Submitted 5 months ago by jobbies@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Have one unraid lifetime license, just paid for a second license yearly for my backup off-site machine. Been using truenas on the off-site, but its primary storage is USB which I didn’t realize truenas isn’t fond of. Ah well. It’ll be a little easier this way, anywho.
Everyone here is telling you to ditch Arch for Debian, I absolutely agree with them however, if you’re so hell bent on having an Arch server than install Proxmox VE to the host and run both Debian and Arch, getting it working in Debian first then try to replicate it with Arch, compare the differences.
My travels took me from Raspberry Pi and Raspberry PI OS/Rasbpian over to Debian then to TrueNAS + Linux mounted NFS and PVE hosts.
No going to fake RAID unraid. Not paying for harddrives and then again for something TrueNAS does for free.
I fucking LOVE my Unraid server, but I’ve had it for many years and they’ve since changed their pricing. A very, very solid WebUI.
I paid like $40 just once for it, and it looks like it’s $90 now. Honestly I’d still pay that, it has been immensely helpful to get me started as my first homelab.
And btw I use Arch for my desktop whenever I use Linux.
I helped a friend build a server to use Unraid for his new house, and to get him started with Home Assistant and the arr stack. He’s always been fairly good with computers, but had 0 Linux experience. After about 6 months he became self efficient and no longer needed to ask for help.
My first homelab server is running unRAID. No real complaints from me. It’s been running for years no issues other than the crap hardware it runs on (i7-3770, 32GB RAM). I have some file shares, docker, and some VMs. The UI makes it really easy to do stuff, especially if you don’t want to have to research and manage everything.
Self hosting on a rolling release platform? No way. Give me Debian, 4 hours work every 2 1/2 years. Arch is crazy and only doable if you only have a few single server
I use Ubuntu Server -> dm-integrity -> mdadm -> ext4. Super easy to set up (it just takes forever to do dm-integrity on the drives, but you don’t need to watch it), works great, easy to maintain. Everything I run on it is dockerized with docker compose and sits behind nginx-proxy-manager, so it’s also super easy to maintain.
I wouldn’t recommend that as it doesn’t do a lot to protect data. Instead go ZFS or Btrfs.
That’s what dm-integrity is for. Also, absolutely do not use Btrfs for RAID5/RAID6.
Arch is very easy in this context.
After having some issues with TrueNAS killing containers after updates, I went to Unraid and have never been happier. TrueNAS file sharing permissions also never did make sense to me. I got them to work but never quite grok’d them. Unraid performs exactly like I’d expect. I hand rolled a NAS using Ubuntu way back in the day and didn’t have the desire to tinker on the NAS side of things too much.
On Unraid, I roll a larger xfs array for all of my media and large storage, then I have a two disk ZFS array for my more important documents and pictures. That gets archived up to the xfs array and my cache nvme drives have their own ZFS pool. I don’t gain a ton by doing this, it was just fun to set up and I feel reasonably secure with my personal data.
I also run a smaller, lower powered machine with Proxmox and I run Home Assistant on it. Mostly because of tinkering with hardware support in Home Assistant, I didn’t want it messing with my NAS needing restarts and such. But, Unraid is my workhorse. Day in, day out, it does exactly what I suspect with no surprises. I’ve had drives go bad and need replaced. I’ve had the whole machine just die and had to build a new machine. Unraid did exactly what I expected and needed every step of the way. The docker support is fantastic and super stable. Running multiples of the exact same container by duplicating and with only different port settings works great. I can’t say that for my independent docker installs without a bunch of tinkering on things I couldn’t seem to find enough about when I ran into issues.
I tinker on the things I enjoy. I do not enjoy having an unusable server. The anxiety is actually pretty insane for me. I would pay for Unraid many times over to get this combination of factors.
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)
Switched years ago and now things just work, no looking back for me and I am as happy as a clam.
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.
Why would I pay for Unraid when I already have a smooth-running Proxmox cluster and a NAS?
Same, just TrueNAS instead of OMV. I’m not thinking about unraid at all.
To me it seems like:
I’d try Proxmox VE and, if you’re also searching for a Backup Server, Proxmox Backup Server.
I recommend these because:
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 virsh console commands or virt-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.
My tech stack is a NUC running PVE that uses an NFS disk served by a TrueNAS server. That is getting backed up by a Veeam B&R server because I am using that at work.
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.
That’s the way you to go
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 ok 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.
Arch’s design is key for user devices - it gets you the fixes you need now with good enough guard rails that usually it’s all good!
But that’s not the design you want for a 24/7 server that’s likely headless. You want that server to have the security updates and to get them installed asap without worry about stability. Literally for years now I’ve never had unattended upgrades cause any issue, and I’ve taken that system from 11 to 13 now. And I’ll look at in a month (maybe) while it continues to do DNS and serve up vidz
Debian on a laptop would be akin to a skeleton waiting on food/water; you’ll get that fix for sleep in 14 (maybe). It’s workable - just like Arch is workable for a server - but it’s just not the ideal role.
Both designs exist for a reason though, and that’s cause they both have their strengths!
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.
It’s probably because tech influencers on insert your fav video scrolling app love choosing arch as their flavor of the month Linux distro
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.
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 didnt 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
UnRaid doesn’t provide anything in 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 win ZFS, 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.
How are you sharing the storage to PVE? NFS?
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.
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 HDDs slapped onto it has been rocksolid for years.
Here, you lost this
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maybe try zVault (freenas fork)? heard it’s great.
I found all that TrueNAS back and forth a bit confusing but I’m glad they ended up on Debian as a base. This seems to value FreeBSD but I can’t find their reasoning.
BSD was good at one point
These days however…
Not too close. My Proxmox server is basically set up, I can’t fit anything more on it, so it’s just back end and tinkering now. I’m comfortable with Proxmox.
That said, new box and a large windfall I’d have a look at Unraid. After donating to Proxmox at least that much first.
If Proxmox didn’t exist (and TTeck didn’t exist) I think I would have at least tested Unraid. I was comfy in Debian with Docker as a virtualisation host before moving to Proxmox anyways.
I’m sure it’s good, I would like to give it a go. I’m happy where I am though.
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 :)
Nah. I have everything in containers so maintenance is a non-issue, since I can upgrade the host separately from the containers. I’m using openSUSE Leap with a BTRFS mirror for the storage and I never have to think about it. I’ll probably move to openSUSE MicroOS when I get a new boot drive so I don’t have to do the release upgrade every other year.
Fair warning unraid is slow… A friend tried unraid and absolutley hated it because file transfer was verry slow in comparison to both arch and windows.
When remodelling my NAS I was tempted to go for unraid as well, but in the end I chose OMV. Aside from some minor problems here and there it has been running great.
zfs has been working nicely for me for many years, for diverse operating systems including zfs all-in-one for internal NFS mount.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Why would you go from Arch to unraid?
With all due respect, Arch isn’t good for servers. That isn’t to say Arch is bad but it isn’t designed for long term stability.