Being a noob and all I was wondering whats the real benefit of having a monolithic lets say proxmox instance with router, DNS, VPN but also home asssistant and NAS functionalitiy all in one server? I always thought dedicated devices are simpler to maintain or replace and some services are also more critical than others I guess?
I’m running an Unraid server. You can pop in and manage everything with the CLI like you would on traditional server OSes and it’ll show your containers, images, orphans etc. in the GUI and throws alerts out of the box for utilization thresholds and power events. It’s quite nice at a glance and gets the fuck out of the way the moment it’s time to be a sysadmin.
Unraid brings some good things to the table, I wouldn’t discount it completely.
I’m well aware.
I was #8 on this list: https://web.archive.org/web/20240221094039/unraid.net/about
The way that Unraid manages Docker containers is really dumb, and it gets in your way SO MUCH. Orphans are not a normal Docker idea, it is something invented by Unraid. It actively makes managing containers harder, as there is no documented way to restore orphans if I recall correctly. Creating new containers is confusing and uses non-standard terminology, when docker-compose files have been standard for half a decade now. Unraid is a really bad container orchestrator with bad abstractions and no ability to do Infrastructure as Code. The only good thing is the GUI for monitoring containers.
The monitoring GUI is nice, and I guess if you’re doing everything with the CLI and just using the GUI for monitoring it makes sense. But CLI is not a supported workflow with Unraid, and what are you paying $3/month for if you’re just going to use the CLI? I personally wouldn’t recommend the overhead, setup, and upgrade headaches over just doing the CLI with Debian. There are just as nice free dashboards available for Kubernetes.
For what it’s worth, this is my homelab: https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b
I run nearly 300 containers in a 4 node cluster, with a separate router and iot server. Every single piece is implemented in code, because that’s easier to maintain and document. I used Proxmox for VMs/LXC for a while, and I used FreeNAS for ZFS+NFS for a while, but now I use purely NixOS and Kubernetes. I have never seen Unraid as a valuable thing that I would like to add to my homelab in the past 8 years.
Orphans are just dangling objects, are they not?
I’m only using the Unraid Docker GUI to send me utilization alerts and notify me when my images are egregiously out of date. I saw someone trying to author a compose file using the GUI once and I closed the window before the headache started.
I’m not paying $3/mo. Where’d you get that idea? I think I paid $20 for a license like 6 years ago.
I picked Unraid because I had a bunch of disparate HDDs sitting around and their filesystem intrigued me. (0 data loss after 3 drive failures so far.)
Fair enough. I think it’s bad to invent new words for “stopped container”, though. And there should be a way to re-start them.
Yeah, the container creation GUI is a mess. The $3/month thing is a new thing they started for new customers this year. https://unraid.net/pricing
Not a big deal for grandfathered users, but I think its important to consider as a new customer, as you won’t even get security updates without paying the subscription fee. Even for vulnerabilities like the CVE-2024-21626 Leaky Vessels vulnerability.
The raid is nice, but it can be kinda clunky adding/removing drives sometimes and I’ve managed to accidentally destroy an array when I was playing with it. I think you can get identical features using LVM, but obviously it’s nice how Unraid does it all for you in a GUI.
You’re not wrong!
The cheapest option Is the monthly one for no security updates, there are still regular pro and higher plans which are one and done, no grandfathering
Interesting, self hosting crossplane. What do you use it for?
Yeah I’ve been wanting to start using it. I have a colleague who uses it for platform engineering and it’s supposed to be amazing. I was going to use it for creating offsite backup buckets on OVH but I ended up setting up a Hetzner storage box manually instead because that was cheaper. Since everything I have is self hosted, really the only external infrastructure I have is Cloudflare, but all the records there are handled by external-dns, so I haven’t really seen a need to GitOps it.
One thing I do want to look at was the custom CRD feature they were talking about at Kubecon this year, it sounded like they might have finally fixed the platform engineering abstraction problem that people have been trying to use helm (badly) for. Many companies have actually been resorting to operators for this problem, which is super overkill. I did try to use cdk8s for abstraction last year, and I was even planning to create and support a production-ready Lemmy deployment option using cdk8s, but cdk8s honestly was quite clunky on the developer side and committed the sin of reimplementing an API without even properly documenting the new API.
I’m probably just going to create a Lemmy Helm chart at some point using Cloud-Native Postgres operator and Gateway API when I have time. But Helm has glaring issues, both as a developer and as a user.