There were a number of users who were really upset that we dropped rTorrent/ruTorrent, but we had way to many complaints about it being unstable. FWIW I couldn't ever reproduce the issues, but we had way to many reports for it to be in people's imagination.

What are the specs of your "always on" box? Assuming that it was built in the last Proxmox. The minimum hardware requirements are x86_64 (i.e. 64 bits) and VT-x/AMD-V cpu extensions. Unless it's one of the early old Atom CPUs, it should support 64 bit.

CPU virtualisation support is a slightly different (and messier) situation. AFAIK AMD have been providing AMD-V on all their chips since the Athlon 64 chips (circa early 2006). So if you have an AMD chip, you should be good.

Intel CPUs have VT-x instead, and their philosophy was a bit more scattered. They first provided it in the later high end Pentium 4 chips (circa late 2005). Many of the Core2Duo chips had it too, but not all of them. I used to have a high end Intel Core2Quad that didn't have it. If you have an Intel chip, I suggest you find out what it is and consult the internet to see if it supports it. Intel still provide the full specs on all their old CPUs last time I checked.

I mention Proxmox, because then you can run each server as it's own VM. So you get the redundancy of having multiple servers (which personally I like) but only need to leave one machine running. I ran a Proxmox server on an old desktop system for years and had up to 20 VMs running no problems (and one was even Windows!) The only reason why I ended upgrading was I was running out of RAM (I had upgrade it as far as possible; 8GB). My new Proxmox rig is a low power octocore Atom with 32 GB RAM. Each VM doesn't perform quite as well as it used to on the old server (slower CPU speed) but with 8 cores and 32GB RAM I have tons of headroom.

Personally, installing Proxmox was probably the single best thing I ever did when I first started exploring Linux (ok, finding TurnKey was probably the best, but it was close second). Being able to spin up a server, clone it, then trash it all in a matter of moments makes playing with Linux so much easier. No need to be scared of breaking things (so long as you have a backup first). And new things can be tried in a disposable VM (worst case, trash it, rinse and repeat).

Even if you'd rather not go that route, there are other ways to skin the cat. Samba can be installed too and whilst it isn't the easiest beast to configure, it's possible. As a hint, I suggest that you install the webmin-samba package as well to make it a little easier to configure.

Also, back when I was using Windows, I used to have WinSSHFS installed. That allows you to mount remote Linux directories over SSH (native and preinstalled on all TurnKey servers). Development had been abandoned and it was a little buggy (on Win7) when the computer woke up after being asleep, but otherwise worked fantastic. Last I checked, someone had adopted it and it was under development again. I assume that the bugs have been fixed.

Yes I hear you re the docs... It's a serious shortcoming of TurnKey. I've made some efforts to improve that, but it's been spotty at best. The problem is that those that need it can't do it, and those that could do it, often get tied up with other "more important" (and/or more interesting) things!

Something worth keeping in mind though, is that under the hood, TurnKey is Debian (v14.x = Debian Jessie aka 8.x). There are some initial configuration differences and we provide some custom software, but essentially anything that works for Debian should work for TurnKey too. Out of interest, Ubuntu is also based on Debian so instructions for Ubuntu will often be useful too. Although be a bit careful, as Ubuntu and Debian aren't binary compatible (TurnKey IS binary compatible with Debian).

I get your apprehension, but I couldn't recommend Proxmox more highly. For me it helped alleviate many of my concerns. Like I say, the beauty of it is that you can risk trashing a test server, without risking any other servers you already have configured and running.

If you want a hand seeing if your hardware is up to the task, please feel free to share what you have. If you already have Linux running on it, please just share the output of:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -m 1 "model name"

If it's running Windows, then apparently according to google you can do that from the commandline with this:

wmic CPU get NAME

Personally I use TKLBAM for backups mostly these days, but Proxmox also provides a built in backup mechanism, so you don't even need to risk the particular server you plan to work on (stuff doesn't work, roll back; rinse, repeat).

Obviously you have plans and goals which you'd like to achieve, but while you're learning, I would encourage you to not get too caught up in "getting it right". If you approach it as "play" with more of a mindset of "experimenting" and "I wonder what happens if I ...?", then you can't lose! Remember; if you're not breaking things, you aren't playing hard enough! :)

Also FWIW, the MediaServer is actually built on top of the fileserver (same as the TorrentServer).

Thanks so much for posting back with what you discovered!

I've opened a new issue on our tracker to include the init script to create the /dev/tun device!

I wonder if it's also worth considering how we could add your additional IPTable rules too?! TBH, I just haven't played with OpenVPN enough to be sure... If you have any thoughts on it, I'd love to hear.

What I really need to do is sit down with it and set it up myself from scratch and test it out. Then I can be a bit more confident on updating the docs...

But I still think that the tun device creation would be good to add to the LXC containers (and probably docker too) so at least then it will work.

Regarding you 'just' "rub[bing] a few documents together", yeah ok that is somewhat true. But if you hadn't posted and bought that info to my attention, then we wouldn't be able to make the improvement for the benefit of future users (once we update it). So from one perspective, it was a small thing you did (i.e. collecting and sharing information); but from another, your actions will likely have the biggest impact down the line! So you deserve all the recognition I gave you! :)

Docs are an ongoing issue for any small open source project. For us behind the scenes, there are so many jobs that need doing and so few resources. We almost always have "more important" (i.e. higher priority) tasks to take care of, so docs often get neglected. It's also hard to get developers motivated to write up good docs (most developers find them boring and tedious).

As for community volunteers; as a general rule, those that need the docs don't have the knowledge to create them. Those that have the knowledge, don't have the interest, time or energy. So it's a bit of a vicious cycle really.

Anyway, thanks again for you input. And if you did want to document anything, then our docs section (of the website) is actually a wiki. The dedicated OpenVPN appliance docs page is here. You'll need to be logged in, but you should be able to edit that if you wish. You can also make changes to the docs on GitHub, although you'll need a (free) GitHub account to do that. Our "gitflow" is noted here but please feel free to ask if you need more guidance.

Good luck with it all! :)

I'm also really glad to hear that Proxmox is working out for you. I agree that it's pretty awesome! :)