Tau

Tau is an Ubuntu Server VM that hosts some services using Docker Compose, similarly to my RPi. I’ve been deploying new services to Tau, as the Pi’s 4 GB of RAM is beginning to get a bit overwhelmed!

Pages

• Deployment guide (steps for deploying all the software onto a fresh machine)

History

tau used to be called pi5, because its software ran on a Raspberry Pi 5. In April 2026, I upgraded it to running on a mini PC (within a Proxmox VM) for better performance (and to pass my Pi on to my friend). I named the new VM tau, because 2π is of course the successor to π.

Services

Internal

• Alloy - for forwarding Docker container logs to my central Loki instance

Hardware

Tau exists in my Proxmox cluster, on the megabase node. It has allocated to it:

• 4 virtual CPU cores (lots of cores is helpful for Immich’s ML features)
• 4 GiB RAM (again, so that Immich can run its ML models)
• 931 GiB virtual disk, on the vm-where LVM-Thin storage, backed by a Crucial MX500 SATA SSD (surprise surprise, most of this is used for Immich)

Software

OS

Tau runs Ubuntu Server 26.04.

Docker containers

Tau’s Docker Compose configs are public and available on my Forgejo or GitHub.