Welcome to the party, you’re going to have a blast (and lots of chances to bang your head against the wall)!

Here’s my take on your questions:

1. Doesn’t matter at all where you get a domain. Pick any reliable registrar where the price is right.
2. The top-level domain (TLD) is the domain name’s suffix and you can use any that you like. Some cost more than others, so you may want to compare prices.
3. To start with, anything from within the past 10-15 years should be good enough. There are trade-offs, though. Older machines may use more power, for example, but don’t get hung up on details at this point. Get something cheap like an old laptop with an Ethernet port and you’ll be good to go. Once you’ve done it for a while, you’ll understand any downsides and the next piece of hardware you get will be an even better informed choice.
4. Not at all. Self host as much as you want, but I’d recommend starting slowly. Pick one thing and set it up on your server. Tweak it until it’s just how you want it, makes backups, test. Then add the next thing. Immich, forgejo, and a website are nice easy ones to start with. Communications platforms like chat apps and email are much more involved. Maybe save those for slightly later.
5. For sure! You can use any OS you’d like. I’ll mention that a lot of the very basic tutorials will assume you’re using Ubuntu or Debian, both of which use systemd. For Devuan, for example, you could mostly follow those same tutorials, but you’ll have to fill in some of the blanks. I’ll mention that Linux isn’t the only option, either. If you don’t like systemd, you might enjoy something like FreeBSD. It sounds from your experience like you’ll be able to handle this part.

Whatever you do, just remember that it doesn’t need to be perfect immediately. You’re going to mess a bunch of things up and make decisions you’ll wish you hadn’t. You’ll spend a lot of time destroying and recreating things you’ve already done. That’s the joy of self-taught self hosting!

Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t notice anyone elaborate on what I think is the simplest way to handle this.

You can port your existing number to a VOIP provider (I’ve had good experience with voip.ms and Flowroute). Then you get an ATA (analog telephone adapter), connect to the VOIP service and plug your existing landline phone into it. Secure hand ATAs are pretty reasonable priced. I like the Grandstream HT802.

For learners who are helped by seeing someone think through a problem and explain why they made the choices they did it doesn’t get much better than YSAP. (Here’s the link: ysap.sh)

I like @pgo_lemmy’s answer best, but instead of rebuilding the original system, (assuming you did the default ZFS installation) you can add the bigger device as part of a mirror, let it resilver, install the boot loader, and then detach the smaller device from the mirror. It should automatically grow to the bigger size once the smaller device is removed and the only downtime you’d have is from installing the bigger device. Check the PVE wiki and you should find some details on this method.

Not sure about a PDF, but he sells an epub that’s $15 US.

Michael Lucas released a stellar book on the subject not long ago (https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product/ryoms/). It’s pretty thorough, relatively up-to-date, and (like all his stuff) a fun read. It does a great job of demystifying the mechanics. As far as the implementation goes, I’ll put in another vote for Mailcow, which combines all of the components into a very usable docker stack.

You’ve got some good options, but let me mention that if you dig Odoo, there are alternatives to pretty much all the “Enterprise” apps. Just use the Third Party App Store or browse through the OCA (https://apps.odoo-community.org/shop).

As others have said, ersatztv would be the way to go, but apparently is no longer being developed. I’m still using it, but there was a conversation a few days ago that might have some leads on good replacements: https://lemmy.ml/post/44804563

Yeah, I sort of figured it’d be too much. It looks like there are a bunch of booking plugins for Wordpress. That’s definitely where I’d start my search in your shoes.

I’ve been using Odoo CE for some projects and I know that it has apps for scheduling and booking, but if you want to add this to an existing website, that may be overkill.

What platform does your site use? That may help target some suitable options.

Also, check out this list and you may get some ideas: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#booking-and-scheduling

I don’t have a real preference, but one more advantage to the plugin route is that if you need something that’s not available, cobbling together a plugin is much simpler than modify most projects directly.

I recently spent a lot of time doing this with Odoo and I was very grateful for the modularity.

By the way, in case you haven’t found it, there is a pretty decent wysiwyg editor plugin for DokuWiki. I use it at work and it’s been pretty simple for my users.

I’m sure you already know this, but do note that with Z2 compared to mirrors, you should expect a decrease in performance and an increase in rebuild times in the event of a drive failure. Not saying don’t do it, but make sure the perceived benefits are worth the trade offs.

Here’s some more info on the topic: https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/.

Very interesting idea. I’ve gotten into the habit of using something like /^-o to search for short flags.

I hear you and I’m all for diving in—breaking things is half the fun.

If you’re after something straightforward for NAS software, another thing to consider would be vanilla Debian with Cockpit and 45Drives’ excellent filesharing plug in. I like the combo quite a bit.

Enjoy the journey!

Personally, I wouldn’t bother wiping the asustor. There’s nothing wrong with OpenMediaVault, but it’s not any more straight forward than TrueNAS. If you’re looking for beginner simple, maybe something like HexOS or CasaOS would be more to your liking. But that makes me wonder about Proxmox for this setup. I love Proxmox and use it extensively at home and at work. It’s incredibly powerful and flexible, but it’s a lot less hand-holdy than TrueNAS. By all means give them all a try—thats the fun—but expect a learning curve before things really click.

This sounds like a very fun project. I also run a small local news organization and we use a company that specialize in managing small news sites (Our-Hometown.com, in case you want to give them a look). We’ve been very happy with their service for the past 25 years, so I don’t plan on leaving them any time soon, but, as a self-hoster, I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how I’d put together the infrastructure. I think my preference is Nginx plus Varnish for caching. Also, in case you’re not aware of it, Automattic makes a plugin for newsrooms that adds some industry-specific features (https://github.com/Automattic/newspack-plugin) that looks interesting, though I haven’t tried it.

Lee Hutchinson at ArsTechnica wrote an interesting series about hosting a weather news site in Houston that I thought was awful interesting and might be worth a read. Here’s part 1 and part 2.

Sure. For full disclosure, I also run separate compute and storage. I do think separating storage from a compute cluster can be a good option, but not necessarily for the use case described in the original question.

I’d recommend against separating storage and compute in most small environments. Separating them means you suddenly have higher latency and less bandwidth between your data and whatever you want to do with it. Sure, there are good reasons to do it (centralizing storage for multiple nodes, for example), but go into with your eyes open to the trade-offs.

I landed on KDE and I don’t worry about it matching my Mac desktop, though you certainly could. The thing I miss most is the Finder, oddly. There’s not much in Linux world that gives Miller columns, unfortunately.

I’ll mention that if you like your Mac keyboard, or just want to keep using the familiar shortcuts, check out Toshy. It remaps the keys so that command still does what you expect it to do.

Here’s one more opinion for you.

Running a NAS on Debian is a great idea if you don’t mind being responsible for all of the details that TrueNAS abstracts away. One thing I’d consider in your shoes is to use Proxmox VE rather than vanilla Debian. I say this because PVE uses a kernel with ZFS built in, so there’s no fiddling with DKMS to get it to work; it just treats it as a first-class file system (including on root). Having said that, either is a perfectly good choice.

If you want a UI, I’d heartily recommend Cockpit, which is included in the repos (just apt install cockpit). If you go the PVE way, you’ve got a couple options. You could either virtualize your existing TrueNAS, passing through the disks or (and this is my preference) let the host handle all the ZFS stuff and create an LXC container that just deals with filesharing. You’d bindmount a directory from the host that could be shared out via SMB and this is where I’d use Cockpit to manage the shares.

The PVE route makes adding VMs and containers pretty quick. I haven’t run into any issues passing through a GPU to either a VM or LXC, which can then be used inside a docker container.

In answer to the common pitfalls question, I think the biggest thing I see is that it’s important to document exactly what TrueNAS is doing for you. Did you encrypt the ZFS pool? Make sure you have the keys to unlock it and arrange for your next OS to do so gracefully. Are you managing snapshots and replication in TrueNAS? Document and adapt that. Something like sanoid/syncoid can manage this on a Debian system. How about monitoring? Don’t forget to set up notifications for disk failures. Any other services you’re using? NFS, iSCSI, cronjobs? Take care notes of everything because that’s the stuff that’ll be easy to miss if you jump straight to overwriting your old boot disk.