Below is a practical, sightseeing-focused plan that keeps a safety buffer before every all-aboard time. I’m assuming:

Brussels port = Zeebrugge
Paris port = Le Havre
The ports are visited in the order listed
You'll use taxis, trains, or ship-organized transfers where necessary

Aim to be back at the port at least 60-90 minutes before departure-especially on independent excursions.

Cruise Sightseeing Itinerary

Day Port and time Suggested schedule

Oct. 26 Hamburg, 8 AM-overnight 8:00-9:30 AM: Disembark and leave luggage if possible. 9:30 AM-12:30 PM: Speicherstadt, Miniatur Wunderland, and HafenCity. 12:30-1:30 PM: Lunch near Speicherstadt. 1:30-3:00 PM: Elbphilharmonie Plaza and harbor views. 3:00-5:00 PM: St. Michael’s Church and a walk through the historic center. Evening: Dinner around the Rathaus or Sternschanze.

Physical Setup:

Hypervisor:

Hardware:

Networking:

Software:

• Proxmox 7.3-3 -> 9.1.9

VMs:

• OPNsense 23.7.10 -> 26.1.6_2, 2 Cores, 4GiB RAM
• TrueNAS CORE 13.0.U3.1-STABLE -> 13.0-U6.8, 4 Cores, 32GiB RAM
• Windows 11, 2 Cores, 8GiB RAM
• FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE - 15.0-RELEASE, 16GiB RAM
• Debian 11 (Bullseye), 8 Cores, 16GiB RAM

Jails:

• Kerberos
• Caddy
• Jellyfin
• Transmission

Why build a second server?

With the first server built, I now have a much better idea of what a NAS is. I also spent a lot of time reading a lot of materials on the TrueNAS forums. From these readings, I realized that my setup was non-optimal. It uses primarily gamer gear and as such, it lacks ECC.

Armed with that information, I set out to make an ECC-capable system. Unfortunately, crooked Intel likes to keep ECC exclusive to their Xeon CPU’s. Fortunately for me, I found out that the Core i3 line of processors up to 9th-gen do support ECC and that’s perfect for my server.

Introduction

Prior to this, I was only familiar with building gaming rigs. One day at work, I and a co-worker were talking about the convenience of NAS for storing bulk files and backup. I was intrigued and asked for more. He revealed that he has a small, quiet, and low power NAS that was quick and easy to setup. I was sold and off I went to my first real server.

Introduction

So here we are… my first post ever. I thought long and hard on how to start this. I decided to just document my journey over the years that led us to this point and what I plan to do moving forward.

Early years

I have always been nerdy ever since I was a kid. I played a lot of video games as early as the good ol’ Atari. My first introduction to computers was with MS-DOS on a 5.25" floppy disk that actually felt floppy. But, the one that really got me hooked was Windows 95 and its GUI that allowed me to play Solitaire and Prince of Persia.