In a few months, I will have the space and infrastructure to join the selfhost community. I’m trying to prepare, as I know it can be challenging, but I somehow ended up with more questions than answers.

For context, I want to run a server with torrents, media (plex, Jellyfin or something else entirely - I didn’t make a decision yet), photos(Emmich, if its stable, or something else), Rook, Paperless, Home Assistant, Frigate, Adguard Home… Possibly lots more. Also, I will need storage - I’m planning for 3x18tb drives to begin with, but will certainly be adding more later.

My initial intention was to set up a NAS in Silverstone CS382(or Jonsbo N3/N5, if they’re in a reasonable price). I heard good things about Unraid and it’s capabilities of running docker. On the other hand, I’m hearing hood things about Proxmox or NixOS with NAS software running in a VM, too - but for Unraid, it seems hacky. Maybe I should run NAS and a separate server? That’d be more costly and seems like more work on maintenance with no real benefit. Maybe I should go with TrueNAS in a VM? If I don’t do anything other than NAS, TrueNAS shouldn’t be that hard to set up, right?

I’m also wondering whether I should go with Intel for QuickSync, AMD and Arc graphics or something else entirely. I’ve read that AV1 is getting popular, is AMD getting more support there? I will buy Intel if it’s clearly the better option, but I’m team Red and would prefer AMD.

Also, could anyone with a non-technical SO tell me how do they find your selhosted things? I’ve read about Cloudflare Tunnels and Tailscale, which will be a breeze for me, but I gotta think about other users aswell.

That’s another concern for me - am I correct in thinking Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are all I need to access the server remotely? I will probably set up a PiKVM or the Risc one aswell, can it be exposed aswell? I will have a dream machine from Ubiqiti, anything that needs to run to access the server I may run there. I’m not looking to set up anything more complicated like Wireguard - it’s too much.

For additional context, I’m a software developer, I know my way with Docker and the command line and I consider myself to be tech savvy, but I’m not looking to spend every weekend reading changelogs and doing manual updates. I want to have an upgrade path (that’s why Im not going with Synology for example), but I also don’t want to obsess over it. Money isn’t much of an issue, I can spare 1-2k$ on the build, not including the drives.

Any feedback and suggestions appreciated :)

  • @[email protected]OP
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    13 months ago

    What device do you use for NAS? I’m looking to have a tb of raid 0 ssd cache and if I were to have a dedicated NAS, I would probably go for something with ITX mobo or something like Ugreen Nas with unraid software. Doesn’t the power necessary to have a performant NAS go underutilized then?

    • originalucifer
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      13 months ago

      well, i do try and keep all my data hot in the server… i am using the devices as redundancy, so no raid anywhere. 24Tb with 3 copies.

      ive got a couple of 6-bay readynas i got second hand and a plain ol’ ubunutu workstation i crammed with 6 drives and an ssd.

      app server runs off 6 local disks(and an ssd for os) which are replicated to the 2 nas as logical (they pull), the workstation gets a drive-for-drive physical

      rsync is your friend.