Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Pretty much the tradeoff that you said. Harder to maintain an all in one box since things conflict with each other. That said, it's also harder to maintain 10 devices instead of 2. Usually, you want to segregate your services based on maintenance schedule. Something that you reboot once a year like your router probably shouldn't be on the same device as something that you might reboot every day, like home assistant, if you value your sanity.
Also, virtualization is pretty much dead-end now and will just make your life harder.
In terms of the easiest software available for self hosting, I would use a dedicated router and a dedicated nas, as those are fairly standalone and can be purchased as appliances. Then I would use a single machine with Debian or NixOS, and use it as a Kubernetes or Docker host. (Kubernetes is super easy with k3s and easier to maintain than Docker, but there's a higher barrier to entry as you'd have to write your services with Pod files instead of docker-compose files)
I wouldn't recommend something that tries to do everything, like Unraid, TrueNAS, or Proxmox, as they honestly obfuscate things and make things harder to maintain. Though they can be nice for DIY NASes.
If you're interested in high availability and clustering for a DIY NAS, you could even look into ceph/rook, which is what I'm using for my NAS, but it's like 20x the effort of just having a standard NFS appliance.
I'm running an Unraid server. You can pop in and manage everything with the CLI like you would on traditional server OSes and it'll show your containers, images, orphans etc. in the GUI and throws alerts out of the box for utilization thresholds and power events. It's quite nice at a glance and gets the fuck out of the way the moment it's time to be a sysadmin.
Unraid brings some good things to the table, I wouldn't discount it completely.
I'm well aware.
I was #8 on this list: https://web.archive.org/web/20240221094039/unraid.net/about
The way that Unraid manages Docker containers is really dumb, and it gets in your way SO MUCH. Orphans are not a normal Docker idea, it is something invented by Unraid. It actively makes managing containers harder, as there is no documented way to restore orphans if I recall correctly. Creating new containers is confusing and uses non-standard terminology, when docker-compose files have been standard for half a decade now. Unraid is a really bad container orchestrator with bad abstractions and no ability to do Infrastructure as Code. The only good thing is the GUI for monitoring containers.
The monitoring GUI is nice, and I guess if you're doing everything with the CLI and just using the GUI for monitoring it makes sense. But CLI is not a supported workflow with Unraid, and what are you paying $3/month for if you're just going to use the CLI? I personally wouldn't recommend the overhead, setup, and upgrade headaches over just doing the CLI with Debian. There are just as nice free dashboards available for Kubernetes.
For what it's worth, this is my homelab: https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b
I run nearly 300 containers in a 4 node cluster, with a separate router and iot server. Every single piece is implemented in code, because that's easier to maintain and document. I used Proxmox for VMs/LXC for a while, and I used FreeNAS for ZFS+NFS for a while, but now I use purely NixOS and Kubernetes. I have never seen Unraid as a valuable thing that I would like to add to my homelab in the past 8 years.
Orphans are just dangling objects, are they not?
I'm only using the Unraid Docker GUI to send me utilization alerts and notify me when my images are egregiously out of date. I saw someone trying to author a compose file using the GUI once and I closed the window before the headache started.
I'm not paying $3/mo. Where'd you get that idea? I think I paid $20 for a license like 6 years ago.
I picked Unraid because I had a bunch of disparate HDDs sitting around and their filesystem intrigued me. (0 data loss after 3 drive failures so far.)
Fair enough. I think it's bad to invent new words for "stopped container", though. And there should be a way to re-start them.
Yeah, the container creation GUI is a mess. The $3/month thing is a new thing they started for new customers this year. https://unraid.net/pricing
Not a big deal for grandfathered users, but I think its important to consider as a new customer, as you won't even get security updates without paying the subscription fee. Even for vulnerabilities like the CVE-2024-21626 Leaky Vessels vulnerability.
The raid is nice, but it can be kinda clunky adding/removing drives sometimes and I've managed to accidentally destroy an array when I was playing with it. I think you can get identical features using LVM, but obviously it's nice how Unraid does it all for you in a GUI.
You're not wrong!
The cheapest option Is the monthly one for no security updates, there are still regular pro and higher plans which are one and done, no grandfathering