one piece i highly recommend is running your torrent solution in a container with the network set to a gluetun container. no fuss, no muss, vpn’d torrenting.

for the nas piece, im a big fan of the nas device being single purpose. its life should only exist in fileserving. i have several redundant nas devices and then a big ol app server.

my goal is the ron popeil method of ‘set it and forget it’

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.

I have been extremely happy with Unraid. It is by far the most beginner-friendly option and there isn’t an easier solution when it comes to expanding capacity. I run my nzb client and all of my *arr containers on it. My media server is on a used SFF PC I grabbed for cheap — so QuickSync can run on the bare metal. It’s been a great stack for years.

Married, we both work from home, and we’re in an apartment.

First, all of my weird stuff is not between her work and living room pcs and the internet. Cable modem connects to normal consumer router (openwrt) with four lan ports. Two of those are directly connected to her machines (requiring a 150-ish foot cable for one), and two connect to my stuff. All of my stuff can be down and she still has internet.

Second, no rack mount servers with loud fans, mid tower cases only. Through command line tools I’ve found some of these are in fact capable of a lot of fan noise, but this never happens in normal operation so she’s fine with it.

Separately I’d say, have a plan for what she will need if something happens to you. Precious memories, backups, your utility and service accounts, etc. should remain accessible to her if you’re gone and everything is powered off - but not accessible to a burglar. Ideally label and structure things so a future internet installer can ignore your stuff and set her up with normal consumer internet after your business internet account is shut off.

Also keep in mind if you both switch over so every movie and show you watch only ever comes from Plex (which we both like), in an extended power outage situation all of your media will be inaccessible. It might be good to save a few emergency-entertainment shows to storage you can browse from your phone, usb or iXpand drive you can plug directly into your phone for example.

A LOT of questions there.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox+Ceph vs Proxmox+ZFS for NAS: I am not sure if Unraid is ONLY a subscription these days (I think it was going that way?) but for a single machine NAS with a hodgepodge of drives, it is pretty much unbeatable.

That said, it sounds like you are buying dedicated drives. There are a lot of arguments for not having large spinning disk drives (I think general wisdom is 12 TB is the biggest you should go for speed reasons?), but at 3x18 you aren’t going to really be upgrading any time soon. So Truenas or just a ZFS pool in Proxmox seems reasonable. Although, with only three drives you are in a weird spot regarding “raid” options. Seeing as I am already going to antagonize enough people by having an opinion, I’ll let someone else wage the holy war of RAID levels.

I personally run Proxmox+Ceph across three machines (with one specifically set up to use Proxmox+ZFS+Ceph so I can take my essential data with me in an evacuation). It is overkill and Proxmox+ZFS is probably sufficient for your needs. The main difference is that your “NAS” is actually a mount that you expose via SMB and something like Cockpit. Apalrd did a REALLY good video on this that goes step by step and explains everything and it is well worth checking out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu3t8pcq8O0.

Ceph is always the wrong decision. It is too slow for enterprise and too finicky for home use. That said, I use ceph and love it. Proxmox abstracts away most of the chaos but you still need to understand enough to set up pools and cephfs (at which point it is exactly like the zfs examples above). And I love that I can set redundancy settings for different pools (folders) of data. So my blu ray rips are pretty much YOLO with minimal redundancy. My personal documents have multiple full backups (and then get backed up to a different storage setup entirely). Just understand that you really need at least three nodes (“servers”) for that to make sense. But also? If you are expanding it is very possible to set up the ceph in parallel to your initial ZFS pool (using separate drives/OSDs), copy stuff over, and then cannibalize the old OSDs. Just understand that makes that initial upgrade more expensive because you need to be able to duplicate all of the data you care about.

I know some people want really fancy NASes with twenty million access methods. I want an SMB share that I can see when I am on my local network. So… barebones cockpit exposing an SMB share is nice. And I have syncthing set up to access the same share for the purpose of saves for video games and so forth.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox for Services: Personally? I prefer to just use Proxmox to set up a crapton of containers/vms. I used Unraid for years but the vast majority of tutorials and wisdom out there are just setting things up via something closer to proxmox. And it is often a struggle to replicate that in the Unraid gui (although I think level1techs have good resources on how to access the real interface which is REALLY good?).

And my general experience is that truenas is mostly a worst of all worlds in every aspect and is really just there if you want something but are afraid of/smart enough not to use proxmox like a sicko.

Processor and Graphics: it really depends on what you are doing. For what you listed? Only frigate will really take advantage and I just bought a Coral accelerator which is a lot cheaper than a GPU and tends to outperform them for the kind of inference that Frigate does. There is an argument for having a proper GPU for transcoding in Plex but… I’ve never seen a point in that.

That said: A buddy of mine does the whole vlogger thing and some day soon we are going to set up a contract for me to sit down and set her up an exporting box (with likely use as a streaming box). But I need to do more research on what she actually needs and how best to handle that and she needs to figure out her budget for both materials and my time (the latter likely just being another case where she pays for my vacation and I am her camera guy for like half of it). But we probably will grab a cheap intel gpu for that.

External access: Don’t do it, that is a great way to get hacked.

That out of the way. My nextcloud is exposed to the outside world via a cloudflare tunnel. It fills me with anxiety but as long as you regularly update everything it is “fine”.

My plex? I have a lifetime plex pass so I just use their services to access it remotely. And I think I pay an annual fee for homeassistant because I genuinely want to support that project.

Everything else? I used to use wireguard (and openvpn before it) but actually switched to tailscale. I like the control that the former provided but much prefer the model where I expose individual services (well, VMs). Because it is nice to have access to my cockpit share when I want to grab a file in a hotel room. There is zero reason that anything needs access to my qbitorrent or calibre or opnsense setup. Let alone even seeing my desktop that I totally forgot to turn off.

But the general idea I use for all my selfhosted services is: The vast majority of interactions should happen when I am at home on my home network. It is a special case if I ever need to access anything remotely and that is where tailscale comes in.

Theoretically you can also do the same via wireguard and subnetting and vlans but I always found that to be a mess to provide access both locally and remotely and the end result is I get lazy. Also, Tailscale is just an app on basically any machine whereas wireguard tends to involve some commands or weird phone interactions.

I have one mini-ATX server with four drives in RAID 10. I find it easier to manage everything in one device. It runs Proxmox, with Almalinux in a VM that runs my Docker containers. Yes, it’s a layer of inefficiency, but I keep it that way partially because I migrated the VM to Proxmox from ESXi, and partially because I’m not confident in LXC being able to do everything Docker can.

I also run it that way because I have a handful of other VMs.

I’m currently using Unraid for pretty much every thing you listed, and I love it so much. I really appreciate being able to set up almost everything through the web interface. It makes my hobbies feel fun rather than just an extension of my day job.

That said, I bought the licence before they switched to a subscription model. So if I were starting over I might look into free alternatives.

Unraid is bad at NAS and bad at docker. Go with a separate Nas and application server.

Been running Unraid for almost a year. I was previously running Windows with nearly zero insight into the health of my apps, RAID, etc. Made me very nervous. Unraid makes it all so easy.

I’m running many of the apps you mentioned and the implementation of docker on Unraid is easy to install, update, etc. I used docker on Windows but it was not the same. I’m not a software dev, so I’m not sure why you said Unraid’s docker implementation is hacky. It seems good to me.

The reason I switched to Unraid was I had to add more storage to my RAID and that was impossible in Windows without destroying the RAID and losing my data. I considered TrueNAS, but my understanding is the same is true. They’re supposed to be adding that capability soon ™️ but who knows when that’ll actually be available and reliable. Unraid let’s you add more storage whenever and the drives don’t have to match. I love the flexibility.

I use Nginx Proxy Manager docker to access my apps externally. My SO is not tech savvy and after setting up the individual apps with the domain I have, it’s usually smooth sailing. If I ever need to do any mucking about with the server itself, I turn on UI teleport. I also have a PiKVM but have only needed to use it a couple times. It’s just not necessary with how reliable Unraid is.

My server has an i5-6600 and utilizes QuickSync, which is great. More energy efficient than a dedicated GPU. I’ve considered adding a GPU but I haven’t run into a situation where I need it.

Tldr: highly recommend Unraid.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #943 for this sub, first seen 31st Aug 2024, 15:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

What my setup will soon be for hardware: Gen 2 AMD epic 16 core CPU, Supermicro motherboard with lots of pcie slots, 128g ram, Intel arc a40 GPU, HBA card attached to a super micro disk shelf

Software: Proxmox for host is, Truenas Scale (just NAS) in VM with HBA card passed into VM, Plex in VM with Intel GPU passed in, 3 VMs for docker swarm (headless Debian)

Other thoughts: Cloud flare will only be helpful for things you want exposed to the internet. If you do that make sure you have a reverse proxy. This is how I expose services for non-tech family.

VPN will be more secure, but can also be more of a pain. I generally only do that for things only I need or only techy savvy people will use.

The way I’ve done it is Ubuntu Server with a bunch of Docker Compose stacks for each service I run. Then they all get their own subdomain which all runs through the Nginx Proxy Manager service to forward to the right port. The Portainer service lets me inspect things and poke around, but I don’t manage anything through it. I want it all to be super portable, so if Ubuntu Server becomes too annoying, I can pack it all up and plop it into something like Fedora Server.

I’m running something surprisingly close to most of what you’re asking for sans the immich which I’m waiting on stability from them first. That warning at the time of their site that says it’s under constant development and not to use it as your primary picture store is a bit worrisome.

Unraid with 2 video cards

• Plex Container (primary video card)
• Plex VM (pass through secondary card handles DVR and backups and it’s also my steam remote provider)
• Home assistant VM (running it in a VM is nicer than a container because of HAOS)
• Jellyfin container
• All the video services pull from the same catalog. I use jellyfin frequently but secondarily, it is my backup in case Plex heads in a direction I don’t like. They’ve already shown some indications I’m not going to like them in the future.
• Deluge+VPN container
• Cloudflare container (first set up is actually a pain in the ass)
• Tailscale plugin
• SearxNG container self-hosted search engine tool
• Pi hole in a container
• Pi hole on a raspberry pi

Plex gets accessed remotely via its own remote capabilities

Jellyfin gets accessed remotely via tailscale

SearXNG is access remotely via cloudflare

I have a secondary Plex server sitting on a raspberry pi with the backup pi hole

I am preparing to set up a peertube. Haven’t had a lot of luck with the container on unraid. I run a fair amount of proxmox at work so I’ll probably just use proxmox for it.

I run a separate dedicated system completely for my cameras. Not running frigate yet but I’ll get around to it eventually using blue iris at the moment.

My unraid gets as much uptime as updates allow. I love being able to just jbod my media discs together and still have some protection with parity.

I find the containerized version of Plex to be more stable than my VM version but that’s probably my own fault as I’m oversubscribing the vm.

What I’ve realized in my (very limited) experience in selfhosting, it’s always best to use a general purpose server OS rather than anything geared to a specific usecase, unless that’s the only thing you’re gonna use it for. So, if you want a separate NAS drive, then it’s a good idea to use TrueNAS on it. But on your main server, it’ll be best to use some sort of RHEL downstream distro like AlmaLinux.

Keep it as simple as possible to start with and then expand if you feel there is a need. No need for two servers. The first thing you should buy though is a book about basic network design and security if you’re not familiar with it. It may feel like overkill now but future you will thank yourself.

As for the family in the same house… I try to make it as seamless as possible. Sometimes there is no need to tell them because the new service I set up integrates nicely with our devices. And sometimes I tell them “we have X now which does this, you can go to http://x.y.z.lan or use the app”.

Some random and probably not very popular opinions.

• I would check out eBay for used parts and find a decent motherboard with an IPMI interface. Find an appropriate case with good reviews if you’re not gonna mount your server in a rack.

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• Install FreeBSD and use zfs in a raid configuration that fits you if you care about your data. Run all your services in separate jails and be done with it. You don’t need Docker anyway for your private NAS.

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• Plex, Jellyfin, the *arr stack and a few other resource hogging services have a nice web ui but that’s about it. Do you really, really, need transcoding and all the features? Set up NFS, DLNA or whatever and use whatever client you like. I can’t access my Jellyfin library right now because the backend is apparently too old (wtf). Meanwhile VLC and a few other more fancy frontend clients with cover art, ratings and stuff works just fine accessing the same files over NFS. You don’t have to run some convoluted bullshit and reinvent the wheel every time just because you can.