[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!