I previously made a post a while ago about wanting to leave Proxmox for my own version of Arch using packages such as Cockpit, Podman, and other tools. Though I decided to use Debian 13 instead for this task. I only had a very basic Proxmox setup at first and did not really like the way I had configured my server. This made me wonder if I could use a more bare bones distribution like Arch or base Debian and configure my system the way I liked it to try and challenge myself more. If anyone has an suggestions of more services to deploy or things to try please let me know. Also, I do not hate Proxmox I just wanted a way to challenge myself and learn some new things.

Here's an overview of my new setup:

Host Specs

Intel Core i7-9700K

32GB DDR4-2666

128GB SATA SSD x4

Storage and Filesystem

Instead of using a basic partitioning scheme I built out my storage to fit my needs. I used RAID for my root and gave it 20GB on each drive so I could have enough storage for my main system files. Then I dedicated the rest to my ZFS pool for /home where all my containers were to be held. My purpose for using ZFS on /home was because I wanted all the benefits of ZFS for all my containers.

Partitioning Scheme

o 1GB EFI

o 8GB SWAP (RAID 10)

o 20GB root using BTRFS (RAID 10)

o Remaining mounted on /home using a striped mirror zfs pool (essentially RAID 10)

Networking

Host Interface

o Statically assigned on my LAN subnet

Podman Macvlan

o Used to assign containers their own individual LAN IP addresses

Kernel Macvlan Shim

o Virtual bridge to allow host-container connections and allow routing from my VPN

Services

Cockpit Web GUI

o I use this to stand in place of Proxmox’s web interface, as it allows me to remotely manage and watch my host’s status and resource utilization.

Uptime Kuma

o I am running this application in Podman and it allows me to set a dashboard that monitors the uptime of services such as my DNS, VPN, DDNS, and more.

Ntopng

o Used to monitor live traffic flows across my network and is run in Podman. It monitors my host’s network interface and allows me to view all egress and ingress traffic.

Technitium DNS

o Configured local authoritative forward zones and reverse lookup zones with custom A/PTR records for my LAN and WireGuard peers. I also added a blocklist to my network to block trackers, telemetry, and ads.

WireGuard VPN

DDNS Configuration

Ok, I posted this here a few months back and it didn't go well. I gathered the feedback, and the fair part of it was that I never explained why I built this or how it compares to what everyone already runs, so it read like just another "self-promotion, vibe-coded over a weekend" post. Trying again.

I have a fleet of IoT devices (very cool robotic hives) writing messy, unstructured logs, and I needed something that can store and search years of it. What I ended up looking for was a real inverted index, long retention that doesn't cost a fortune, fast needle-in-a-haystack search, and something one person can run and manage.

Why not Loki: Loki indexes labels, not log content. Search for anything outside your labels and it slows down a lot. Fine when you know which stream you want. Less fine when you don't, which is most of my searches.

Why not ELK: It does full text search well, no argument there. But it's a lot of moving parts for one person: nodes, shards, heap, ILM. I didn't want that to become my second job. To put it simple: it felt too heavy for my needs.

Why not VictoriaLogs: I like it, and I run it for different purpose. It stores on local disk though, and object storage is on their roadmap but not shipped, so retention still means paying for EBS. Otherwise a great tool and you can happily point it at your logs.

On the other hand, this amazing tool - Quickwit - does what I needed. Proper inverted index, and the index files live in object storage, so queries read straight from the bucket. Mine is around 100GB a day of raw logs, compressing about 5.5x, kept for 24 months, and S3 comes to roughly $300 a month.

So why I built Rootprint?

Quickwit ships an API with very basic UI. I ran it behind Grafana's Quickwit plugin for a while and that plugin gives you search and not much else. My team works with these logs every day, so I built the layer above it:

• log search with a field sidebar, click-to-filter and a histogram
• saved views that remember query, filters, sort and columns
• configurable context around a log line, plus a traceback tab for stack traces
• OTel traces next to the logs, basic APM based on spans
• ingest over OTLP or HTTP NDJSON, or pull from Kafka, Kinesis and SQS/S3
• roles, scoped ingest keys, Google and GitHub login
• indexes, mappings, field config and retention from the UI

It's built around OTel, but most of the features works also with custom-shaped data.

What it's not: no metrics. This is logs and traces only, so for metric dashboards and alerting you still need something else next to it.

Demo with real data: https://demo.rootprint.io

Code, Apache 2.0: https://github.com/rootprint/rootprint

Tech-stack: Bun and Hono on the API, SvelteKit for the UI, Postgres for metadata, Quickwit for search.

Fair warning: I'm a solo developer on this, with QA from my team, so expect bugs, rough edges and some clunky UI. Open a GitHub issue and I'll look at it. I'm not claiming parity with Grafana, VictoriaLogs or ELK. It's just a passion project after 8+ years of doing strict infrastructure work and getting a bit tired of it :)

On AI, since it came up last time: Claude Code wrote some parts of the project and I've been refactoring them constantly. It also does a first review pass on my code and some general reviews. The core logic and architecture is mine, mostly written by hand. Feel free to call it AI-assisted, because that's what it is.

Sync-in is an open-source, self-hosted platform for file storage, synchronization, sharing, and collaboration.

Highlights of this release include:

• Favorites for files and folders across personal files, collaborative spaces, and shares, with a dedicated view, filtering, sorting, and gallery/list layouts.
• Improved selection management, with a new Selection panel showing selected items, their total size, and available actions.
• Unified recent activity, bringing recent files and comments together in a single filterable timeline.
• Redesigned copy and move workflows, with easier navigation between spaces and the ability to skip conflicting files during copy, move, and upload operations.
• More reliable full-text search, especially for dates, email addresses, hyphenated terms, Unicode characters, and prefix matches.
• Numerous UI and accessibility improvements across desktop and mobile.
• Major authentication, OIDC, WebDAV, upload, editor, and configuration reliability improvements.

This release also includes several important security fixes covering OIDC account binding, OnlyOffice callbacks, SVG thumbnails, WebDAV quota enforcement, notification links, authentication secrets, SQL queries, stored XSS, external sharing permissions, and storage path validation.

Full release announcement:
https://sync-in.org/news/sync-in-2-5/

GitHub release:
https://github.com/Sync-in/server/releases/tag/v2.5.0