Selfhosted

Reading that is wild

Why are you doing Arch on a server? You want to tinker forever and read the update notes like a hawk lest the server implode forever?

Arch isn’t gonna be noticeably leaner than Debian.

Get Debian, install docker and/or podman, set unattended upgrades, and then install Incus if you need VMs or containers down the line. You can stick on ZFS and it’ll be fine, you already have BTRFS for basic mirrors. Install Cockpit and you’ll have a nice GUI. Try not to think you have to fiddle with settings, the maintainers for each package/service have set it so it works for most people (and we’re most people!); you’ll only need to intervene on an handful of package configs. All set and it’s not proprietary.

UnRaid doesn't provide anything I am interested in, at all. Currently running TrueNAS for main storage and proxmox for virtualization, both ZFS based. If TrueNAS ever enshittifies, I'd run some bare metal Linux with ZFS. My workstations also run ZFS as the file system, making backups trivial. VM snapshots and backups of any system are trivial and take seconds (including network transfers).

I never understood why I'd even consider UnRaid for anything.

Openmediavault + mergerfs + snapraid is very similar to unraid storage in that you can add different disk sizes just like unraid. Admittedly it's not as 'plug and play' as unraid, but it's free, so can't really complain. Disk speeds using this config are also much faster if that matters.

I have considered truneas for if/when I need to rebuild, but this works for my jellfyin/arr stack needs.

At times i have felt that my distro was so not worth the flak.

But the thing that keeps me on it is i write it once and never half to dick with it again.

NixOS is really powerful, but the learning curve will push you to the edge!

I currently self host alot of stuff on my server which runs NixOS, theres some services that are as simple as ollama.service = true;

And others that you spend hours cussing at. But i feel the declarative nature is what makes switching to any other distro feel so unintuitive.

My linux journey had been,

Manjaro > ubuntu > arch > fedora > silverblue > opensuse tumbleweed > gentoo > nixos > opensuse tumbleweed > nixos.

I kept coming back to nix because i wrote what i wanted it to do and it did it that way every time. Its been a godsend for ZFS, although its not super bad to use ZFS on debian just mostly time consuming. The fact i dont half to worry about a update breaking DKMS and making my filesystem not work. I SWEAR SUN IF YOU COULD HAVE JUST DONE THE GPL INSTEAD OF CDL!!!

I have recently been exploring Guix, purely because of the NixOS drama. But i think nix is my main server OS

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.

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

Here, you lost this

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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'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?

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 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.