Y’all, this is gonna be super broad, and I apologize for that, but I’m pretty new to all this and am looking for advice and guidance because I’m pretty overwhelmed at the moment. Any help is very, very appreciated.

For the last ~3 years, I’ve been running a basic home server on an old computer. Right now, it is hosting HomeAssistant, Frigate NVR, their various dependencies, and other things I use (such as zigbee2mqtt, zwave-js-ui, node-red, mosquitto, vscode, etc).

This old server has been my “learning playground” for the last few years, as it was my very first home server and my first foray into linux. That said, it’s obviously got some shortcomings in terms of basic setup (it’s probably not secure, it’s definitely messy, some things don’t work as I’d like, etc). It’s currently on its way out (the motherboard is slowly kicking the bucket on me), so it’s time to replace it, and I kind of what to start over (not completely - I’ve hundreds of automations in home assistant and node-red, for instance, that I don’t want to have to completely re-write, so I intend to export/import those as needed) and do it “right” this time - at this point, I think this is where I’m hung up, paralyzed by a fear of doing it “wrong” and winding up with an inefficient, insecure mess.

The new server, I want to be much more robust in terms of capability, and I have a handful of things I’d really love to do: pi-hole (though I need to buy a new router for this, so that has to come later on unless it’d save a bunch of headache doing it from the get-go), NAS, media server (plex/jellyfin), *arr stuff, as well as plenty of new things I’d love to self-host like Trilium notes, Tandoor or Mealie, Grocy, backups of local PCs/phones/etc (nextcloud?)… obviously this part is impossible to completely cover, but I suspect the hardware (list below) should be capable?

I would love to put all my security cameras on their own subnet or vlan or something to keep them more secure.

I need everything to be fully but securely accessible from outside the network. I’ve recently set up nginx for this on my current server and it works well, though I probably didn’t do it 100% “right.” Is something like Tailscale something I should look to use in conjuction with that? In place of? Not at all?

I’ve also looked at something like Authelia for SSO, which would probably be convenient but also probably isn’t entirely necessary.

Currently considering Proxmox, but then again, TrueNAS would be helpful for the storage aspect of all this. Can/should you run TrueNAS inside Proxmox? Should I be looking elsewhere entirely?

Here’s the hardware for the recently-retired gaming PC I’ll be using:
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/chV3jH
Also various SSDs and HDDs.

I’m in this weird place where I don’t have too much room to play around because I want to get all my home automation and security stuff back up as quickly as possible, but I don’t want to screw this all up.

Again, any help/advice/input at all is super, super appreciated.

  • @VelociCatTurd
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    311 months ago

    I will provide a word of advice since you mentioned messiness. My original server was just one phyiscla host which I would install new stuff to. And then I started realizing that I would forget about stuff or that if I removed something later there may still be lingering related files or dependencies. Now I run all my apps in docker containers and use docker-compose for every single one. No more messiness or extra dependencies. If I try out an app and don’t like it, boom container deleted, end of story.

    Extra benefit is that I have less to backup. I only need to backup the docker compose files themselves and whatever persistent volumes are mounted to each container.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      111 months ago

      I forgot to mention, I do use docker-compose for (almost) all the stuff I’m currently using and, yes, it’s pretty great for keeping things, well… containerized, haha. Clean, organized, and easy to tinker with something and completely ditch it if it doesn’t work out.

      Thanks for the input!