Kimai 2 VS OpenMediaVault

I’ve been using Kimai [1] for a bit over a year to track my freelancing work for various clients as well as the work I do for my own projects. I can definitely recommend it!

It's easy to install and very pleasant to use for tracking time.

Entries have an "exported" flag to mark if you've already billed for a certain hour or not. You could also generate invoices directly from Kimai but I'm not using that feature because I'm creating my invoices in another program.

[1] https://www.kimai.org

Try https://www.kimai.org/ It has time-clock, timesheets etc

For docker version, see here: https://github.com/kevinpapst/kimai2

See Kimai and its demo (which includes accounts with different roles)

Depends on your needs / goals / abilities etc... but there are free, open source options that you might consider... This comes to mind: https://www.kimai.org/ It looks pretty at least :)

I can highly recmmend Kimai https://www.kimai.org/ . In my opinion one oft the most feature-rich and reliable self-hosted FOSS time-tracking solutions.

Check out Kimai2.

Don't know one in Laravel, but Kimai (https://github.com/kevinpapst/kimai2) is php-based. I use it for weekly time entry as it has a form for this. Also has good reports etc.

Use a time-tracker like Kimai (https://github.com/kevinpapst/kimai2), add persons like clients, and have the pool tables as activities. Then use in-built timer to start/stop for each activity.

You might want to consider the previously mentioned MergerFS and SnapRAID, or MDADM and LVM for your setup. OpenMediaVault [https://www.openmediavault.org/ is a solid choice in this regard. Additionally, if you're planning to run something like Proxmox, you could look into deploying Starwind CVM on top of it. Pretty much like in this guide: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/ .

You would better to install OMV instead. It's a ready to use fileserver solution with web interface.

So I'm working on a similar setup with an ancient desktop my in-laws were getting rid of. I installed OpenMediaVault directly to the hard drive (it's so old that I assume it wouldn't work too well as a hypervisor), with a 4TB external HDD attached. OMV supports Docker by means of a plug-in and I'm running a Jellyfin container with no issues at all. I'm still manually downloading everything to the HDD but *arr containers are my next step, as well as setting up a gluetun container to route all that through a VPN.

That is possible (it's automated to a certain extent). It also depends on the NAS OS. Unraid, for example, can work with drives of different sizes while using the largest one for parity. TrueNAS uses ZFS so you won't be able to just add a drive to your RAIDZ and expand it. There's also openmediavault: https://www.openmediavault.org/ that uses Linux Software RAID and you can add a new drive there but you can't combine drives of different sizes. And there's also Starwinds NAS that supports both Linux Software RAID and ZFS: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas. Plus, I would avoid SMR drives in RAID: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

I'd put it like that: if you have a spare PC, then it's definitely worth trying. I would also look into openmediavault (minimal RAM needs): https://www.openmediavault.org/ and Starwinds NAS (supports both ZFS and Linux software RAID): https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas

Your current PC looks very decent for a lab. Proxmox on it, then one Linux VM with Docker, another VM for NAS with something lite and easy like openmediavault: https://www.openmediavault.org/ or Starwinds NAS: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas and Plex separately. And other stuff in VMs or containers.