I would still consider myself a noob but i do feel accomplished enough to answer this properly.

Hardware depends on your budget. It does not need to be bleeding edge either, i would focus on a good server case that makes it easy to upgrade over time and maybe fits a few harddrives if you don’t plan on having a nas.

Also make sure to check how much sata connections your motherboard can handle, using an m.2 slots may occupy some of the physical sata connections.

I highly, highly recommend proxmox for an OS.

You can set up every different service into its own lxc container, its wonderful to know you can experiment with whatever and everything else will be unaffected and just keep working. Within lxc things can just run using docker (though this is officially not recommended it works fine). The resource sharing between lxc containers is excellent. Taking snapshots a breeze. And when an lxc is not enough you can easily spin up some vm with whatever distro or even windows also. Best server-choice i made ever!

The zfs format for your storage pool is also very good. And you definitely want redundancy, redundancy makes it so x amount of drives can fail and the system just keeps running like normal while you replace the broken drive, otherwise a single drive failing ruins all your data.

Unless you make every drive its own pool with specific items that you backup separately but thats honestly more troublesome then learning how to setup a pool.

How you want a pool and how much redundancy is a personal choice but i can tell you how i arranged mine.

I have 5 identical drives which is the max My system can handle. 4 of them are in a pool with a raidz1 configuration (equivalent to raid-5) this setup gives me 1 drive of redundancy and leaves me 3 drives of actual usable space.

I could have added the fifth drive in the pool fo more but i opted not too, to protect my immich photons against complete critical failure. This fifth drive is unmounted when not used.

Basically my immich storage are in a dataset, which you can think of as a directory on your pool that you can assign to different lxc to keep things separate.

Every week a script will mount the fifth drive, rsync copy my immich dataset from the pool onto it. Unmount the drive again. Its a backup of the most important stuff outside of the pool.

This drive can also be removed from the cases front in an emergency, which is part of why I recommend spending some time finding a case that fits your wants more then worrying about how much ram.

Best of luck!

This seems to be an unpopular opinion but i personally had someone block me for presumably being too friendly and sincere, after an initial comment where i had agreed with them and defended their downvoted comment.

A second person blocked me after i pointed out that the person they where calling ai/a bot is in fact a well loved moderator of the community they tried to be a part of and they where simply misreading the room.

I don’t really mind that people remove themselves but it does worry me that tolerance of others have gotten so low that ideologically similar people will label each other enemies based on very basic misunderstandings of topics they agree about.

For every that doesn’t understand what this is about.

They are trying to filter content from 4chan

The images you upload gets scanned. If they contain the words “anonymous” it checks if it also contains “no.” And if it does it assumes its from 4 chan and then deliberately serves a misleading error.

I have tried snac before as a minimalist fediverse server but the blog style layout isn’t really for me.

I have also considered wether a personal Lemmy is a good idea or not.

Navidrome❤️

It is so undervalued for how amazing streaming your own music collection is.

Honestly not having a static public ip address would be a dealbreaker for me, reason to change isp.

But thats not always an option.

My old isp got a new ip every full modem reboot and a way i used to circumvent this is with duckdns. It’s a free dns service i used before i had money to pay for my own domain.

If i recall correctly they have a desktop tool that connects to your account that scans for your current dynamic public ip and then updates it for your freesubdomainname.duckdns.org which is what you use to connect.

I never heard if twingate but i see no reason why not to selfhost Wireguard.

Its a proven open source vpn.

As far as a little research went. Twingate is proprietary software and caters to enterprises, it has some open source alternatives that have a similar functionality. Most if them using Wireguard under the hood. Look for tailscale/headscale or netbird.

If you can boot an os from usb (basically the same for all distros) you can try proxmox.

There are these incredibly useful helper scripts that setup entire services in 1-2 copy pasted commands.

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/

To explain what proxmox is its basicly virtualisation software, it can run vms but also lxc (light linux containers) and share resources very efficiently between all of them

Jellyfin, radarr, sonar. They are all included in the helper scripts, each will be a dedicated lxc.

Its also very easy to setup raid and there own storage format is very efficient.

Its well documented to the point that any decent llm can help you learn whatever you need. In fact its claude that helped me setup my own proper raid on proxmox, also tought me about datasets and how i can make those available to different lxc

Personally i am very hands off with my server, the hardest part is often choosing what ip i want to give a service, i rarely update or mess with it if not strictly necessary.

For hardware i recommend plenty of ram (can Be bought and installed seperatly), more cores is usually better and internal graphics can save you some hassle depending on what you are doing (also allows you to dedicate a Big gpu to some services).

A warning on second hand corporate machines, the performance is often good But quite fans are often an afterthought. I onxe got a beast of machine for free but you could hear it spin from anywhere in my house.

A good practical case is always a blessing when you need to check the insides.

Never heard of this one but i might try it. Looks very clean and practical.

https://github.com/glanceapp/glance

The technical term seems to be a JBOD bay. (Just a Bunch Of Disks)

Basic ones are probably usb, ideally you have something that has a SFF port. Modern ones might also have thunderbolt.

Finding a micropc that supports SFF out of the box might be a challenge but some do support pci express cards.

Apparently there also exists something like Oculink which is pci over cable but i know even less about that one.

EDIT: if you look for “Nas enclosure 4bay” you actually do find plenty of options (Jonsbro N3 per example) that allow you to build it all in one unit with a mini-itx board. A nas pretty much just is a pc with special software so this would be what i recommend.

Maybe i miss some perspective here because i never had the spare money to consider a storebought nass. The convenience never sounded like it was worth being locked down to its software.

My server is “just a pc”

I got a case with external drive slots (it also needed to fit a gpu), but i suppose external drive cases also exist that can connect to a micro computer build.

The software is proxmox, which imo is amazing. Its virtualisation and backup software and performs really well and has a proper gui.

I have numerous lxc (linux container that is not a full vm) that each run their own docker with a single service. I can ssh into those from my main system or visit the terminal and other panels in the proxmox gui. Many services host a gui to my network and i could probably make it so cli is minimal but i personally am comfortable with that so…

I also run a few full vms on it, including some windows desktops.

You could probably also host actual Nass software this way.

All of these work well next to eachother and share resources. Snapshots and backups of individual systems or data can be made with ease.

If it doesn’t fit your usecases you can get the off the shelf ones i guess but for others interested here, maybe this helps.

Continue to self host, create a yearly backup on external harddrive which you keep offline at a trusted family members house.

Navidrome is planning on multi user ability, some parts of it already implemented.

But spinning a navidrone service up is so easy (proxmox helper script ftw) you can just spin up multiple side by side with some shared and some private libraries.

Hardware does not need a steep upfront costs.

You don’t need a nasa pc to run nextcloud, larger businesses routinely trow away machines that are beyond what you need. Chances are family of a member already has some machines they where going to trow away. Your hardware priorities are most cpu cores with as much compatible ram.

The advantages of having your own hardware is you can run multiple local servers and let members experience without additional costs. Imagine it like a private mini internet run by members that only is accessible at location.

I highly recommend proxmox as a server os which has 1 line helper script commands that create a whole nextcloud installation and others automatically, its also very easy to backup those.

Got any of em helper Scripts for proxmox to get gpu passtrough working please? 🥺

Whispers “try proxmox”

You dont need to limit yourself to just one, feel free to diversify your presence.

But for a real answer: The smaller ones; The smaller the more respecfull they feel.

Though more users does demonstrate capabilities. Not every server is fast or stable.

How do you picture this?

As far as i know many people try to advertise Lemmy on reddit but those posts are getting removed.

Are you suggesting we should crowdsource funding for actual ads? It might work to get it to stay and have many people see it but i am conflicted in the sense i believe todays internet advertisement is inherently harmfull and i want no part of it.

I am running a few lxc which all run a docker container each.

What taxon said.

Most of my services have their own lxc with docker.

A few that need it are vms

It works so well i often forget how i set things up because its very leave and forget about it, Keeps working.