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?
What parts are “a bitch” to work with?
I’m a bit confuses about your approach in general:
No zfs because it “breaks”, but you use arch as server is? Sounds like you want to tinker and break things to learn, but virtualization is “overkill”?
I don’t understand what you’re trying to get from your homelab.
If you’re coming from Windows servers/environs (or Mac for that matter), configuring ZFS in CLI (as you do in arch) is a learning curve and can be tedious.
Its not baked into the arch kernels so unless you’ve got your wits about you running updates can fuck everything up.
Yes. If all you’re looking for is a NAS with some docker containers and you don’t need the segregation virtualization is overkill.
You could just ask questions? There’s no need to be a dick about it.
I meant no disrespect, I suppose I should have been more direct.
I asked about ZFS because it is not really that difficult to set up and there aren’t that many variables involved. You create a pool, then start using it. There isn’t much more to it.
That is an arch problem, not ZFS. An update on Debian with ZFS would almost never behave like this.
I asked about virtualization because it would allow you to break things intentionally and flip back to a desired state, which seems to fit with your like of solving broken stuff.
So in the end, you’re obviously free to do what you like, and that’s the great thing about Linux. But you definitely seem to want to do things the hard way.
Have a better one.