Hey guys. I’ve been considering maybe moving to another OS for my home lab. Do you have have any suggestions? Especially former Unraid users? Mostly just for arrs though I would like to run reverse proxy/file hosting as well. Proxmox seems pretty trendy can I use it for arrs as well as backups?

Rant/extra info:

Tap for spoiler

I’ve been using Unraid for a couple years now, even paid for basic registration. I’ve largely used it to run all my arrs in docker, pihole and had a HASSIO VM running.

I recently tried setting up nextcloud, during the set up (which like nearly everything, I followed a video guide for) I ran into a novel error. So I deleted the nextcloud docker and got it from the official repo instead. Now my nextcloud share is gone and I can’t create new shares??

Stuff like this happened when I set up guac. Weird errors, plenty of which have little documentation or explanation. Plenty of which I need to ssh in or use Linux commands to fix. Which lead me to, “I’m having to learn this stuff anyway, why not spin up a Linux server and learn properly”.

Should I just rebuild/give Unraid a bit more time, it is young OS wise right?

  • CTDummy@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    I have seen Nix come up quite a bit and have been tempted to try it. I’ve rolled with Arch before so I was considering going back to it but maybe something new be go.

    The OS itself I don’t back up outside of mirroring. I run an immutable OS (every reboot is like a fresh install). I can redeploy from git so no need to backup. I have some persistent BTRFS volumes mounted where logs, caches, and state go. Don’t backup, but I swap the volume every boot and keep the last 30 days of volumes or a min of at least 10 for debugging.

    Something like this has always interested me. I remember reading about doing similar with Windows. Not so much it being immutable so much as having a decent starting image that you load on any device you want with all your programs ready to go.

    Runs Arrs, Jellyfin, Monero node, Tor entry node, wireguard VPN (to get into network from remote), I2C, Mullvad VPN (default), Proton VPN (torrents with port forwarding use this), DNS (forced over VPN using DoT), PiHole in front of that, three of my WiFi vlans route through either Mulvad, I2C, or Tor. I’ll use TailsOS for anything sensitive. WiFi is just to get to I2C or Onion sites where I’m not worried about my device possibly leaking identity.

    Do you have a guide or ten you used for all this perchance? Unraid has stuff like trashguides and space invader one. Especially the DNS part onwards? If not it’s cool I have Mullvad set up and Pihole with my current setup so I’ll be able to work it out. This is all very compelling for me to try out (I should really have learned about wireguard by now). Thanks a lot for such an interesting and informative write up!

    • JustinAEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      Nixos’ weakness is definitely it’s documentation. There’s often configuration snippets you can copy and paste, though. If you go with NixOS, make sure to come back with questions, the community is very helpful.

    • sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      For the networking I found some repos with Nix and Gluetun (OCI containers). I don’t see them in my bookmarks, so it was probably a day project when I set up and didn’t keep the references.

      That part is still in docker / podman. So any docker network guide just needs to be translated to nix.

    • sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Best resource I’ve found is searching GitHub.

      My setup closely follows https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config.

      For servarr I just translated someone else’s docker compose setup to nix. There are some ready made nix ones you can look at like https://github.com/rasmus-kirk/nixarr/tree/main/nixarr.

      The complex networking I just picked up over time once I knew my way around a little bit.

      GitHub is your best resource. lang:nix search terms.