues are that MS Teams compresses video streams and greatly reduces the fidelity of the stream and the labor involved in mixing or producing the program. 

I have built a Windows 11 VM with OBS installed on it to manage streams.  As mentioned above, I am going to eventually expose the OBS WebSocket interface for the producer to interact with directly.

OpenMediaVault for Sharing Files

The next service I added to my Proxmox was OpenMediaVault (OMV) in a virtual machine rather than an LXC.  LXCs are great, lightweight containers, but they use a shared kernel and don't have the level of isolation you get from a VM.  I also wanted to easily pass hardware through to the VM to allow it to control the USB ports on my machine to give it the ability to directly control my external drives.

There could be a strong case made that I should have installed OMV first and had it controlling the media containing my .mkv files served by Plex. And if I were to sit down and build it all out in a weekend, then that would surely be the way I would go about it.  However, it was a few months after my initial setup that I got around to setting up a NAS.  

When my server lost a drive (RAID 0, so total data loss but I did have backups) and I installed replacement drives I dedicated one to OMV and redirected all backups to it.  It wasn't hard to do, I was able to do it all using directions found on the Proxmox site.  

I have since opened up NFS, SMB, and FTP shared directories.  I then added Veeam Backup agents on my desktops and laptops with OMV as a backup target.  

Thank you for following me on my journey, please feel free to reach out to me if there is anything you want me to dig into more.