Just like you don't really need the official Pi-hole software. It's a wrapper around dnsmasq, so you really just need dnsmasq.
A habit of boiling your application down to the most basic needs is going to let you run a lot more on your lab and do so a lot more reliably.
Hardware is kind of the same deal; you can buy weird specialty "NAS hardware" but it doesn't do well with anything offbeat, or you can buy some Supermicro or Dell kit that's used and get the freedom to pick the right hardware for the job, like an actual SAS controller.
That's exactly what TrueNAS is these days: it's Debian + OpenZFS + a handy web-based UI + some extra NAS-oriented bits. You can roll your own if you want with just Debian and OpenZFS if you don't mind using the command line for everything, or you can try "Cockpit".
The nice thing about TrueNAS is that all the ZFS management stuff is nicely integrated into the UI, which might not be the case with other UIs, and the whole thing is set up out-of-the-box to do ZFS and only ZFS.
But for my own sanity I prefer out of the box solutions for things like my router and NAS. Learning is great but sometimes you really just need something to work right now!
The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change etc makes this my favourite too.
Household life is generally in some form of ‘relax’ mode in evening and at weekends. Having no internet or movies or whatever is poorly tolerated.
I wish Apple was even slightly supportive of servers and Linux as the mini is such a wicked little box. I went to it to save power. Just checked - it averaged 4.7w over the past 30 days. It runs Ubuntu server in UTM which notably raises power usage but it has the advantage that Docker desktop isn’t there.
I think some of the difference between "self-hosted" vs "homelab" is in the answer to the question of "What happens if this breaks end of the day Friday?" An answer of "oh merde of le fan, immediate evening/weekend plans are now hosed" is on the self-hosted end of the spectrum, whereas "eh, I'll poke at it on Sunday when it's supposed to be raining or sometime next week, maybe" is on the other end. Does that make sense? There are a few pretty different ways to approach making your setup reliable/redundant but I think throwing more metal at the problem features in all of them one way or another. Plus if someone moves up the stack it can simply be a lot more efficient and performant, the sort of hardware suited for one role isn't necessarily as well suited for another and trying to cram too much into one box may result in someone worse AND more expensive then breaking out a few roles.
But probably a lot of people who ended up doing more hosting started pretty simple, dipping their toes in the water, seeing how it worked out and building confidence. And having everything virtualized on a single box is a pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal understanding given you can just use the same snapshot mechanism for that as you do for all other data. Issues with circular dependencies and the like or what happens if things go down when it's not convenient for you to be around in person don't really matter that much. I think anything that lowers the barrier to entry is good.
Of course, someone can have some of each too! Or be somewhere along the spectrum, not at one end or another.
Docker-compose isn’t a backup, but from a fresh ubuntu server install, it’ll have me back in 20 mins. Backing up the entire VM isn’t too hard either.
I was in a really sweet spot and then ESXi became intolerable. Though in fairness their website was alway pure hell.
Docker-compose isn’t a backup, but from a fresh ubuntu server install, it’ll have me back in 20 mins. Backing up the entire VM isn’t too hard either.
I was n a really sweet spot and then ESXi became intolerable. Though in fairness their website was alway pure hell.
Big downgrade after moving to Linux:
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-versu...
I definitely will want to have a dedicated NAS machine and a separate server for compute in the future. Think I'll look more into this once RAM prices come back to normal.
Really, we should rename that kind of devices to HSSS (Home Service Storage Server)
I really prefer storage just being storage. For security it makes a lot of sense. Stuff on my network can only access storage via NFS. That means if I were to get malware on my network and it corrupted data (like ransomware), it won't be able to touch the ZFS snapshots I make every hour. I know TrueNAS is well designed and they are using Docker etc, but it still makes me nervous.
I guess when I finally have to replace my NAS I'll have to go Linux, but it'll still be just a NAS for me.