Submitted 3 months ago by Dust0741@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Its new homelab time. And with that, potentially a new OS time too.
I currently am very happy with Debian and Docker. The only issue is I am brand new to using data redundancy. I have a 2 bay NAS I’ll use, and I want the two HDDs to be in raid 1.
Now I could definitely just use ZFS or BTRFS with Debian, and be able to use Docker just like I do currently.
Or I could use a dedicated NAS OS. That would help me with the raid part of this, but a requirement is Docker.
Any recommendations?
Unraid and Truenas are pretty popular. Openmediavault is less popular, but a pretty simple system based on Debian.
I’ve been happy with unraid, super simple to use and the community apps makes it easy to find and install docker containers
Unraid si great and I have been using it for over a decade now, but a paid OS on a 2bay nas seems excessive
Generally, I think it is better to use a general server OS like Debian or Fedora instead of something specialized like Proxmox or Unraid. That way you can always choose the way you want to use your server instead of being channeled into running it a specific way (especially if you ever change your mind).
I run Debian with zfs. Really simple to set up and has been rock solid for it too. As far as I can tell all the issues I've had have been my fault.
ZFS looks like it uses a lot of RAM, but you can get away without it if you need too. It's basically extra caching. I was thrilled to use it as an excuse to upgrade my ram instead.
Mdadm has a little more setup then zfs, as far as I'm concerned. You need to set your own scrubbing up whereas zfs schedules it's own for you. You need to add monitoring stuff for both though.
I've considered looking into the various operating systems designsd for this, but they just don't seem to be worth the effort of switching to me.
I can also recommend zfs on debian. Even if you only using two disks you will be still protected from bit rot.
Any recomended monitoring solutions? Or just proxmox and grafana?
I can recommend dockprom. It comes with grafana preconfigured.
Proxmox ZFS with plenty of ram. (ZFS is ram heavy)
Bog-standard Debian with LVM. LVM can also do RAID, but you could also do mdadm below LVM if you prefer. Keep it simple.
Not as powerful as btrfs or zfs
ZFS isn't built-in. I don't know enough about btrfs to recommend it.
Definitely use ZFS for the data volumes in order to avoid silent data corruption. If you don’t use separate drive for the OS, then you need to look into ZFS on root.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| LVM | (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
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ZFS is rigid? Please explain
I need to throw random spare old HDs at it, I expect failures, I expect expanding it, I expect very different sizes between the disks.
Honestly, from your description, I’d go with Debian, likely with btrfs. Would be better if you had 3 slots so that you can swap a bad drive but, 2 will work.
If you want to get adventurous, you can see about a Fedora Atomic distro.
Previously, I’ve recommended Proxmox but, not sure that I still can at the moment, if they haven’t fixed their kernel funkiness. Right now, I’m back to libvirt.
Of course, Gentoo with mdadm! I am running Linux software raid for the last… 20 years? And never had a single issue.
Also a big Gentoo fan, and of course use podman instead of docker :)
I was in a similar boat. Initially, I ran debian with docker but later on decided to check out unraid. It’s pretty easy to get setup, and you have a lot of docker containers pre-configured, so you can just click and install. I have it notify me whenever something goes on with it, but outside of that, I don’t tinker much with it.
Only two weird things about it though…
You dont install unraid. Instead, you run it through a usb. More specifically, the usb has a specific config that’ll then load everything to your memory.
Recently, they redid their pay structure so not too familiar with the changes but you do have to pay for unraid.
Unraid!
As long as you’re not relying on RAID as your backup. Don’t know why so many people struggle with understanding, RAID is not a backup. It’s a solution to ensure uptime in the face of a list disc, not to restore lost data… again, its primary purpose is uptime. I would guess most selfhosters shouldn’t be concerned with uptime.
Yea I have a fully seperate backup solution
XigmaNAS
I’m not falling for that one again. Next you’ll tell me to use DeezOS
Huh
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months ago
Debian and the standard linux mdraid?
catloaf@lemm.ee 3 months ago
This. Don’t make it unnecessarily complicated.
Dust0741@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Do you mean mdadm? raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/A_guide_to_mdadm If not can I have a link?
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months ago
Yes, as the other people pointed out, that's what I mean. The standard Linux software RAID (also called MD RAID)
It's proven, battle-tested, pretty robust and you don't rely on any specific vendor formats or any hardware for that matter. The main point would be to keep it simple. You could use BTRFS or ZFS or all kinds of things. But it only introduces additional complexity and points of failure. And has no benefits over a plain mirror (what the RAID1 does) if we're talking about just 2 devices. At least it served me well in the past. Contrary to cheap hardware RAID controllers and also BTRFS which also let me down once. But a lot of development went in to that since then and the situation might have changed. But mdraid is reliable anyways.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
I’d suggest lvmraid which is just mdraid wrapped in LVM. It’s a tad simpler to setup and you get the flexibility of LVM, plus the ability to convert from linear to mirror and back as needed. That is you could do a standard install on LVM, then add another disk to LVM and convert the volumes to RAID1. It’s all documented under
man lvmraid.