dream_weasel

Couldn’t say, for me it was way way easier than ESXI which was my first break into the space. And also more complete / straightforward than bare metal which was what I had been doing before unraid.

I paid for the lifetime license. No regrets.

Because it’s easy and does all the hard stuff out of the box? Also any sized drives!

Oh hi I picked up Linux for the CLI and shell and the UI for me has nothing to do with it.

There is no easy way to break into the scene and unraid is a one stop shop. So you want to set up a few little projects on your own? It’s learning containerization, learning networking and NAT, figuring out filesystems (and shares and share locations) and backup strategies, how to integrate with VPN, deployment strategies and templates (think Ansible, docker compose, make scripts, etc). There’s a shitload to know and not a “for dummies” place to learn it.

Considering the “easy” first project of ARR suite + jackett, integrate with transmission, and integrate with jellyfin or Plex: this is not a couple hours of work if you’ve never done it before. With unraid it’s probably one video tutorial and less than an hour? Idk I haven’t done that one yet. But it’s a common request.

There are a lot of things that need to hang together for a good homelab to work, and unraid for me has made it so I don’t have to spend all my time doing plumbing and background work to try a project and see if I even want to use it.

I would absolutely do a 101 on self hosting, but it seems everybody has different priorities on what to host and how so it’s probably not cut and dry to implement.

Yep. My home assistant production deploy is on a separate rpi, same as my pihole, and I’ve promoted out a few other services out of unraid. As an almost 40 father of 2 with a full time gig, I don’t want to dick around with experiments that interrupt the rest of the family and I also don’t want to spend a year of “30 mins before bed” to figure out how to deploy a service I’m not even sure I want to use long term.

Exactly. I like doing clever scripting and neat one off projects, I don’t like having to become a networking expert, a containerization expert, a hardware expert, and an integration expert so my wife can reliably watch law and order.

I can roll a custom arch build no problem, but I can not set up custom vlan or nat rules or easily swap to a new file system with baked in snapshots or tell you anything about how my GPU compares to anything on the market or how to make it reliably perform hardware acceleration. I would be happy to learn those skills, but sometimes it’s all just too much.

If I’m gonna do it, I want to do it. If I need to verbatim copy someone’s YouTube video where I use proxmox to use someone’s Ubuntu KDE VM to set up couch potato, I’d rather just use unraid and not pretend I’m a FOSSing haxor :).

Already bought the lifetime license. It’s great, I don’t miss rolling my own bare metal arch servers.

(Because I still do that too)

Edit:

Unraid is stupidly point and shoot. It just works for whatever weird configuration of hardware you have and the provisioning is extremely intuitive, fast, and it just fucking works. Why yes, I will have a paperless server and have it auto update and sure here let’s make this space a samba drive to receive docs. Paperless is not brain surgery in arch, but man 5 minute setup for stuff is nice. Ive got maybe 10 containers running that I set up the first time I launched Unraid more than a year ago and I otherwise haven’t touched it. The upside and downside is that I didn’t have to learn anything to do it. Esp if you get your stuff from the same maker/provider the latest versions all hang together and updating can just be automated.

The 42U rack in the basement will be… hard to steal.

I only use 3U of it for compute and all of it came from my university salvage for less than… $350 total (switch, rack, 2 servers).

First sentence of each paragraph: correct.

Basically all the rest is bunk besides the fact that you can’t count on always getting reliable information. Right answers (especially for something that is technical but non-verifiable), wrong reasons.

There are “stochastic language models” I suppose (e.g., click the middle suggestion from your phone after typing the first word to create a message), but something like chatgpt or perplexity or deepseek are not that, beyond using tokenization / word2vect-like setups to make human readable text. These are a lot more like “don’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia” than a randomized acid drop response.

Bro I can’t finish getting myself into it

It really is super good

Ssh to pihole. $ pihole restartdns usually works for me

Nice! Very clean

I reserve everything below .100 for static IP devices like switches/access points and my work devices, the rest is all dynamic lease DHCP.

I could just set up a dashboard or figure out how to use hostnames, but I’m a caveman and I remember the IPs of the devices I want to ssh or browse to in my network.

So separate WiFi name or (or probably router/AP) for separate vlan?

I like your funny words magic man.

As a total novice for networking (setting up 4 hat rules for my pihole was… tough), how bad are vlans to set up?

Looks great! Is there a builder YouTube channel that shows the design / execution of something like this? If no, maybe you’ve got an opportunity knocking!

I also enjoy 196. The rest I block. So much femboy shit on Lemmy too.

Gotta block all the sports and local community stuff too.

If it’s anything like what “All” shows me, it will be mostly furries, sissies, anime, and 196 with just a splash of conservative. Unless you block it, Lemmy got some weird shit yo.