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 :)
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 personally run truenas on a standalone system to act as my NAS network wide. It never goes offline and is up near 24/7 except when I need to pull a dead drive.
Unraid is my go to right now for self hosting as its learning curve for docker containers is fairly easy. I find I reboot the system from time to time so its not something I use for a daily NAS solution.
Proxmox I run as well on a standalone system. This is my go to for VM instances. Really easy to spin up any OS I would need for any purpose. I run things like home assistant for example on this machine. And its uptime is 24/7.
Each operating system has its advantages, and all three could potentially do the same things. Though I do find a containered approche prevents long periods of downtime if one system goes offline.
TrueNAS is switching apps from kubernetes to docker. Might wait till October if wanting to spin up something new. I’ve got to figure out how to migrate my TrueCharts apps or find the equivalent when the time comes to upgrade
Why do you need both Unraid and TrueNAS? Don’t they do the same thing? What’s the downside to running TrueNAS on VM in Proxmox VS dedicated machine?
Comes down to personal preferences really. Personally I have been running truenas since the freebsd days and its always been on bare metal. There would be no reason you could not virtualize it, and I have seen it done.
I do run a pfsense virtualized on my proxmox VM machine. It runs great once I figured out all the hardware pass through settings. I do the same with GPU pass through for a retro gaming machine on the same proxmox machine.
The only thing I dont like is that when you reboot your proxmox machine the PCI devices dont retain their mapping ids. So a PCI NIC card I have in the machine causes the pfsense machine not to start.
The one thing to take into account with Unraid vs TrueNAS is the difference between how they do RAID. Unraid always drives of different sizes in its setup, but it does not provide the same redundancy as TrueNAS. Truenas requires disk be the same size inside a vdev, but you can have multiple vdevs in one large pool. One vdev can be 5 drives of 10tb and the other vdev can be 5 drives of 2tb. You can always swap any drive in truenas with a larger drive, but it will only be as big as the smallest disk in the vdev.
What hardware are you running your truenas setup on? I have an old computer that I’ve had freenas on that finally died.
Intel Core i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz with 16gb ram 165TB of storage. Motherboard is a Asus Delux 10+ years old. And a 10gb NIC. All inside a fractal Design XL case.
The hardware is by all means not top of the line, but you dont need much for a NAS.
This is the way. Except my “big ol’ app server” is an n95 mini pc that sips power.
What device do you use for NAS? I’m looking to have a tb of raid 0 ssd cache and if I were to have a dedicated NAS, I would probably go for something with ITX mobo or something like Ugreen Nas with unraid software. Doesn’t the power necessary to have a performant NAS go underutilized then?
well, i do try and keep all my data hot in the server… i am using the devices as redundancy, so no raid anywhere. 24Tb with 3 copies.
ive got a couple of 6-bay readynas i got second hand and a plain ol’ ubunutu workstation i crammed with 6 drives and an ssd.
app server runs off 6 local disks(and an ssd for os) which are replicated to the 2 nas as logical (they pull), the workstation gets a drive-for-drive physical
rsync is your friend.