Some advice, TrueNAS isn’t very newbie friendly. Between permissions and their wonky kubernettes setup that no containers actually leverage, it’s not great. It is free, but expect bumps in the road. Unraid and OpenMediaVault are much easier to use. I switched to Unraid, and it’s been amazing, I highly recommend it. It’s nice that you can install random sized drives, they don’t need to match. You can toss in a few ssds for cache, and the docker containers are super easy to setup and maintain. Jellyfin works just fine for instance. OMV has some great offerings too, but lack the docker/VM hosting side. It’s a NAS and nothing else. It’s expected to have proxmox or something hosted elsewhere that uses OMV as storage.

#2 opinion, build your own NAS. Especially if you’ve already built your own Gaming PC, it’s pretty straight forward. Pick a low powered cpu, toss in some ram, a ton of hdds, and maybe some old graphics card you have lying around for transcoding or hosting local AI for kicks. You’ll get a lot more for your money this way.

A lot of people aren’t big fans of Nginx Proxy Manager, which is separate from Nginx. But I like it. It’s got a nice gui, and the part I really like is the letsencrypt ssl certs baked in. You can get a new one, for a new service with a click of a button, and it auto renews your certs, so you don’t have to worry about it once it’s set up.

So, something to note is that a lot of UPSs have a configuration for sensitivity. Your power actually fluctuates quite a bit, but you don’t notice. I have my UPS on the default sensitivity, and there have been a few instances of it going onto battery power when none of my other devices even flickered.

So, with that in mind, I use NUT. My server has it setup and it’s set to gracefully shutdown after my UPS hits 25% battery remaining. That way false positives don’t shut it down, nor will small flickers, nor will an outage less than an hour or so. My UPS says I can run for about 90mins on current load.

Did you accidently typo the url? I see a ‘/’ instead of a ‘:’ before the port number.

try going to http://mydomainname:20054/

Might also need to fix the searchx_base_url env variable

Run:

df -h

in the terminal and find out.

Craigslist and facebook marketplace will usually get you some racks cheap. it’s also bot too difficult to build one either out of metal or wood.

Basically not to. Open one for a VPN like Wireguard to accept incoming connections, and that’s it. Use the VPN to connect to your home network and access your services that way.

Not NEW, but, check out local auctions. Local universities and govt offices are frequently selling lots of newish laptops (5ish yrs old) for $10-$50 apiece.

That’s why we have mice copy/paste bindings on most systems too. Highlighting text auto copies, and scroll wheel click pastes. Not all do this, but many do and have for a while.

Great, I recommend having two Adguard Home instances.

Yep, if you have somewhere to put a docker container or VM you can have redundancy.

Right, I never said two raspberry pis, I meant two instances. Like one pi and a container run elsewhere.

Right, I didn’t have any issues running it on a pi for years too. The problems came when I started messing with things. So, really my advice is to help save people from ideas like mine.

I decided one day to take a bunch of old laptops and create a proxmox cluster out of them. It worked great, but I didn’t have a use for them, I was just playing. So, I decided to retire the pi and put the pihole on the cluster. HA for the win!

I did that and came woke up a few days later to my family complaining that they had no internet. I found the pihole container on a different node and it wouldn’t start. Turns out with proxmox you need separate storage for HA to work. I had assumed that it would be similar to jboss clustering which I’m familiar with, and the container would be on all the nodes and only one actice at a time, with some syncing between nodes. Nope.

What’s worse is the container refused to move back to the origional node AND wouldn’t start. The pi was stored away at this point so I figured it would be easier to just create a new container, but duh, no internet. Turn off dns settings on the router, bam have internet.

Eventually set up the old pi again, and it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong with proxmox. But while I was figuring it out it was nice to have the backup.

Now I always have two running on different hardware, just in case.

I recommend having two. Otherwise your home internet goes down everytime you update or reboot or it crashes.

Windows 10 Home

Just checked my wife’s laptop. Local account, secure boot off, windows 10. It had a message telling me to setup a microsoft account to ‘finish encrypting the device’. I clicked turn off, and it’s currently decrypting the hard drive. Blech.

Or to hang on a home server rack displaying dashboards.

I only had issues with the latest tag when dealing with the community apps. Some of them would randomly break and I’d have to roll back. Once I manually configured the docker settings using normal file mounts things were plenty stable. I think the issues were with the k8s community charts not with the underlying software. And that was fixed by just configuring it manually like however the dockerhub docs suggest.

I would still have the occasional issue where a container would freeze and a force stop wouldn’t work, and spinning up a new one wouldn’t work because the ports were still used. But I traced that back to a bad ssd with write timeouts. I still think truenas’s k8s wrapper is buggy. Even if a container crashes hard, I shouldn’t have to reboot the system to fix it. I switched to unraid and have been blissfully happy since.

Not sure if you were aware of the recent (last year) drama with a major contributing group to the community apps. TrueCharts I think they were called? I had some truecharts containers and some straight truenas containers. Then TrueCharts ragequit and took down their repo. I ended up reinstalling all those apps manually because for the life of me I still couldn’t get the dumb truenas versions to work. Also, I wasn’t a fan of the pvc (or whatever it was called) storage containers that got used by default. Made eveverything more difficult. My advice is to use the truenas community apps as a learning tool to configure your own properly with the truenas software. I noticed the community apps would seriously take around a minute to restart, but the ones I made manually would takes seconds. Same docker image, never figured out why, maybe a k8s thing?

Garuda - because like endeavor it’s arch for lazy people, plus I got sold on the gaming edition by how much I like the theme and the latest drivers. But that’s just what got me to try it, what sold me on it is when I had a vm of it that ran out of hdd space mid kernel update. I shut it down to expand the drive, booted it back up and no kernels present. Fiddling around in grub in a panic made me realize snappertools auto snapshots btrfs before updating. I think only once in my life (out of dozens of tries) has Microsoft’s restorepoints actually worked for me. Booting to the snapshot was effortless, clicking through to recover to that snapshot was a breeze. I rebooted again just to make sure it was working and it did. Re-updated and I was back in action.

That experience made me love garuda. I highly recommend snappertools+btrfs from now on and use it whenever I can. Yes, preventative tools and warnings would have stopped it from happening, but you can’t stop everything, and it’s a comfort to have.