Just link them the story of a Dad getting locked out of his Google account after sending a picture of his child to the Doctor as part of remote care.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked
The point being they can fuck up your life on a whim and don’t care about the harm they will cause because your one out of millions.
This is an area where AI can be helpful. Tell the AI what Linux distro your on and what you want to do. Most of the time it will give you pretty good answer. If you don’t understand what it is telling you to do, ask it to explain the thing in detail. Most important thing though is to always verify what it tells you before you run stuff. Google search specific commands or use the “man” command to get documentation. The key thing is the AI can make you aware of CLI commands and tools more easily then trying to find what you need on your own.
I think you are making it more complicated than needed. If you just want reliable service, just figure out who has the most reliable Internet and power and they can host the server. If you want to learn kubernets or docker swarm, you can try that but it will take a ton of upfront work.
Edit: Also get a UPS for the server.
Be aware if you have the iGPU as the only video output device and passthrough to a VM it will no longer show what the host system is doing. This would be referred to as a headless server. I would suggest making sure you can SSH into the host before doing that. LearnLinuxTV has guides for how to do that with best security practices.
Docker works differently, so it may not be an issue with that.
Truenas uses KVM for virtual machines. So that will allow GPU passthrough, but may require command line and config files to do it. For docker this seems relevant: https://forums.truenas.com/t/electric-eel-nvidia-gpu-passthrough-support/11797
When you read files from the ZFS filesystem it will automatically keep the files in RAM. This is called the ARC and it is why people frequently recommend having a lot of RAM with ZFS. The ARC is very effective, automatic, and has no risk because it only caches reads. A cache drive is a secondary ARC generally using a fast SSD. The problem is that it generally only helps performance when you are reading lots of small files multiple times. This is because ZFS does so well reading large files from HDD that it doesn’t make much of a difference.
In short: If you already have the drive and want to play with the feature, go for it. But if your going to spend money on the drive, you will probably be better served spending it on more RAM.
I assume the cache drive is for your ZFS pool. You probably don’t need that.
What about GiB?
Intel iGPU are very good for transcoding.
Other people have already talked about why you are having performance issues with the Pi. As for a better NAS solution you will probably be better off with a used desktop PC from the last 10 years. If the computer doesn’t have enough SATA ports you can get a sata addon card or HBA (host buss adapter) addon card flashed in IT mode. You should be able to find a lot of options on eBay. Maybe people can chime in with specific models to look at.
I have had good luck with self hosted Headscale server and Tailscale clients on Pfsense routers creating a mesh network. But I am trusting other people’s networks. So Tailscale clients on each computer and the NAS would be lower risk.
Tailscale. You can make a free account and they have clients for most things. If you want to self host, Headscale.
My setup is very influenced by consolidating multiple hosts to a single host. So far this setup has been extremely stable for me with the only quirk being the Truenas web gui initially loads very slowly if I haven’t accessed in a couple days. I assume it’s because all the memory for that has gone to swap to make space for caching.
Truenas has the primary focus of being a NAS. Running apps or VMs is more of a side thing. It can do these things fine, but because it’s not the primary focus it doesn’t get the same level of polish as the NAS aspects.
My personal solution is to run Proxmox as the host OS with a Truenas VM. Any other services I want to run get to live in VMs or LXC containers. For example all my docker services run across 3 VMs with a docker swarm setup.
Also it’s not as RAM limited because it uses system memory which can be upgraded.
Any reason you need to encrypt the host OS information? I would assume anything interesting would be in the VM and you could probably have the VM encrypt it’s own storage.
To make sure there is not a misunderstanding, the wattage of a PSU is not how much power it will draw. The wattage is how much is can supply. So if you have a 1000w PSU, but all your components draw 200w of power it will use about 200w of power.
Additionally, if you plan to get a lot of HDDs in the future, do some research on power rails. Some PSUs are designed to only be able to supply a small amount of power to things like HDDs because most people only have 1 or 2.
I have used audiobook shelf to read a couple of PDF files. Seemed to work fine. I mostly use it for audio books.
If you have mechanical HDD you may want to get a foam lined case and anti static bags. That should be the best approach to avoid drive damage.
As for leaving things in the rack, I am concerned that road vibration could walk screws out. That would be bad.
I don’t see how it would push manufacturers to do that. I can see how it would make consumers more open to soldered RAM if RAM is so expensive there is no way you are going to upgrade it later. But, I would be interested to get your thoughts as I miss stuff that feels obvious I’m hindsight all the time.