u/Drakmyth

I am attempting to install Alpine on a Zotac ZBOX-ID80-PLUS from circa 2011. After much back and forth, I have determined that this device:

• Requires UEFI boot for USB devices (no legacy support)
• Requires legacy BIOS boot for internal drives (no UEFI support)

I am using a USB drive as the installation media, created on Windows with Rufus using alpine-standard-3.24.1-x86_64.iso. I have tried both "MBR+(BIOS or UEFI)" and "GPT+(UEFI non-CSM)" configurations, in both ISO and DD modes. I have no trouble getting into the live USB instance, but it always boots in UEFI mode and thus setup-alpine/setup-disk always uses the UEFI install procedure, even if I try to provide USE_EFI=0.

While I can see the partitions on the internal drive do have the Alpine files I would expect, I cannot get this machine to boot from it. I feel like I've followed every install guide I can find and in desperation tried to get ChatGPT to direct me to a solution, with no avail. I'm this close to throwing this box in the garbage.

What am I missing? What is the secret incantation to installing/configuring a legacy bios boot option from within a UEFI installation medium?

(Apologies for the rather long post. Had more questions than I thought once I started writing it out. Jump to the bottom for the actual questions if you want to skip the context.)

I'm a fairly novice homelabber and am looking to pick up some mini pcs to move my container stack off my Synology NAS. I'm looking to get into Proxmox for the first time and had a couple questions.

My current container stack includes:

• Networking
  • pihole
  • traefik
  • step-ca
  • authentik (server, worker, redis, postgres)
  • openspeedtest
  • netalertx
  • omada-controller
• Smart Home
  • home-assistant
  • node-red
  • eclipse-mosquitto
  • zwave-js-ui
  • zigbee2mqtt
  • sun2mqtt
  • snmp2mqtt
  • docker2mqtt
• Services
  • jellyfin
  • excalidraw
  • dashy
  • calibre-web
  • freshrss
  • penpot (frontend, backend, exporter, valkey, postgres, mailcatcher)

These combined idle at 5.6/20gb of RAM (though 1.8 of that is omada-controller by itself 😵 and I'm considering dropping that).

I also have OPNSense running bare-metal on a Beelink EQ14 and Octoprint running bare-metal on an RPi 3B+.

I'm thinking about picking up a couple refurbished ThinkCentre M93P's (16gb ram, 1tb hdd) that I can get for ~$100 each and putting them in a cluster. I also dug out an old Zotac ZBOX-ID80-Plus (2gb ram, 320gb hdd) I had lying around.

My hardware questions:

• Are the M93P's a good place to start? I have a maximum budget of about $600 to play with at the moment, and I've particularly been looking for machines with 16gb of ram or more, but that quickly pushes most prices up to $180-$200 on the low end. Is it even worth bothering with my ZBox? Am I overindexing on ram amount? I'm very open to suggestions for other hardware picks.
• When clustering, should I be thinking of it as individual host machines that I can choose between for hosting things, or should I think of it as one large server with the combined resources of all the instances in the cluster? I suspect the former, but I have no experience with multi-system setups.
• Anything to watch out for in terms of number of machines in the cluster? Would it be better for me to maybe pick up a larger number of machines with less ram each vs fewer machines with more? (Assuming physical space and power availability is not an issue.)
• How much does the individual hardware configurations of the different instances matter? Should I be trying to keep them all relatively similar, or can they be wildly different with no problems?
• Should I even mess with a cluster right now? Would I be better off picking up a beefier machine and just getting started with Proxmox first?

My virtualization questions:

• I'm very familiar with docker containers, but haven't messed with VM's in a very long time (and even then, it was primarily VMWare on my daily driver windows host). I have an impression of VM's being fairly slow and heavy. Is this actually accurate though? And how much does the instance hardware impact this?
• Reading through this forum, I'm seeing mixed opinions on the usefulness or purpose of LXC containers. Seems like they've wavered in and out of popularity over time. What's the current thinking? Always forego them in favor of VM's, or are there specific conditions I should consider them for?
• Is it still true that Proxmox can't run docker containers natively, and that the recommended pattern is hosting a VM and running docker within that? Does this introduce any performance limitations or networking complexity?
• This all started with me wanting to get my critical networking containers off my NAS and onto dedicated hardware so I didn't have to deal with circular ip dependencies and my internet going out any time I reboot the NAS or accidently forget to put the container name after docker compose down. Am I just shifting the problem up a layer? Should I still lean toward having dedicated hardware just for my networking items, unrelated to whatever virtualization/clustering setup I have for my non-critical services?

[UPDATE] Thank you everyone for the insights and especially u/jillianmd for clearly identifying the part of the process I was missing. It is true that just switching to a Set Aside target can cause overfunding (or more accurately, it causes underspending to accumulate in the category), but the step I wasn't aware of is that if you also go back and modify the previous period to remove the excess, the current period will start with exactly enough to cover the late transaction and fill up to the desired amount from there.

Original message below.

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Let's say I have a yearly Refill Up To target of $100 that renews Jan 1. I had spent $60 in November 2025, but then was a bit late shopping for a birthday or something and spent an additional $20 on Jan 2, 2026 that I want to be considered part of 2025's budget.

I know this question has been asked many times. The canonical answer I tend to see is to use a Set Aside target instead but doesn't this cause the opposite problem?

If I use a Refill Up To target: on Jan 1 I'll refill the $60 I had spent in November and the $20 will be considered part of 2026's budget - I'm now underfunded by $20 for 2026.

If I use a Set Aside target: on Jan 1 I'll refill $100, which covers both the $60 from November as well as the $20, but also assigns an additional $20 to sum up to $100 - I'm now overfunded by $20.

In the former case, I'll have not set aside enough for 2026. In the latter case, I'll have set aside too much. Obviously, I could reconcile this by backdating the $20 charge, but I'd really prefer not to mess with history. Or alternatively, if I use the Set Aside target but then only refill the $80 I spent, YNAB will continuously tell me that category is underfunded and I'll have to keep snoozing it.

Is the only real option for me to delete and re-create the target whenever this happens, or am I missing something?

I've been looking into getting my first robot mower and it seems like many options market having a "free lifetime subscription" for 4G NRTK service.

Having been bitten by lifetime subscriptions that had a significantly shorter "lifetime" than myself, I'm immediately skeptical. Is this a marketing ploy that will get rug pulled in a few years? Is the initial price jacked up with the hope you'll replace the unit before they start losing money on the duration you've had it?

What happens when the service provider goes bankrupt or is acquired by a company that doesn't want to continue the service? It sounds like some of these rely on NRTK as their primary navigation source. Do these units effectively have a drop-dead date where the performance drops off a cliff due to having to exclusively use whatever backup technology is available, unless you start paying?