Hello everyone,
I am about to renovate my selfhosting setup (software wise). And then thought about how I could help my favourite lemmy community become more active. Since I am still learning many things and am far away from being a sysadmin I don’t (just) want tell my point of view but thought about a series of posts:
Your favourite piece of selfhosting
I thought about asking everyone of you for your favourite piece of software for a specific use case. But we have to start at the bottom:
Operating systems and/or type 1 hypervisors
You don’t have to be an expert or a professional. You don’t even have to be using it. Tell us about your thoughts about one piece of software. Why would you want to try it out? Did you try it out already? What worked great? What didn’t? Where are you stuck right now? What are your next steps? Why do you think it is the best tool for this job? Is it aimed at beginners or veterans?
I am eager to hear about your thoughts and stories in the comments!
And please also give me feedback to this idea in general.
Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE, Hypervisor), my beloved. Especially in combination with Proxmox Backup Server (PBS).
My homelab would not exist without Proxmox VE, as I’m definitely not going to use Nutanix or VMWare. I love working with linux and Proxmox VE is literally debian with a modified kernel and a Management Webinterface on top.
I first learned about Proxmox VE in my company, while we still had VMWare for us and all of our customers. We gradually switched everyone over to Proxmox VE and now I’m using it at home too. Proxmox is an Austrian (my country) company, so I was double hyped about this software.
A few things I like most about Proxmox VE
- Ease of access to the correct part of the documentation you currently need (*)
- Open Source
- Company resides in my country (no US big tech walled garden)
- Linux / Debian based, so no learning new OS’s and toolchains
- Free version available
- Forum available and actually used
(*) What I mean by ease of access to the correct part of the documentation is: Whenever you’re in the WebUI and need to decide on some settings, there’s a button somewhere on the same page which is going to lead you directly to the portion of the documentation you need right now. I don’t know why this seems like such a great luxury, every software should have something like this.
Next steps
My “server” (some mini PC with spare parts I already had) is getting too weak for the workload I put it through, so I’m going to migrate to a better “server”. I already have a PC and most of the necessary parts, I just need some SSDs and an AMD CPU.
Even migrating from PVE (old) -> PVE (new) couldn’t be easier:
- PVE (old): create last backup to PBS, shut down PVE (old)
- PVE (new): add PBS, restore Backups
- ???
- profit
I think it’s great to have a series posting about personal achievements and troubles with selfhosting. There’s so much software out there, you always get to see someone doing something you didn’t even know could be done or using a software you didn’t realize even existed. Sharing is caring.
I have a nuc with Linux mint and host everything on docker containers. I expose any service I need through caddy.
I run several different ones, Debian is the most, Ubuntu server runs a few and I have a couple of truenas scale instances simply because they have run truenas for years and work well. One is local network only, another is available but is used for storage and storage alone via s3/minio and sftp and duplicati
I have been using Proxmox VE with Docker running on the host not managed by Proxmox, and then Cockpit to manage NFS Shares with Home Assistant OS running in a VM. It’s been pretty rock solid. That was until I updated to Version 9 last night, it’s been a nightmare getting the docker socket to be available. I think Debian Trixie may have some sort of extra layers of protection, I haven’t investigated it too much, but my plan tomorrow and this week is to migrate everything to Debian 12 as that’s the tried and true OS for me and I know it’s quite stable with Cockpit, docker and so forth with KVM for my Home Assistant installation.
One other OS for consideration if you are wanting to check it out is XCP-NG which I played with and Home Assistant with that was blazing fast, but they don’t allow NFS shares to be created and using existing data on my drives was not possible, so I would’ve had to format them .
openSUSE MicroOS
I’ve only tried it out on a VPS, so I’m not completely sold on it yet, but I do think I’ll be switching to it eventually. I’m currently on Leap, but since almost everything is containerized, I’m not getting much benefit from the slow release cycle.
For your questions:
Why would you want to try it out? Did you try it out already? What worked great? What didn’t
The main appeal is unattended, atomic updates using bleeding edge packages. You keep your apps as separate from the base system as possible (containerized), and the base handles itself.
My main issue is with the toolbox utility, which runs a container to hold userland utilities for debugging stuff. So far, it has been buggy with the underprivileged user I configured, and I’d really rather not login as root. I’ve worked around it for now, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
Where are you stuck right now? What are your next steps?
Mostly figuring out how I want to handle my VPN (for exposing LAN services to the outside world) config. My options are:
- containerize, and configure iptables rules to route traffic properly
- install the needed tools to the base system and configure it on the host
The main sticking point is that I need HAProxy in front and route traffic to the given device, so the VPN and HAProxy need to talk. The easiest solution is to put both on the host, but that breaks the whole point of MicroOS. The ideal is to have both the VPN and HAProxy containerized, but I ran into some issues with podman.
Why do you think it is the best tool for this job? Is it aimed at beginners or veterans?
This is definitely a veteran system right now, but I think it’s ideal because it means I can completely automate system updates and not worry about my apps breaking. It also means I can automate setting up a new server (say, if I move to a different VPS) or even new OS since I only need to deploy my containers and don’t need anything special from the OS setup.
I’m also playing with Aeon on my laptop, but that’d going a lot less smoothly than MicroOS on the server.
Maybe crazy, but I’ve been running flatcar lately. Automatic OS updates are nice and I pretty much exclusively use most of my machines to run containers.
Debian on the host and everything else in containers
I’ve been using NixOS on my server. Having all the server’s config in one place gives me peace of mind that the server is running exactly what I tell it to and I can rebuild it from scratch in an afternoon.
I don’t use it on my personal machine because the lack of fhs feels like it’d be a problem, but when selfhosting most things are popular enough to have a module already.
No love for Open Media Vault? I run it virtualized under Proxmox and I’m quite happy with it, not very fancy but super stable.
I run about twenty containers on OMV, with 4 8tb drives in a ZFS ZRAID5 setup. I love how users can be shared across services, for example the same user may access SMB shares or connect via OpenVPN.
+1 for OMV. I use it at work all the time to serve Clonezilla images through an SMB share. It’s extremely reliable. The Clonezilla PXE server is a separate VM, but the toolkit is available in the
clonezillapackage, and I could even integrate the two services if I felt particularly masochistic one day.My first choice for that role was TrueNAS, but at the time I had to use an old-ass Dell server that only had hardware RAID, and TrueNAS couldn’t use ZFS with it.
I used to really like esxi, but broadcom screwed us on that.
Hyper-v sucks to run and manage. It’s also pretty bloated.
Proxmox is pretty awesome if you want full VMs. I’m gonna move everything I have onto it eventually.
For ease of use, if you have Synology that can run containers, it’s okay.
I also like and tend to use unraid at my house, but that’s more because of my insane storage requirements and how I upgrade with dissimilar disks fairly frequently. (I’m just shy of 500tb and my server holds 38 disks.)
(I’m just shy of 500tb and my server holds 38 disks.)
That means every one of your disks is >13TB? That’s expensive!
It’s been a long term build. With unraid it’s been pretty easy to slowly add disks one disk at a time.
I’m moving everything towards 22tb disks right now. It’s still got a handful of 4 and 5tb disks in it. I’ve ended up with a pile of smaller disks that I’ve pulled and just… sit around.
I also picked up a Synology recently that houses 12x 12tb disks that goes into that total count. I’ve got another couple Synologys just laying around unused.
Damn, 38 disks! How do you connect them all? Some kind of server hardware?
Curious because I’m currently using all 6 SATA ports on an old consumer motherboard and not sure how I’ll be able to expand my storage capacity. The best option I’ve seen so far would probably be adding PCIe SATA controller(s), but I can’t imagine having enough PCIe slots to reach 38 disks that way! Wondering if there’s another option I haven’t seen yet.
Yep. It’s a 4u super micro chassis with the associated backplanes.
I had some servers left over from work. It’s set up to also take jbod cards with mini-sas to expand into additional shelf’s if I need that.
My setup really isn’t much of an entry setup. It’s similar to this: https://store.supermicro.com/us_en/4u-superstorage-ssg-641e-e1cr36h.html
OS: Unraid
It’s primarily NAS software, with a form of software raid functionality built in.
I like it mainly because it works well and the GUI makes is very easy to use and work with.On top of that you can run VMs and docker containers, so it is very versatile as well.
I use it to host the following services on my network:
- Nextcloud
- Jellyfin
- CUPS
It costs a bit of money up-front, but for me it was well-worth the investment.
+1 for unraid. Nice OS that let’s me easily do what I want
Love Unraid. Been using it for a few years now on an old Dell server. I’m about to transform my current gaming PC into the main server so I can utilize the GPU pass-through and CPU pinning for things like running a VM just for LLM/AI and a VM for EndeavourOS for gaming. I just need to figure out how to keep my old server somehow working still bc of all the drive storage I have already setup, which my PC doesn’t have space for without a new case.
For anyone looking to setup Unraid, I highly recommend the SpaceInvaderOne YouTube channel. It helped tremendously when I got started.
Debian on the servers, Diet-Pi on the SBC’s, all containerized.
I’ve been using Ubuntu server on my server for close to a decade now and it has been just rock solid.
I know Ubuntu gets (deserved) hate for things like snaps shenanigans, but the LTS is pretty great. Not having to worry about a full OS upgrade for up to 10 years (5 years standard, 10 years if you go Ubuntu pro (which is free for personal use)) is great.
A couple times I’ve considered switching my server to another distro, but honestly, I love how little I worry about the state of my server os.
I’m interested in learning more about nixOS but until i get there, proxmox all day
Proxmox all day, every day.
Generally speaking I start with Debian and install proxmox on top rather than use their installer, this way I can config things as I want them before getting proxmox going, which I guess counts as a more advanced user use case, though not really complicated.
Edit: and if it wasn’t obvious, everything is Debian, even those not on proxmox (which is just debian anyway, and isn’t much tbh).
