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 :)
I’ve gone the TrueNAS SCALE route myself, with TN running on bare metal. All my containers/apps are set up through it, and I’ve also spun up Windows and Linux VMs without major issues, including GPU and USB passthrough.
I do enjoy the security it gives me, will all my apps being versioned/snapshotted regularly and before every update, as well as the rest of my data. Since TN is only using ZFS and not something like MergerFS (which I believe is used by Unraid), the upgrade path is a bit mote restricted. So you should definitely look into your options up-front. For example, you won’t be able to expand a vdev (virtual ZFS disk) later on, you’ll have to create a new one. And you can only use equivalent vdevs to form pools. That means if you start with 3 drives in a vdev for your main storage pool, you can only expand that pool by adding anothet 3 drives with the same capacity as a secons vdev. So make sure you can stomach these costs, or go for fewer and cheaper drives, with a large case.
As for apps, you can set up docker apps easily, and there are a large number of officially or community-maintained apps, where any breaking changes and migrations are handled for you, so updating is a breeze. But you don’t have a much flexibility as with a custom setup. TN has been becoming more generic in that regard though, switching from k3s to regular docker, so you could probably play around with stuff via the CLI without major issues.
Oh and one more thing: you should probably use a separate, dedicated device for Home Assistant. Use a Raspberry Pi or one of their official boards, and you’ll have better support, more features, redundancy, and can still create backups on your NAS via SMB.
Such a second device that is also connected via Tailscale doesn’t hurt either, just in case.