What my setup will soon be for hardware: Gen 2 AMD epic 16 core CPU, Supermicro motherboard with lots of pcie slots, 128g ram, Intel arc a40 GPU, HBA card attached to a super micro disk shelf

Software: Proxmox for host is, Truenas Scale (just NAS) in VM with HBA card passed into VM, Plex in VM with Intel GPU passed in, 3 VMs for docker swarm (headless Debian)

Other thoughts: Cloud flare will only be helpful for things you want exposed to the internet. If you do that make sure you have a reverse proxy. This is how I expose services for non-tech family.

VPN will be more secure, but can also be more of a pain. I generally only do that for things only I need or only techy savvy people will use.

https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower

Your biggest potential bottle neck is if your NAS and App server only have a single 1g network port. This may not be a problem depending on your usage, but it is a important consideration to keep in mind.

For HDDs the best way is to think of them like shoes or tires. They will eventually fail, but they also may fail prematurely. I always recommend having a spare drive ready.

You don’t want hardware raid. Some options you can research:

• Mdadm - Linux software raid
• ZFS - Combo raid and filesystem
• Btrfs - A filesystem that can also do raid things

Some OS options to consider:

• Debian - good if you want to learn to do everything yourself
• Truenas Scale - Comercial NAS OS. I bit of work to get started, but very stable once going.
• Unraid - Enthusiast focused NAS OS. Not as stable as Truenas, but easier to get started and a lot of community support.

There are probably other software/OS’s to consider, but those are the ones I have any experience with. I personally use ZFS on Truenas with a lot of help from this YouTube channel. https://youtube.com/@lawrencesystems?si=O1Z4BuEjogjdsslF

If you want to get things working then never “tinker” with things, maybe it’s not worth it. But if you want to learn and be able to try new things it is really helpful. Having a new VM not breaking existing VMs reduces risk when trying something new.

I think GPU passthrough has improved since you have used it. Some command line prep work is still necessary, but the passthrough config is done in the GUI.

Syncthing is a better fit for your use case. As much as I appreciate having my Nextcloud setup, it can also be a pain in the ass some times.

No idea. If I was worried about that I would just install a normal Linux distro on it.

I have a Chromebook. It’s a cheap web browser, good battery life, and I can use terminal to SSH into my stuff. It’s good enough for my use case.

A used older desktop is a good starting machine. I think Unraid is a good starting point as the community is more welcome to completely new people needing a lot of help. Also this channel has a tone of good guides for Unraid: https://youtube.com/@SpaceinvaderOne?si=A8BWLbMq42KzHD8I

I suggest starting off cheap to learn. Then you can spend money as you determine what is necessary based on problems you encounter. One VERY important thing to remember is that HDDs fail, power surges kill motherboards, water leaks kill the whole thing. If you don’t want to loose family photos, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE IT BACKED UP OFF YOUR SERVER. Preferably “off-site”.

You honestly sound like your stressed out and in fight/flight mode. The first step is just acknowledging where you are mentally and how it’s going to make everything seem worse than it really is.

Yes. The important detail is that it remounts the path once the path gets called. So I setup a cron job to “ls” the path every few minutes to make sure it’s always remounted quickly.

Try looking into “autofs”.

Do you think using a steam deck counts? On one hand it is Linux, but on the other hand the default experience is more of a console than a PC.

Have you ever wanted to do more with regular expressions? Then give Perl a try.

I think 2 good concepts come to mind to help you make choices:

1. Least privilege - Only give things/people just enough access/authority to get the job done. A good example is sonarr doesn’t need access to your personal photos to do it’s job, so don’t give it access if to them.
2. Defense in layers - Nothing is perfect and you can make mistakes in configuration. Don’t rely on a single point of failure to protect you. If you want remote access use a VPN. But also take steps in your network like putting a password on the logins.

If you want cheap new drives check out https://shucks.top/.

You can get used Enterprise drives on eBay if you want to got that way. Look for a seller with lots of sales, a good rating, and a reasonable return policy.

Same

I would stay away from kubernets/k3/k8s. Unless you want to learn it for work purposes, it’s so overkill you can spend a month before you get things running. I know from experience. My current setup gives you options and has been reliable for me.

NAS Box: Truenas Scale - You can have UnRaid fill this role.

Services Hosting: Proxmox - I can spin up any VMs I need and lots of info online to do things like hardware passthrough to VMs.

Containers: Debian VM - Debian makes a great server environment as it’s stable and well supported. I just make this VM a docker swarm host. I managed things with Portainer for a web interface.

I keep data on the NAS and have containers access it over the network. Usually a NFS share.