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Help me decide?!

Hey everyone. So I'll try to keep the post short. I have selfhosting for roughly 5 years quite few apps with Yunohost with a static ip address in an i3 3rd generation, namely the below:

  • Nextcloud. Used for documents backup-sync, calendar and contacts sync, Joplin folder sync, also in the past Photos uplod folder from the mobile (we can call it webDav). In addition online remote documents edits and that's about it. Nextcloud does not causes any major issue but I am kinda afraid to each upgrade that might screw things up.
  • Vaultwarden
  • Baikal. Mainly Because I wanted to try it and get away from Nextcloud better late than never.
  • Firefly III. Because, budget. Not actively using it. I have set up some automations for expenses but I do not enter either manually nor importing transactions via the Importer (never made it to work).
  • FreshRSS
  • Syncthing. Userd mainly for Obsidian sync.
  • Wallabag.
  • Webmin.
  • Roundcube for Yunohost's mails only since port 25 is blocked by my ISP.

I also selfost inhouse via DOCKER (arr stack and Jellyfin) in a SFF desktop HP, Ryzen 7, 65gb Ram, with a 256 GM SSD for Linux Mint, 4TB SSD (movies, tv series, music), a 1TB SSD for additional temp storage and a 4TB external HDD as also media storage (movies, tv series, photos). This machine is blocked access from the outside since I do not need it. In case I want to access to put some downloads in a queue then I have setup a wireguard tunnel. Note that I play media with a NVIDIA Shield TV (LineageOS flashed) so no transcoding is done or necessary.

Now, to the juicy stuff. Ideally I would like for now keep the Yunohost as is BUT want to tidy ip the inhouse one. Since I might get rid of the HP desktop I am thinking to invest in a new PC with the below characteristics:

  • i5-12600K
  • 64 GB RAM
  • 256 SSD for OS or thinking also Proxmox
  • 4 HDDs roughly 12T each for storage in RAID 5.

The idea is to:

  • Continue run the arr stack in Docker since I have the docker compose file ready
  • Set up a NAS. Please recommend any solution (eg. TrueNas, how, docker, lxc, VM?). This should be setup as main files dump for media, documents etc.
  • Future use in case the Yunohost server is removed from the static IP address (currently in another location)
  • RAID 5 is an excessive setup you think?

Does the above seem an overkill or should I simplify the current setup? Investing in a new server of approx 1000-1500€ is OK including also the HDDs.

I would appreciate any input to clear things up.

Many thanks!

in reply to WeAreAllOne

hendrik
hendrik
• •

The HDDs alone should be roughly ~1,000€. The rest of the build sounds pretty much like your other machine, just with a different processor.

I run my YunoHost in a VM with like ~8GB of RAM allocated. You can move everything to one single machine if you set up some reverse proxy for all the web frontends.

36TB of storage and 64GB of RAM should be plenty.

This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to hendrik

WeAreAllOne
WeAreAllOne
• •
True, I could run everything to one machine but the home one is a SFF so I cannot fit too much storage inside..
in reply to WeAreAllOne

hendrik
hendrik
• •

I think I get it. I mean in that situation you'd essentially pay to get some SATA ports and the space to put the harddrives. The money doesn't really get you anything else that'd be fundamentally different from the current setup.

Idk, I'm fine with 48GB of RAM to run a lot of services and containers. And I don't use a separate machine for storage, the hypervisor does that and I either share the filesystems via NFS or pass them through into some VM. And I don't think a fast machine with lots of RAM is needed for storage, unless you're using ZFS.

in reply to abeorch

hendrik
hendrik
• •

Uh, I'm not super up to date any more. I installed YunoHost a long time ago and it's been running fine most of the time, I haven't installed anything new in the last year or so. I like it. I don't think i have any broad advice, except the usual. Do your backups in case a harddisk fails. And don't mess with the config manually (too much) or you might run into problems.

I'm mainly using it to self-host my e-mail, Matrix chat, Peertube and Nextcloud. Have stored all the calendars and contacts stored there and sync it to my phone and computer. Have smaller websites running as a custom_webapp. And I use the reverse proxy to make Home Assistant and a few side-projects and experiments accessible from outside.

in reply to WeAreAllOne

N0x0n
N0x0n
• •

I can't jump in for everything related to NAS, Yunohost or RAID5.

However, If you wan't to host the arr stack with jellyfin or other media server, you probably need something to encode on the fly (some kind of GPU).

CPU encoding is superior but slower. Also this would leave your server CPU for other tasks more important. Encoding is very demanding and could bottleneck your whole server if you only rely on the CPU to do the heavy lifting and share your media server with family members.

in reply to N0x0n

WeAreAllOne
WeAreAllOne
• •
I have an NVIDIA Shield TV connected to my TV and reads from the ssd-hdds, so basically no need for additional GPU.
in reply to WeAreAllOne

thelittleblackbird
thelittleblackbird
• •

Totally overkill if you cut the specs to the half I have the feeling they are still overkill

The only point are the hdds and the mass storage, I can not decide if it is a lot or not, but for your list I would say that you can even go one order of magnitude down. But it mainly depends if the number of Linux isos you want to archive

in reply to WeAreAllOne

acid_falcon
acid_falcon
• •

Oh shit I may have advice. I have a setup similar to what you're shooting for! Proxmox is the absolute best thing ever. I used to just run plain Debian with some docker and random services. Now I have proxmox, and for my desktop I pass my GPU through to a VM that is my desktop.

I've got half a dozen VMs, one of them has the arr stack hooked up to a raid 6 array (7 14 TB drives), and another VM running jellyfin (and I use Kodi to play stuff on my nvidia shield)

First advice of the top of my head, gosuperhard and serverpartsdeals on eBay are amazing. They sell used industry drives for a fraction of the cost, just shoot for the ones that have warranties

in reply to acid_falcon

Nimrod
Nimrod
• •
Regarding your “desktop” setup. I tried to do this, and have one of my Cams inside proxmox pass the gui out via HDMI to my monitor, and I could not for the life of me get it to work. All the googling at that time said it doesn’t work, but might in the future. Are we in the future?
in reply to Nimrod

acid_falcon
acid_falcon
• •
I'd say so. My buddy is into gaming, but I only have one computer. To get around anti-cheat, I tricked a Windows VM into thinking that it's running on bare metal. I pass through my GPU to it and I can play on medium quality settings just fine
in reply to acid_falcon

Nimrod
Nimrod
• •
Hmmm… I’ll have to try again. I don’t have a windows VM, so I’ve just been trying to pass through my MX Linux VM that I use for watching media. I’m not worried about the GPU, so as long as I can send the desktop to my display via HDMI, I’ll be happy as a clam.
in reply to Nimrod

acid_falcon
acid_falcon
• •
Hm so are you trying to pass through your onboard graphics?
in reply to acid_falcon

Nimrod
Nimrod
• •
I guess so… it’s been a while since I tried it to be honest. I ended up just opting for an additional NUC to use as my media playing PC, but if I could combine that with my “server” NUC, it would give me more a reason to buy new, more powerful hardware 😈
in reply to Nimrod

acid_falcon
acid_falcon
• •
Hah well, I just tested the built in graphics and it worked. If you wanna give me more details on what you have I can try to help
in reply to acid_falcon

Nimrod
Nimrod
• •
Thanks man, I’ll pencil in a spot this weekend to give it another go. I’ll hit you up next week if I can’t figure it out. Thanks a lot. I love lemmy for this.
in reply to acid_falcon

WeAreAllOne
WeAreAllOne
• •
Thank you! Indeed you have a similar setup to what I'm thinking. Why do you have jellyfin to a different VM. Also, how come you haven't considered a dedicated NAS (eg Synology) ?
in reply to WeAreAllOne

acid_falcon
acid_falcon
• •

Portability/modularity/plus I have an Intel Arc GPU. The drivers just played nicer on Windows when it comes to transcoding (which you said wasn't an issue.) But most of my services are on separate barebones VMs because they're just easier to work with.

I went with a "traditional" desktop because I already had a big ass Be Quiet! Dark Base 900 Pro. Also I don't trust hardware raid, and a regular desktop is infinitely more flexible.

For instance: I threw two GPUs in there! Little one for transcoding, big one for gaming. So I can play a game while my girlfriend watches a movie in the other room. Plus I can keep shoving drives in there until I run of room. A dedicated NAS is much more limited

in reply to WeAreAllOne

abeorch
abeorch
•
Help me decide?!
@WeAreAllOne
Hey I'm new to #Yunohost running #Friendica #Nextcloud and #HomeAssistant - Hoping to have #ziggbee2mqtt in there when it becomes available. I am looking at back up now. Do you use #joplin for backup? - I have started talking to the #coopcloud people as I understand that is #container based.
#friendica #yunohost #homeassistant #nextcloud #ziggbee2mqtt #joplin #coopcloud #container @WeAreAllOne

Selfhosted reshared this.

in reply to WeAreAllOne

thumdinger
thumdinger
• •

For storage redundancy RAID 5 is not recommended, particularly as you get to high capacity drives (think >8TB). I think the rating to consider is URE (unrecoverable read error, usually 1 in 10^14 bits read).

Once a drive inevitably fails and you are forced to resilver the array to avoid data loss. During the resilver the healthy disks are running at 100%, reading every bit of data they have to complete the parity calculation and determine what data is missing. The chances of encountering a URE on another drive is a near certainty at high capacities as the total number of bits read exceeds the URE rating. As result the resilver would fail and the array would be lost.

RAID 6 as a minimum (2 drive redundancy), although a popular option now (and the layout I use) is mirrored vdevs.

Edit: Consider TrueNAS for NAS software. I have been using it for 10 years and it is absolutely rock solid. 25TB usable storage across 4x mirrored vdevs. I run it as a VM inside Proxmox with 4 logical cores on a 10 year old Xeon with 16GB RAM for the VM (I run ECC as was recommended at the time, but whether it’s still considered necessary I’m not certain).

I would also recommend getting an LSI HBA (host bus adapter) like the 9207-8i flashed to IT mode (it must not be in raid mode, let TrueNAS manage the disks directly). This simplifies passing through all the disks to a VM.

This entry was edited (13 hours ago)
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