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?
Not too close. My Proxmox server is basically set up, I can’t fit anything more on it, so it’s just back end and tinkering now. I’m comfortable with Proxmox.
That said, new box and a large windfall I’d have a look at Unraid. After donating to Proxmox at least that much first.
If Proxmox didn’t exist (and TTeck didn’t exist) I think I would have at least tested Unraid. I was comfy in Debian with Docker as a virtualisation host before moving to Proxmox anyways.
I’m sure it’s good, I would like to give it a go. I’m happy where I am though.
Ive been using Unraid for years.
I am fully capable of running a Docker solution and setting up drives in a raid configuration. It’s more or less one of my job duties so when I get home I’m not in a hurry to do a lot more of that.
But Unraid is not zero maintenance, and when something goes wrong, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to fix even with significant institutional knowledge.
Running disks in JBOD with parity is wonderful for fault tolerance. But throughput for copying files is very slow.
You could run it with zfs and get much more performance, but then all your discs need to be the same size, and there’s regular disk maintenance that needs to happen.
They have this weird dedication to running everything is root. They’re not inherently insecure, but it’s one of those obvious no-nos that you shouldn’t do that they’re holding on to.
If you want to make it a jellyfin/arr server and just store some docs on the side, it’s reasonable and fairly low maintenance.
I’m happy enough with them not to change away. And if you wait till a black Friday they usually have a pretty good sale.
I’ll probably eventually move to a ProxMox and a Kubernetes cluster as I’ve picked up those skills at work. I kind of want to throw together a 10-inch rack with a cluster of RPI. But that’s pretty against what direction you’re looking to head :)
They have this weird dedication to running everything as root
I didn’t know that. That isn’t fantastic.
Running disks in JBOD with parity is wonderful for fault tolerance. But throughput for copying files is very slow.
Didn’t know this either. It makes sense. Worth considering.
Nah. I have everything in containers so maintenance is a non-issue, since I can upgrade the host separately from the containers. I’m using openSUSE Leap with a BTRFS mirror for the storage and I never have to think about it. I’ll probably move to openSUSE MicroOS when I get a new boot drive so I don’t have to do the release upgrade every other year.
Fair warning unraid is slow… A friend tried unraid and absolutley hated it because file transfer was verry slow in comparison to both arch and windows.
I use Unraid. It’s great and a lot less hassle than back when I used just a regular distro for everything.
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.
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.zfs has been working nicely for me for many years, for diverse operating systems including zfs all-in-one for internal NFS mount.
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’m very jealous of everyone who bought in before the subscriptions ha
I thought you could still buy the highest tier and get no subscription, just that they raised the price?
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.
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.
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.
I have given up on ZFS entirely because of how much of a pig it was.
A pig on what?
Looks like I angered people by not loving ZFS. I don’t feel like being bagged on further for using it wrong or whatever.
I didn’t downvote you, I’m genuinely curious what you mean about zfs being a “pig”.
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.
squeezing every last drop of resource form tired old hardware
This is such a myth. 99% of the time your hardware is doing there doing nothing. Even when running “bloated” services.
Nextcloud, for example, uses practically zero cpu and a few tens on mb when sitting around yet people avoid it for “bloat”.
I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.
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.
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’m not sure what the benefits of unraid are but for better or worse, I’ve been running Linux servers since 2007 or so, so……
I also used arch now and full time for a few years in the 2010s. I like it, but they put in breaking changes occasionally that I don’t want to have to deal with for a server.
I was on CentOS and switched to Debian because of IBM/RH
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
