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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Unraid is bad at NAS and bad at docker. Go with a separate Nas and application server.
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.
This is the way. I’m up since Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on this machine. Platform swapped from AMD Phenom, to Intel i7, to AMD Ryzen, now with a bigger Ryzen. SSDs from a single SATA, to NVMe, to a 512G NVMe mirror, to a 1G NVMe mirror. The storage went from a single 4T disk to an 8T mirror NAS, to 8T directly attached mirror, to 24T RAIDz, to 48T RAIDz. I’ve now activated the free Ubuntu Pro tier, so if Canonical is still around in 2032, this machine can operate for another 8 years with just hardware swaps on failure.
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.
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.
I’m a very satisfied proxmox user and I have almost all applications deployed with VM or containers. If you’re no a begginer into Linux/nas I think it is the best choice. On the other hand I would totally discard TrueNAS because it is too restrictive and hard to customize.
After years of messing around with cheap and unreliable hardware and complicated setups, I settled to a very stable and simple setup: one huge Dell server with a lot of spare SAS bays and plenty empty memory slots, driven by Proxmox. Within it only 4 VMs: One for pfSense, one for Home Assistant, one for Docker, and one for Ispconfig, as I host for some friends. I ended up using Truenas as it was such a pain to maintain and totally useless for my use case. Proxmox is good enough to run a simple ZFS Nas if you don’t need to manage dozens of shares and users. It’s now so hassle free that I start to become inclined to brake something just for the sake of it.
Which model Dell?
Buying few-year old enterprise gear can be a really cost-effective way to get a ton of power and expandability. But the noise, footprint, and power requirements seem pretty niche, even for homelab/selfhost people.
But I’m curious if you’re talking about a full-depth rack system like I’m assuming, or something else.
Personally, I switched to a handful of very small-footprint systems (mostly NUC/SFF PCs, and some laptops). And use cheap jbod enclosures when I need to add external storage.
It’s a R730XD. It draws 168W idle with 128GB of 2400Mhz, and 8 x 3.5" spinning drives. I started with small desktop computers, but I ended up compromising about everything: ram, disks, cards. Everything was braking one after an other, mostly because heat I would think. I (and my family) was constantly annoyed by the outages, so now I invested in a proper rack in my garage. It’s sometimes noisy, it’s somewhat power hungry, but god… Professional hardware is so comfortable to work with. iDRAC, ipmi, very good temperature management, lot of room for upgrades, reliability, I wouldn’t go back to the nightmare of half-assed computer. I now run everything I can think of so smoothly that I rarely get complains from anyone. It’s not only from the hardware side to be honest. Using traefik has been a massive improvement to ease my reverse proxying. Finally getting rid of Truenas a huge relief. And switching from a hardcore 20 year long Gentoo user to a Portainer’s noob a clever move to finally get some time to use the services I host instead of messing around with hundreds of config files.
By the way, I do not understand the huge paranoia about facing services to the internet. I’m happy to share my mail, websites, jellyfin, cloud services and what else to everyone interested. In the more than 30 years I’m online, I never been hacked in anyway. I might be lucky.
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.
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.
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.
At least in the case of jellyfin, it’s not exactly just a “resource hogging frontend”.
For instance it keeps track of watch progress, in episode and through the series, and what did you watch last time so you can continue with whichever.
Allows you to remote control your player device (handy if it’s a TV or something like that) from your phone or another anything with a web browser.
It fetches info about the movies and series so it looks nice and for your users it is easier to pick something for themselves.
It has integration for MPV (and probably a few other players) so it does all the above.And it does all these things in a way that everything is available across all your devices. Not just the content, but watch progress and everything else.
Something tells me you also tell your family that a Linux computer with no desktop environment is all one needs for everyday tasks.
And finally for OP: you don’t have to learn FreeBSD for ZFS, because Linux has it too. Because of licensing issues installation is a bit more complicated in most distros, but if you use Proxmox, they have done that part for you.
I can’t access my Jellyfin library right now because the backend is apparently too old (wtf).
Are you using the binhex image by any chance? I had this same problem, just had to update it from the apps/community center page instead of from the docker page.
No, the FreeBSD version from the ports tree. Equivalent to installing a package in a Linux distribution from the built-in repo’s.
I rarely use it anyway and I could just upgrade, but enforcing an update by disabling all functionality still feels a bit excessive. Makes me wonder if any other artificial restrictions have been imposed.
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.
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’ve been running Unraid for over 5 years now and it has been great. I just checked the uptime on it and it’s been running for 146 days, 11 hours, 31 minutes. I should probably check for updates…
I used to run a Threadripper 2950x with 64GB of RAM as my main system and built a new PC when Ryzen 5000 came out and the Threadripper system became the Unraid server. I threw it into a 24-bay, 4U Supermicro CSE-846 with a LSI SAS9211-8I HBA and an extra RTX 3060 I had for hardware transcoding Plex. I have 64TB of storage at the moment with no drive being larger than 8TB. Having 24 bays is nice for that. The server is in a rack in my cellar so sound isn’t an issue for me. I’ve thought about switching to an Epyc setup just to have IPMI built into the motherboard instead of buying a separate KVM device
I have 8 containers and 5 VMs running. I have multiple VLANs setup on my UDM Pro and Juniper switches. A camera VLAN, one for IoT devices for Home Assistant. A Tailscale exit node container is all I use to access the server remotely. I also have a Rustdesk server VM setup for private remote desktop
I’m biased towards TrueNAS scale, because in my experience, it’s been really rock solid, running on bare metal. It also allows you to setup things like Nextcloud/Tailscale/ a lot more, in 1 click from their “app store”. It’s also got all the virtualization bells and whistles. As for ZFS, again, just like everything else, it’s been rock solid and setting up a ZFS pool is pretty much done for you when you install TN Scale.
As for remote access, I’ve always personally done it via a local Wireguard server and can’t really compare it to tailscare or whatever cloudflare does… Because I’ve never used those.
If you need a GPU just for encoding, go on the 2nd hand market and pick up a used Nvidia RTX 2000/3000 card. Intel Arc could also work, but it’s a bit quirky afaik…