Currently working on an Arch server for my self hosting needs. I love arch, in my eyes its the perfect platform for self hosting. There is no bloat, making it lightweight and resource efficient. Its also very stable if you go down the lts route and have the time and skills to head off problems before they become catastrophic.
The downsides. For someone who is a semi-noob there is a very steep learning curve. Arch is very well documented but when you hit a problem or a brick wall its very frustrating. My low tolerence for bullshit means I take hours/days long breaks from it. There’s also time demands in the real world so needless to say I’ve been going at it for a few weeks now.
Unraid is very appealing - nice clean interface, out-of-the-box solutions for whatever you want to do, easy NAS management… What’s not to like? If it was fully open-source I would’ve bought into it from the start. At least once a day I think “I’m done. Sign me up unraid”. Its taking an age to set up the Arch server. If I went for unraid I could be self hosting in a matter of hours. Unraid is the antitheses of Arch. Arch is for masochists.
Do you ever look at products like unraid and think “fuck this shit, gimme some of that”? What is your version of this? Have you ever actually done it and regretted it/lived happily ever after?
I use Unraid. It’s great and a lot less hassle than back when I used just a regular distro for everything.
When remodelling my NAS I was tempted to go for unraid as well, but in the end I chose OMV. Aside from some minor problems here and there it has been running great.
I think most selfhosters already know/use Linux, so management issues are already known. About the ease of use, if you manage services with docker it’s really easy to bring them up/down, and if you want some GUI there’s portainer.
I already did, no regrets. The way it handles storage is the killer feature for me. Being able to upgrade my drives or add one with very little effort is worth every penny.
Edit: I was grandfathered in before the subscription
I went to look at buying a second license and saw its all subscription now for updates… much sad
There is the ‘lifetime’ option? I hate subscriptions. I don’t know how much money these companies think I have but there’s no way I could subscribe to everything.
Ahh yes I see that option now. But at $250 CAD that’s pretty steep, but I am glad they at least have it as an option.
I thought you could still buy the highest tier and get no subscription, just that they raised the price?
Weeeell, since they switched to a semi-subscription model, I’d recommend looking into TrueNAS (inb4 they start locking down their stuff)
TrueNAS was actually the first thing I tried. The NAS side of it is great but my need to tinker and get my hands dirty got the better of me. And I don’t actually mind paying for good software, its the fact that so much of unraid is closed-source puts me off.
Are you using truenas as the entire homelab?
I also love messing with stuff until it breaks and I learn something, but I’ve decided I just want my files to be accessible.
So I actually have truenas virtualized with a passed through HBA so I can run proxmox to host all my breakable VMs while leaving truenas alone.
zfs has been working nicely for me for many years, for diverse operating systems including zfs all-in-one for internal NFS mount.
Already bought the lifetime license. It’s great, I don’t miss rolling my own bare metal arch servers.
(Because I still do that too)
Edit:
Unraid is stupidly point and shoot. It just works for whatever weird configuration of hardware you have and the provisioning is extremely intuitive, fast, and it just fucking works. Why yes, I will have a paperless server and have it auto update and sure here let’s make this space a samba drive to receive docs. Paperless is not brain surgery in arch, but man 5 minute setup for stuff is nice. Ive got maybe 10 containers running that I set up the first time I launched Unraid more than a year ago and I otherwise haven’t touched it. The upside and downside is that I didn’t have to learn anything to do it. Esp if you get your stuff from the same maker/provider the latest versions all hang together and updating can just be automated.
I just use TrueNAS for my storage layer. I don’t love the idea of a proprietary OS running my storage system. It’s just a bunch of ZFS under the hood which a competent data recovery company should be able to handle, if I don’t have backups of my 3TB of clown porn. The proportion of FreeBSD that’s a mystery to me is slightly less than it was in 2015 when I built it but it’s still pretty high.
My recommendation is to KISS with the fundamental layers and play higher in the stack with less critical workloads. Build a web server and a DNS server and reverse proxy and get a feel for how it works before
mucking withoptimizing the VM host.Not close at all.
OK, I got some missing bells and whistles in my current setup, which is just a poor man’s NAS made of ZFS and samba, plus a nextcloud for convenience.
But I fell so much in love with ZFS that I would never replace it with unraid. For my next box I am looking forward to use TrueNAS instead.
Unraid supports ZFS
ZFS is a bit like Arch - its wonderful in theory but in practice it can be bitch to work with. I’ve got it working on Arch but it wasn’t easy, let me tell you.
I have given up on ZFS entirely because of how much of a pig it was.
I bout unraid years ago… Mostly because I was just married and just started my career and wanted a solution that was already baked. It’s been great. I think it’s helped me get to under stand docker more. I’d often want to run a docker that’s not in their app store (yet).
The problem I kept running into is I wanted go check out and do everything which often broke things or something weird would happen… Lol. So I have two know. One that’s “production” and another for checking things out.
Ha nice. I actually like it when things break and I manage to fix them. That’s how you learn and finding the solution is satisfying.
For me I need to have stuff I actually use break to have the motivation to figure it out
Debian?
Yeah I wouldn’t call Arch a server OS. I run Arch on my laptop, but Debian on my docker/file/self-hosting server. Best tool for the job etc. Never even been tempted by Unraid, the whole point of running Linux is that I control what goes where.
I’ve never tried Arch but my debian server with kvm/qemu/cockpit running mdraid1 and smb/nfs file sharing - works well enough and I enjoy the tinkering and setting it all up. I’m writing this from a virtual Fedora KDE workstation that I’ve setup vfio and pcie passthrough of my dgpu and a usb controller on (both connected to my monitor that acts as a usb hub).
A friend runs a Proxmox VE Community Edition with physical disk passthrough to a virtual Nextcloud server and that seems to work well too.
I guess my answer is no, I don’t look at UnRAID and think “fuck this shit I’m done”, I enjoy the tinkering that makes you frustrated.May I ask what kind of brick walls you’re hitting and what software you run on Arch that makes it so frustrating?
I actually gave Debian a go and I get the hype. Compared to Arch its a dream to set up and work with. Somewhere down the road I might go back to it.
Proxmox - it looks great but I think its overkill for what I need. I can run most things in Docker - I don’t really need virtualization. At some point in the future I’d like to try it and have TrueNAS virtualized on top to manage the NAS side of things.
There’s not really particular thing (or things) that are insurmountable/unbearable with Arch. Its more the experience. But I love it and hate it in equal measure ha.
What I like about running a hypervisor and true vms is that I can fool around with some vms in my server without risk of disrupting the others.
I run most of my dockers in one VM, my game servers in another and the Jellyfin instance on a third. That allows me to fool around with my portainer instance or game servers without disrupting Jellyfin and so on.
Part of it is that I’m more used to and comfortable in managing vms and their backup/recovery compared to LXCs and Dockers.
Im running a similar setup (ZFS pool, Cockpit, portainer x2, and a few LXCs for Plex, Frigate, etc) and it’s been great. Before building it early this year, I’d been running everything on Windows for the decade prior because I was unfamiliar with Linux and struggled like OP when problems arose, but after following a guide to get everything setup it’s been rock solid and if I screw anything up I can just load a backup. I’d also looked into TrueNAS and Unraid but this gives me a more flexible setup without any extra cost and the ability to tinker without affecting anything else like you said.
I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?
I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?
Gentoo/Arch guy checking in. It’s more about having fewer codepaths to go wrong after some update. At least in my case.
After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?
The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.
Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.
hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?
Yeah I get you. I suppose it is only installing what you need and knowing exactly what everything is for/does. As well as squeezing every last drop of resource form tired old hardware. But yeah there is a usability trade-off.
I have a working solution already so unraid isn’t really appealing to me, and as you say, isn’t FOSS. It’s one of the multiple reasons I’ll never switch to Plex, even if some argue it is a superior product to Jellyfin.
But I use NixOS (btw) so it’s fairly low maintenance once it’s setup, and easy to redeploy if things ever go completely sideways due to hardware failures etc
I actually bought unraid before it became a subscription. And I must say, i really like it.
I am currently looking into Proxmox to build a small cluster to prevent critical services from becoming unavailable whenever I do stupid things… but… compared to unraid the learning curve and ease of use is much more brutal.
