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Home server setup recommendation (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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Hello everyone, My home server (intel nuc6) died on me recently, I set it to be used as my home server using OpensSUSE Leap with the following services:

NFS server
Sftp over ssh for remote file transfers and I was looking for a faster alternative for local transfers (tftp maybe)
Qbittorrent
Aria2
Emby
I was experiencing with nextcloud then pfsense after.
Definitely an office suite and a few nextcloud addons.

I have no alternative machine ATM to use it as a replacement but I plan to re-install everything on a VM (Virtualbox or Qemu/libvirt) on my Desktop, I have no experience with containers, but I think installing each service in a countainer would make it easier to move everything later to my new home server.

Would using debian or opensuse and use docker? Maybe even proxmox? or should I just stick with installing everything directly on my distro with no containers? I would love to know your opinion about the best approach.

Edit: I'm containerizing, I like to keep my setup simple, no OSes vertualization since I will be using a 7th or 8th gen low power minipc for my next server (Intel NUC, Hp mini, dell micro or lenovo tiny). I will use proxmox in the VM to get confortable with it and I think the web UI might be easier to use than SSHing to the VM. Later on the new server I will mostly use debain+docker (opensuse leap's futur is cloudy atm) I would still love your suggestions and any guide/tutorial that you think is helpful to read/watch. Thanks everyone.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I firmly am of the mindset of containerizing everything. It may be harder to set up for services that you write yourself or ones that don't already have containers, but as you said, it's so much easier to migrate in the future.

I actually use podman for my services and systemd to manage their lifecycle. For each service, I have a folder that contains the systemd service file (doesn't really work in btrfs systems. You need the service files in the same subvolume as etc or else they won't start at boot) any config files or anything else that needs to be mounted as a volume into my container. I back up the folder that contains all those folder with my nightly backup. If my server craps out, I can restore that directory from my backup, systemctl link and enable all of my service files, and I'm back up to 100%.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I considering containerizing everything, except the OS (I'm not ready for immutable OSes yet). I mentioned Docker because it is what I keep finding guides for and which I think is simpler. How is it compared with Podman (for a beginner in containerizing)

Edit: I will mostly use BTRFS and snapshots, and I would definitely put my containers in a separate subvolume to avoid data loss when rolling back.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

From a user point of view, podman is mostly identical to docker. Like 98% of the time you can just replace 'docker' with 'podman' and it works. How they work under the hood is very different, though. Podman is designed around running rootless and daemonless. But if you don't care about those things, use docker. Docker supports rootless as well now anyway, but you need to set it up manually. The biggest difference I have found is that podman doesn't support docker-compose, which is extremely popular. Lemmy uses it, for example. There's an additional couple of packages you can install that add support for docker-compose, but then podman uses a daemon, which defeats one of the purposes of using podman in the first place.

My workaround that I use for btrfs and systemd files is to have a folder in /etc with all my service files, then I soft link them to my service's directory. This is just for organization purposes, as a backup wouldn't include the data of the systemd file, just the link to it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Thanks foe explaining, I know podman is rootless. My service where running their own non-login users (qbituser for qbitorrent, emby for emby and so own) and I needed to sudo if I want to change anything. It's not a big deal for me so Docker seems easier to use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I considering containerizing everything, except the OS (I’m not ready for immutable OSes yet)

If you do ever want to script the system but don't want to go full immutable OS, Ansible is very useful. I use it for things like tweaking sysctls, installing common packages like htop and borgbackup, etc. across all my servers.