Currently working on an Arch server for my self hosting needs. I love arch, in my eyes its the perfect platform for self hosting. There is no bloat, making it lightweight and resource efficient. Its also very stable if you go down the lts route and have the time and skills to head off problems before they become catastrophic.
The downsides. For someone who is a semi-noob there is a very steep learning curve. Arch is very well documented but when you hit a problem or a brick wall its very frustrating. My low tolerence for bullshit means I take hours/days long breaks from it. There’s also time demands in the real world so needless to say I’ve been going at it for a few weeks now.
Unraid is very appealing - nice clean interface, out-of-the-box solutions for whatever you want to do, easy NAS management… What’s not to like? If it was fully open-source I would’ve bought into it from the start. At least once a day I think “I’m done. Sign me up unraid”. Its taking an age to set up the Arch server. If I went for unraid I could be self hosting in a matter of hours. Unraid is the antitheses of Arch. Arch is for masochists.
Do you ever look at products like unraid and think “fuck this shit, gimme some of that”? What is your version of this? Have you ever actually done it and regretted it/lived happily ever after?
Switched years ago and now things just work, no looking back for me and I am as happy as a clam.
I went with proxmox and various LXCs for either individual services or docker stacks with several things on a minimal os (I’m comfortable with Ubuntu server so that’s what I go with generally as the unpriv LXC)
Why would I pay for Unraid when I already have a smooth-running Proxmox cluster and an OMV-based NAS?
For the time being I’m content with my little raspberry pi 5 running debian. I can stream 4K on my home network and that’s all the performance I need for now.
To me it seems like:
- you want to do a lot of stuff yourself on arch
- but there’s quite some complicated stuff to learn and try
I’d try Proxmox VE and, if you’re also searching for a Backup Server, Proxmox Backup Server.
I recommend these because:
- Proxmox VE is a Hypervisor, you can just spin up Arch Linux VMs for every task you need
- Proxmox VE, as well as Proxmox BS are open source
- you can buy a license for “stable updates” (you get the same updates, but delayed, to fix problems before they get to you)
- includes snapshots, re-rolls, full-backups, a firewall (which you can turn on or off for every VM), …
I personally run a Proxmox VE + Proxmox BS setup in 3 companies + my own homelab.
It’s not magic, Proxmox VE is literally Debian 13 + qemu + kvm with a nice webui. So you know the tech is proven, it’s just now you also get an easy to use interface instead of
virshconsole commands orvirt-manager.I personally like a stable infrastructure to test and run my important and experimental tuff upon. That’s why I’m going with this instead of managing even the hypervisor myself with Arch.
Reading that is wild
Why are you doing Arch on a server? You want to tinker forever and read the update notes like a hawk lest the server implode forever?
Arch isn’t gonna be noticeably leaner than Debian.
Get Debian, install docker and/or podman, set unattended upgrades, and then install Incus if you need VMs or containers down the line. You can stick on ZFS and it’ll be fine, you already have BTRFS for basic mirrors. Install Cockpit and you’ll have a nice GUI. Try not to think you have to fiddle with settings, the maintainers for each package/service have set it so it works for most people (and we’re most people!); you’ll only need to intervene on an handful of package configs. All set and it’s not proprietary.
There was a thread yesterday where most people were choosing arch for their server, I didn’t get it either. Like you, I’d much rather Debian or something else with smoother updates.
Agreed, I run arch on my desktop and laptop, because it is more stable (in the sense of fewer bugs, things like suspend/resume works reliably for example) than any other distro I have used.
But on my VPS and my Pi I run Debian because it is more stable (in the sense of fewer upgrades that could break things). I can enable unattended upgrades there, which I would never do on my Arch system (though it is incredibly rare for those to break).
Also: if someone said they were a (self proclaimed) “semi noob” I would not recommend Arch. I have used Linux since 2002, and as my main OS since 2006. (Furthermore I’m a software developer in C/C++/Rust.) While Arch is a great distro, don’t start with Arch.
UnRaid doesn’t provide anything I am interested in, at all. Currently running TrueNAS for main storage and proxmox for virtualization, both ZFS based. If TrueNAS ever enshittifies, I’d run some bare metal Linux with ZFS. My workstations also run ZFS as the file system, making backups trivial. VM snapshots and backups of any system are trivial and take seconds (including network transfers).
I never understood why I’d even consider UnRaid for anything.
Openmediavault + mergerfs + snapraid is very similar to unraid storage in that you can add different disk sizes just like unraid. Admittedly it’s not as ‘plug and play’ as unraid, but it’s free, so can’t really complain. Disk speeds using this config are also much faster if that matters.
I have considered truneas for if/when I need to rebuild, but this works for my jellfyin/arr stack needs.
How close are you to “fck it, im just gonna pay for unraid”?
Extremely far. Maximum distance. My self updating debian with an sftpgo container and some RAID HDDs slapped onto it has been rocksolid for years.
At times i have felt that my distro was so not worth the flak.
But the thing that keeps me on it is i write it once and never half to dick with it again.
NixOS is really powerful, but the learning curve will push you to the edge!
I currently self host alot of stuff on my server which runs NixOS, theres some services that are as simple as ollama.service = true;
And others that you spend hours cussing at. But i feel the declarative nature is what makes switching to any other distro feel so unintuitive.
My linux journey had been,
Manjaro > ubuntu > arch > fedora > silverblue > opensuse tumbleweed > gentoo > nixos > opensuse tumbleweed > nixos.
I kept coming back to nix because i wrote what i wanted it to do and it did it that way every time. Its been a godsend for ZFS, although its not super bad to use ZFS on debian just mostly time consuming. The fact i dont half to worry about a update breaking DKMS and making my filesystem not work. I SWEAR SUN IF YOU COULD HAVE JUST DONE THE GPL INSTEAD OF CDL!!!
I have recently been exploring Guix, purely because of the NixOS drama. But i think nix is my main server OS
maybe try zVault (freenas fork)? heard it’s great.
Oooh. That’s a new one.
Far. Fedora + ZFS for my NAS that’s consumed by a 3-node bare-metal Kubernetes cluster running Talos. K8s has a ZFS provisioner that automatically creates new volumes when I spin something up. It more or less just works.
Here, you lost this
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Weeeell, since they switched to a semi-subscription model, I’d recommend looking into TrueNAS (inb4 they start locking down their stuff)
TrueNAS was actually the first thing I tried. The NAS side of it is great but my need to tinker and get my hands dirty got the better of me. And I don’t actually mind paying for good software, its the fact that so much of unraid is closed-source puts me off.
Are you using truenas as the entire homelab?
I also love messing with stuff until it breaks and I learn something, but I’ve decided I just want my files to be accessible.
So I actually have truenas virtualized with a passed through HBA so I can run proxmox to host all my breakable VMs while leaving truenas alone.
So I actually have truenas virtualized with a passed through HBA so I can run proxmox to host all my breakable VMs while leaving truenas alone.
I want to try this eventually. Never used HBAs before. Is it hard to set up? Reliable once its up and running?
It was really simple to do in Proxmox.
You will find no name brand HBAs in IT mode on eBay for half the price of Intel, Supermicro, Dell, Etc branded ones. Do not buy the no names. I spent a week flashing and reflashing some cheap one, cycling through cables, etc. Nothing.
My supermicro branded one worked absolutely no issue. And I think it was like $40
It probably took a total of 30 minutes to pass it through and build the VM and everything. It took a couple days to rebuild my data from my previous truenas server but I had 10 TB of data on 4 drives.
The only issues I’ve had have been my own reading comprehension in setting up truenas accounts.
LSI is a common brand as well.
I used to buy mine from Art of the Server off eBay. Came ready to go.
Sweet. You got any good links for reading up on it?
Ive been using Unraid for years.
I am fully capable of running a Docker solution and setting up drives in a raid configuration. It’s more or less one of my job duties so when I get home I’m not in a hurry to do a lot more of that.
But Unraid is not zero maintenance, and when something goes wrong, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to fix even with significant institutional knowledge.
Running disks in JBOD with parity is wonderful for fault tolerance. But throughput for copying files is very slow.
You could run it with zfs and get much more performance, but then all your discs need to be the same size, and there’s regular disk maintenance that needs to happen.
They have this weird dedication to running everything is root. They’re not inherently insecure, but it’s one of those obvious no-nos that you shouldn’t do that they’re holding on to.
If you want to make it a jellyfin/arr server and just store some docs on the side, it’s reasonable and fairly low maintenance.
I’m happy enough with them not to change away. And if you wait till a black Friday they usually have a pretty good sale.
I’ll probably eventually move to a ProxMox and a Kubernetes cluster as I’ve picked up those skills at work. I kind of want to throw together a 10-inch rack with a cluster of RPI. But that’s pretty against what direction you’re looking to head :)
They have this weird dedication to running everything as root
I didn’t know that. That isn’t fantastic.
Running disks in JBOD with parity is wonderful for fault tolerance. But throughput for copying files is very slow.
Didn’t know this either. It makes sense. Worth considering.
