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?
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TrueNAS
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 use Unraid. It’s great and a lot less hassle than back when I used just a regular distro for everything.
Setup was easy, it just works, its stable, and if you want the regular updates, just get the lifetime model on sale. I bought it becaue I didn’t want to spend time screwing with setup and just wanted to get my data moved snd running.
zfs has been working nicely for me for many years, for diverse operating systems including zfs all-in-one for internal NFS mount.
Self hosting on a rolling release platform? No way. Give me Debian, 4 hours work every 2 1/2 years. Arch is crazy and only doable if you only have a few single server
Arch is very easy in this context.
I use Ubuntu Server -> dm-integrity -> mdadm -> ext4. Super easy to set up (it just takes forever to do dm-integrity on the drives, but you don’t need to watch it), works great, easy to maintain. Everything I run on it is dockerized with docker compose and sits behind nginx-proxy-manager, so it’s also super easy to maintain.
I wouldn’t recommend that as it doesn’t do a lot to protect data. Instead go ZFS or Btrfs.
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.
Unraid is stupidly point and shoot.
That’s the appeal. Its not that I can’t speak CLI or that I don’t enjoy it. If something like unraid was managing the barebones there’s a lot more spare time to do more interesting stuff.
Exactly. I like doing clever scripting and neat one off projects, I don’t like having to become a networking expert, a containerization expert, a hardware expert, and an integration expert so my wife can reliably watch law and order.
I can roll a custom arch build no problem, but I can not set up custom vlan or nat rules or easily swap to a new file system with baked in snapshots or tell you anything about how my GPU compares to anything on the market or how to make it reliably perform hardware acceleration. I would be happy to learn those skills, but sometimes it’s all just too much.
If I’m gonna do it, I want to do it. If I need to verbatim copy someone’s YouTube video where I use proxmox to use someone’s Ubuntu KDE VM to set up couch potato, I’d rather just use unraid and not pretend I’m a FOSSing haxor :).
the ‘point and shoot’ is why I ended up with it too. I’ve gotten very tired of spending hours upon hours to make computers work exactly like I want over the years, especially after realizing I’m only actually using 2 or 3 of the dozen+ containers I’ve installed. I can still tinker and break shit on pis and old laptops when I want.
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.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.
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
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.
maybe try zVault (freenas fork)? heard it’s great.
I found all that TrueNAS back and forth a bit confusing but I’m glad they ended up on Debian as a base. This seems to value FreeBSD but I can’t find their reasoning.
Oooh. That’s a new one.
For the time being I’m content with my little raspberry pi 5 running debian. I can stream 4K on my home network and that’s all the performance I need for now.
After having some issues with TrueNAS killing containers after updates, I went to Unraid and have never been happier. TrueNAS file sharing permissions also never did make sense to me. I got them to work but never quite grok’d them. Unraid performs exactly like I’d expect. I hand rolled a NAS using Ubuntu way back in the day and didn’t have the desire to tinker on the NAS side of things too much.
On Unraid, I roll a larger xfs array for all of my media and large storage, then I have a two disk ZFS array for my more important documents and pictures. That gets archived up to the xfs array and my cache nvme drives have their own ZFS pool. I don’t gain a ton by doing this, it was just fun to set up and I feel reasonably secure with my personal data.
I also run a smaller, lower powered machine with Proxmox and I run Home Assistant on it. Mostly because of tinkering with hardware support in Home Assistant, I didn’t want it messing with my NAS needing restarts and such. But, Unraid is my workhorse. Day in, day out, it does exactly what I suspect with no surprises. I’ve had drives go bad and need replaced. I’ve had the whole machine just die and had to build a new machine. Unraid did exactly what I expected and needed every step of the way. The docker support is fantastic and super stable. Running multiples of the exact same container by duplicating and with only different port settings works great. I can’t say that for my independent docker installs without a bunch of tinkering on things I couldn’t seem to find enough about when I ran into issues.
I tinker on the things I enjoy. I do not enjoy having an unusable server. The anxiety is actually pretty insane for me. I would pay for Unraid many times over to get this combination of factors.
