It is enough to put it into its own network namespace.

If you want to use a filesystem that is so bad that it doesn’t even have journaling you need to manually select it. None of them have been using one of those by default for 10-15 years now.

Maybe on some distros that is the case if you install a recent version but to get a non-journaling filesystem you literally have to partition manually to avoid using one on any distro that is still supported today and meant for full sized PCs (as opposed to embedded devices).

I would still consider that generation of filesystem to be effort to use while regular journaling filesystems have been so ubiquitous that you need to invest effort to avoid using one.

Databases shouldn’t even need a journaling filesystem, they usually pay attention to when to use fsync and fdatasync.

In fact journaling filesystems basically use the same mechanisms as databases only for filesystem metadata.

most traditional VMs do not like to have their power killed (especially non-journaling file systems).

Why are you using a non-journaling file system in 2024 when those were common 10+ years ago?

I am ideally looking for something that can just be left and updated less frequently

You might want that but security holes happen every day and need to be patched asap. Honestly, if you want to spend the least amount of effort use a stable distro like Debian stable and just use the package manager to update, a lot less effort than replacing entire containers for everything all the time.

Possibly because ad also exists as a word?

I haven’t used netbird but was just evaluating it earlier (based on the docs for now) for some future use. Could you elaborate on what they changed?

XFS has “just worked” for me for a very long time now on a variety of servers and desktop systems.

Those labels are quite common too with systems that do not prioritize one over the other.

No, that is not how DNS blocking works. It doesn’t just avoid responding, it responds but with a response that says that the domain does not exist or one that points to a different IP address.

The vast majority of devices that allow setting multiple DNS servers do not strictly prioritise one over the other even if they label it as primary and secondary.

Those three are really not all that complicated, basically (apart from DKIM which you can ignore when not sending) they are just a couple of TXT DNS records you need to set once for your domain. Even if you were using DKIM it is just a keypair you generate and then put the public key into a DNS TXT record and configure your mail server to use the private key.

I would also set up SPF to disallow all IPs to send mail for that domain in case some system supports SPF but not DMARC.

Technically you don’t even need to have control over the host, just over the data flow to the IP.

I think Borg Backup would fit your needs. You would still need to reinstall things like a boot sector and recreated partitions but on the other hand file based backups have the advantage that you can restore individual files when needed too and that it is easier to only backup what changed. Just make sure to exclude any temporary files you don’t want to keep from the backup (e.g. cache dirs, log files that get rewritten often and aren’t relevant long-term,…).

Icinga2 works reasonably well for us. It is easy to write new checks as small shell scripts (or any other binary that can print and set and exit status code).

More importantly, if you do things programmatically you will still have the information how you did it last time the next time you need to move to a new major version of something which is particularly important in a home setting where you don’t do tasks like that often.

Depending on what you are trying to host and where you live power usage and your own hardware might be more expensive than the VPS you require to host those.