In a few months, I will have the space and infrastructure to join the selfhost community. I’m trying to prepare, as I know it can be challenging, but I somehow ended up with more questions than answers.
For context, I want to run a server with torrents, media (plex, Jellyfin or something else entirely - I didn’t make a decision yet), photos(Emmich, if its stable, or something else), Rook, Paperless, Home Assistant, Frigate, Adguard Home… Possibly lots more. Also, I will need storage - I’m planning for 3x18tb drives to begin with, but will certainly be adding more later.
My initial intention was to set up a NAS in Silverstone CS382(or Jonsbo N3/N5, if they’re in a reasonable price). I heard good things about Unraid and it’s capabilities of running docker. On the other hand, I’m hearing hood things about Proxmox or NixOS with NAS software running in a VM, too - but for Unraid, it seems hacky. Maybe I should run NAS and a separate server? That’d be more costly and seems like more work on maintenance with no real benefit. Maybe I should go with TrueNAS in a VM? If I don’t do anything other than NAS, TrueNAS shouldn’t be that hard to set up, right?
I’m also wondering whether I should go with Intel for QuickSync, AMD and Arc graphics or something else entirely. I’ve read that AV1 is getting popular, is AMD getting more support there? I will buy Intel if it’s clearly the better option, but I’m team Red and would prefer AMD.
Also, could anyone with a non-technical SO tell me how do they find your selhosted things? I’ve read about Cloudflare Tunnels and Tailscale, which will be a breeze for me, but I gotta think about other users aswell.
That’s another concern for me - am I correct in thinking Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are all I need to access the server remotely? I will probably set up a PiKVM or the Risc one aswell, can it be exposed aswell? I will have a dream machine from Ubiqiti, anything that needs to run to access the server I may run there. I’m not looking to set up anything more complicated like Wireguard - it’s too much.
For additional context, I’m a software developer, I know my way with Docker and the command line and I consider myself to be tech savvy, but I’m not looking to spend every weekend reading changelogs and doing manual updates. I want to have an upgrade path (that’s why Im not going with Synology for example), but I also don’t want to obsess over it. Money isn’t much of an issue, I can spare 1-2k$ on the build, not including the drives.
Any feedback and suggestions appreciated :)
I just went with a plain boring Ubuntu box, because all the “purpose built” options come with compromises.
Granted, this is about as hard-mode as this can get, but on the other hand I have 100% perfect support for any damn thing I feel like using, regardless of the state of support of whatever more specialized OS is for aforementioned thing.
I probably wouldn’t recommend this if you’re NOT very well versed in Linux sysadmin stuff, and probably wouldn’t recommended it to anyone who doesn’t have any interest in sometimes having to fix a broken thing, but I’m 3 LTS upgrades, two hardware swaps, and a full drive replacement, and most of a decade into this build and it does exactly what I want, 95% of the time.
I would say, though, that containerizing EVERYTHING is the way to go. Worst case, you blow up a single service and the other dozen (or two, or three…) keep right on running like you did absolutely nothing. I can’t imagine maintaining the 70ish containers I’m running without them actually being containers and/or without me being a complete nutcase that runs around the house half naked muttering about the horrors of updates.
I’m not anti-Cloudflare, so I use a mix of tunnels, their normal proxy, as well as some rawdogging of services with direct port forwards/a local nginx reverse proxy.
Different services, different needs, different access methods.
This is the way. I’m up since Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on this machine. Platform swapped from AMD Phenom, to Intel i7, to AMD Ryzen, now with a bigger Ryzen. SSDs from a single SATA, to NVMe, to a 512G NVMe mirror, to a 1G NVMe mirror. The storage went from a single 4T disk to an 8T mirror NAS, to 8T directly attached mirror, to 24T RAIDz, to 48T RAIDz. I’ve now activated the free Ubuntu Pro tier, so if Canonical is still around in 2032, this machine can operate for another 8 years with just hardware swaps on failure.