Selfhosted

How close are you to "fck it, im just gonna pay for unraid"?

Extremely far. Maximum distance. My self updating debian with an sftpgo container and some RAID HDDs slapped onto it has been rocksolid for years.

Far. Fedora + ZFS for my NAS that's consumed by a 3-node bare-metal Kubernetes cluster running Talos. K8s has a ZFS provisioner that automatically creates new volumes when I spin something up. It more or less just works.

Here, you lost this

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maybe try zVault (freenas fork)? heard it's great.

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.

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 :)

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.

Weeeell, since they switched to a semi-subscription model, I'd recommend looking into TrueNAS (inb4 they start locking down their stuff)

I use Unraid. It’s great and a lot less hassle than back when I used just a regular distro for everything.

Debian?

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.

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 with~~ optimizing the VM host.

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 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'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?

zfs has been working nicely for me for many years, for diverse operating systems including zfs all-in-one for internal NFS mount.

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.

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 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.

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.