[xoa]

I'll admit I've still stuck with the original FreeBSD based TrueNAS, and still am kinda bummed they swapped it. So it's interesting to see a direct example of someone for whom the new Linux based version is clearly superior. I'm long since far, far more at the "self-hosted" vs "homelab" end of the spectrum at this point, and in turn have ended up splitting my roles back out again more vs all-in-one boxes. My NAS is just a NAS, my virtualization is done via proxmox on separate hardware with storage backing to the NAS via iSCSI, and I've got a third box for OPNsense to handle the routing functions. When I first compared, the new TrueNAS was slower (presumably that is at parity or better now?) and missing certain things of the old one, but already was much easier to have Synology or Docker style or the like "apps" AIO. That didn't interest me because I didn't want my NAS to have any duty but being a NAS, but I can see how it'd be far more friendly to someone getting going, or many small business setups. A sort of better truly open and supported "open Synology" (as opposed the xpenology project).

Clearly it's worked for them here, and I'm happy to see it. Maybe the bug will truly bite them but there's so much incredibly capable hardware now available for a song and it's great to see anyone new experiment with bringing stuff back out of centralized providers in an appropriately judicious way.

Edit: I'll add as well, that this is one of those happy things that can build on itself. As you develop infrastructure, the marginal cost of doing new things drops. Like, if you already have a cheap managed switch setup and your own router setup whatever it is, now when you do something like the author describes you can give all your services IPs and DNS and so on, reverse proxy, put different things on their own VLANs and start doing network isolation that way, etc for "free". The bar of giving something new a shot drops. So I don't think there is any wrong way to get into it, it's all helpful. And if you don't have previous ops or old sysadmin experience or the like then various snags you solve along the way all build knowledge and skills to solve new problems that arise.

[ryandrake]

One of the most helpful realizations I had as I played around with self-hosting at home is that there is nothing magical about a NAS. You don't need special NAS software. You generally don't need wild filesystems, or containers or VMs or this-manager or that-webui. Most people just need Linux and NFS. Or Linux and SMB. And that's kind of it. The more layers running, the more that can fail.

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.

[rpcope1]

Kind of expanding on this, it feels like a huge chunk of specialized operating systems are just someone just putting their own skin over Debian. The vast majority of services and tools they wrap aren't any more complicated than the wrapper.

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.

[shiroiuma]

>it feels like a huge chunk of specialized operating systems are just someone just putting their own skin over Debian. The vast majority of services and tools they wrap aren't any more complicated than the wrapper.

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.

[dizhn]

There are exceptions to this such as Proxmox which can actually be added to an existing Debian install. I must admit that when I first encountered it I didn't expect much more than a glorified toy. However it is so much more than that and they do a really good job with the software and the features. If anybody is on the fence about it I recommend giving it a go. If you do, I recommend using the ISO to install, pick ZFS as the filesystem (much much more flexible), and run pbs (proxmox backup server) somewhere (even on the same box as an lxc host with zfs backed dir).

[globular-toast]

Same with a router. Any Linux box with a couple of (decent) NICs is a powerful router. You just need to configure it.

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!

[lostlogin]

> splitting my roles back out again more

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.

[xoa]

>The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change etc makes this my favourite too.

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.

[lostlogin]

> 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.

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.

[lostlogin]

> 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.

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.

[globular-toast]

I'm similar to you[0]. I still run FreeBSD TrueNAS, and it's just a NAS. Although I do run the occasional VM on it as the box is fairly overprovisioned. I run all my other stuff on an xcp-ng box. I'm a little more homelab-y as I do run stuff on a fairly pointless kubernetes cluster, but it's for learning purposes.

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.

[0] https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/homelab-2025/

[vermaden]

I also regret that change.

Big downgrade after moving to Linux:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-versu...

[photon_collider]

Fair point! When I first started on this I went down a deep rabbit hole exploring all the ways I could set this up. Ultimately, I decided to start simple with hardware that I had laying around.

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.

[PunchyHamster]

There was just not a good reason to stay with BSD, especially with NAS -> homeserver evolution.

Really, we should rename that kind of devices to HSSS (Home Service Storage Server)