Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I’ve started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it’s simple). For the past couple years I’ve been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I’ve also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. I’m not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I’ve pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.

I’ve looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling’s article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I’ve continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because… it’s all I know. I’d like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I’m a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I’ve primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I’d like to try staying with AMD as I’ve slowly moved over from the “dark side” (don’t hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.

Last nugget is that I’ve never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I’ve new-ish to VMs too, so anything “Baby’s First VM” would be nice.

I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there’s no magical unicorn, I’m cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I’m really keen on seeing what options I have.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Can you be more specific?

      I first ran Proxmox on it (which ran fine, just overkill for my use-case).

      Now it’s Windows server and anything I do on it is done in a VM via VMware Workstation (since it’s free). So the host os doesn’t see much change and any changes that break things can be rolled back via a VM snapshot. Proxmox ZFS would be better for this, but I don’t need it, yet.

      You could run any Linux distro on it then use KVM for virtual machines and also docker for things like PiHole and Jellyfin.

      There’s a million ways to skin a cat, though I like using VM’s so if I need to move a service I just copy the VM to a new box. Even my docker stuff is in a VM for just this reason.