Selfhosted

I am at the very beginning of my journey taking those first baby steps. As I don't yet understand all the sysadmin stuff, I'm treading rather carefully to avoid making unfuckable mistakes.

I recently switched to Void on my daily driver so it has been a bit of a trial to get used to a new OS and configure it correctly. Nevertheless, it's been a great learning experience.

Alongside it I've downloaded OpenWrt on my router and begun to configure it as well (still need to deal with the Wireguard and Unbound config).

For the actual server I managed to secure an old Dell Optiplex. In the near future, I plan to flash it with Libreboot and then install Debian or FreeBSD (apparently great ZFS support) on it. Though I've still no idea whether I should use Proxmox and how I should format my drives (one 500GB SSD and 4TB HDD) for maximum effiency and for the possibility of later easily upgrading my storage capacity.

When I've finally past these steps, I plan to selfhost music services, as well as few other basic services. My goal at the moment is to replace Spotify for my whole family. But it's still a long way to go.

I'm in planning for upgrading my NAS. It has a 10Gbps fiber connection, and my main workstation does, as well. My goal is to be able to saturate that with both read and write speed. Timeline is 6 to 8 months out.

Budget in the range of $2000-3000. Currently doing RAID1 on a pair of 18TB disks. I usually want to double that with each upgrade, but there's some leeway on there.

I think my best option is 6 NVMe sticks on RAID6. 8TB sticks would give 32TB of usable space. Not quite double, but close enough.

I would like easy hot swap capabilities. Unfortunately, it looks like the only option for that would be Icydock, and those are expensive. The other way is to go down to SATA drives where relatively cheap 2.5" hot swap bays exist, but a setup that can saturate 10Gbps writes with reasonable redundancy would be even more expensive.

Need a motherboard that has a pair of 16x slots. One needs to be a GPU for Jellyfin transcoding. Also need a 4x slot for a 10Gbps sfp+ NIC. With two NVMe slots on the mobo, this should be workable without going to Threadripper or Epyc chips and such--idle power consumption sucks on those. Totally giving up on hot swap here, though.

There are 8tb NVMe sticks that are priced close to fit in this budget range. I had found one Samsung stick that, according to Amazon price trackers, was around $300 in the recent past (can't seem to find it now). A lot will depend on tariffs, of course.

One surprise is that a Kioxia CD6-R u.3 drive at 15.36TB goes for $1150. 4 drives on RAID10 would be a workable space upgrade. That setup would be out of budget, but not as much as I would have expected. Referb deals or future price movement might put it in range.

H A R V E S T E R

Lol

But honestly got all of nodes (some new hardware, some minipcs, some old laptops, some ewaste servers, some raspberry pies, a VM off my Macbook), all in my harvestet cluster. I got Rancher running as a vcluster as well so messed some with Rancher provisioned rke2 clusters too.

Played some with nutanix as a vm in that cluster (what a fing nightmare, anr not virtual hardware just Nutanix ...). Playing with ESXI now (its not happy about my amd chips so far...). And also my virtual harvester cluster. Easy so far but i want to get more ambitoius in creating a mock deployment, network and all, so i can test crazier configs without losing a day to rebuilding a cluster via thumb drive again...

Also managed some risk and got my ISP to let me do dual modems on the same bus and configed OpenWRT to load balance between them and via usb my wifi hotspot. Still working with them to try and get more IPs so can use the 4 total ports on my modem stacks to attach to both of my routers.

I like tinkering with junk, so the other half of my hobby is just risk mitigation (which i also enjoy).

I'm setting up a yunohost machine for my brother as a birthday present. I got him a domain good for 10 years, and installed nextcloud and Jellyfin with some home videos digitized from our parents' vhs tapes.

So I am in a vicious cycle. I start doing something, notice there is a better way, change my setup and restart. So from just Ubuntu server, I developed to proxmox. From documenting everything manuall in joplin, i am now using ansible. I started with wireguard, then tailscale with selfhosted headscale. I try to get my setup right on the first try, which i notice is stupid as I am writing. It just hinders me to make progress. I think I should rather try to get it up and running as fast as possible (and securely of cause) to make progress and fail fast maybe? And I like all the changes I made, I think they were the right choice, but its a bit tiering. And I like ansible, I just have the urge to automate absolutely everything, so I can redeploy everything right after I installed proxmox. Which is not necessary at all at this stage, idk :D Maybe someone has some tips how to overcome perfectionism?