Y’all, this is gonna be super broad, and I apologize for that, but I’m pretty new to all this and am looking for advice and guidance because I’m pretty overwhelmed at the moment. Any help is very, very appreciated.
For the last ~3 years, I’ve been running a basic home server on an old computer. Right now, it is hosting HomeAssistant, Frigate NVR, their various dependencies, and other things I use (such as zigbee2mqtt, zwave-js-ui, node-red, mosquitto, vscode, etc).
This old server has been my “learning playground” for the last few years, as it was my very first home server and my first foray into linux. That said, it’s obviously got some shortcomings in terms of basic setup (it’s probably not secure, it’s definitely messy, some things don’t work as I’d like, etc). It’s currently on its way out (the motherboard is slowly kicking the bucket on me), so it’s time to replace it, and I kind of what to start over (not completely - I’ve hundreds of automations in home assistant and node-red, for instance, that I don’t want to have to completely re-write, so I intend to export/import those as needed) and do it “right” this time - at this point, I think this is where I’m hung up, paralyzed by a fear of doing it “wrong” and winding up with an inefficient, insecure mess.
The new server, I want to be much more robust in terms of capability, and I have a handful of things I’d really love to do: pi-hole (though I need to buy a new router for this, so that has to come later on unless it’d save a bunch of headache doing it from the get-go), NAS, media server (plex/jellyfin), *arr stuff, as well as plenty of new things I’d love to self-host like Trilium notes, Tandoor or Mealie, Grocy, backups of local PCs/phones/etc (nextcloud?)… obviously this part is impossible to completely cover, but I suspect the hardware (list below) should be capable?
I would love to put all my security cameras on their own subnet or vlan or something to keep them more secure.
I need everything to be fully but securely accessible from outside the network. I’ve recently set up nginx for this on my current server and it works well, though I probably didn’t do it 100% “right.” Is something like Tailscale something I should look to use in conjuction with that? In place of? Not at all?
I’ve also looked at something like Authelia for SSO, which would probably be convenient but also probably isn’t entirely necessary.
Currently considering Proxmox, but then again, TrueNAS would be helpful for the storage aspect of all this. Can/should you run TrueNAS inside Proxmox? Should I be looking elsewhere entirely?
Here’s the hardware for the recently-retired gaming PC I’ll be using:
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/chV3jH
Also various SSDs and HDDs.
I’m in this weird place where I don’t have too much room to play around because I want to get all my home automation and security stuff back up as quickly as possible, but I don’t want to screw this all up.
Again, any help/advice/input at all is super, super appreciated.
Hmm. I strongly disagree. You’ve created a new dependency now for the fileserver to come up - a system that many other services will also depend on and which will likely contain backups.
A dedicated system is less likely to fail as it won’t be sensitive to a bad proxmox upgrade or some other VM exhausting system resources on the host.
You can get cheap hardware if cost is an issue.
Sure, I’m not saying its optimal, optimal will always be dedicated hardware and redundancy in every layer. But my point is that you gain very little for quite the investment by breaking out the fileserver to dedicated hardware. It’s not just CPU and RAM needed, it’s also SATA headers and an enclosure. Most people doing selfhosted have either one or more SBCs and if you have more than one SBC then yeah the fileserver should be dedicated. The other common thing is having an old gaming/office PC converted to server use and in that case Proxmox the whole server and run NAS as a VM makes the most sense instead of buying more hardware for that very little gain.
Question title: Starting over and doing it “right”
You gain stability - which is the single best thing you can get from a file server. It’s not a glamorous job - but it’s an important one.
When somebody new to hosting services asks what they should do we should provide them with best practices rather than “you can run this on the microcontroller in your toaster” advice. Possible != good.
Running your NAS on a VM on Proxmox only makes good sense if you’re just cheap. I’ve been there! I get it. But I wouldn’t tell anyone what I was doing was a good idea and certainly wouldn’t recommend it to others. It’s a hack. Own it.
You can find old servers on eBay for ~$200. Here’s the one I use for <$200. It’s been running for more than a decade without trouble. Even when I mess up other systems it’s always available. When I changed to Proxmox from how I previously managed some other systems it was already available and running. When an upgrade on my laptop goes wrong the backups are available on my fileserver. When a raspberry pi SD card dies the backup images are available on the fileserver. It. Just. Works.
Yes, but in the post they also stated what they were working with in terms of hardware. I really dislike giving the advice “buy more stuff” because not everyone can afford to when selfhosting often comes from a frugal place.
Still you’re absolutely not wrong and I see value in both our opinions being featured here, this discussion we’re having is a good thing.
Circling back to the VM thing though, even if I had dedicated hardware, if I would’ve used an old server for a NAS I still would’ve virtualized it with proxmox if for no other reason than that gives me mobility and an easier path to restoration if the hardware, like the motherboard, breaks.
Still, your advice to buy a used server is good and absolutely what the OP should do if they want a proper setup and have the funds.
I can see the allure. I’ve just had a lot more experiences where “some idiot” (cough) made changes at 2AM to an un-related service that causes the entire fileserver and anything else on that system to become unavailable… Happens more often than a hardware error in my experience. :-)
Do you have two proxmox servers each with enough disk space to store everything on the fileserver? And I assume off-site backups to copy back from?
If my T110 exploded I’d just buy a new machine, restore from off-site, and re-provision with Ansible scripts. But have ~8TB in storage on my server so just copying that to a second system is not an option. I’m not going to have a system with a spare 10T of disk just sitting around…
No the scenario a VM protects from is the T110s motherboard/cpu/PSU/etc craps out and instead of having to restore from off-site I can move the drives into another enclosure and then map them the same way to the VM and start it up. Instead of having to wait for new hardware I can have the fileserver up and running again in 30 minutes and it’s just as easy to move it into the new server once I’ve sourced one.
And in this scenario we’re only running the fileserver on the T110, but we still virtualized it with proxmox because then we can easily move it to new hardware without having to rebuild/migrate anything. As long as we don’t fuck up the drive order or anything like that, then we’re royally fucked.
Ah - I question whether that would really be a 30 or even 60 min operation. But I see what you mean.
One thing I think homegamers overlook is ansible. If you script your setups you can destroy/rebuild them pretty quickly. Both physical systems and VMs. Only manual part is installing Debian which is…pretty easy if we’re talking about disaster recovery.
Also - you can still buy computers in stores. :-)