I had the same dilemma. It comes down to this in my opinion:

• Do you trust yourself and your current networking gear, software, security setup enough to host this yourself at home?
• Do you trust your vps providers tech stack, ethics, privacy policy etc. AND your own ability to secure it to host it on a vps?
• Do you trust Tailscale the company who’s in the business of “zero trust vpn” solutions to use their product?

I didn’t check if they were audited and if so how, but I went with the free Tailscale option, the most comfortable option for me now. Might change once I get more competent at the subject.

Since they are old, i would imagine the power efficiency isn’t the best on them for a 24/7 HA cluster at home. Unless you have an abundance of solar power or something. So I would use them as a test branch for whatever I want to do for self-hosting and learning

I would use them as learning platform for myself. Play with Active Directory DCs, replicataion, failover, recovery, networking etc. Just because more practice in that is what would be needed for advancement at work.

Others mentioned Kubernetes and Proxmox clustering. I could also use some sacrificial storage and compute to play around with those technologies so I could improve my self-hosted services.

I am finally in a position to have hardware running at home without it bothering anyone, so I cobbled together the hardware peaces I thrifted for over the years.

I played around with Proxmox and lxc containers, which are awesome, but not really useful for my usecase. I currently needed the essentials to get started and to finally have some kind of backups.

So TrueNAS scale it is. I got the ACLs down quickly, so the built in apps are no problem. But some things are not suited to be run as a built in app, I found. To avoid these headaches, I created an ubuntu server vm and a network bridge to allow for host access, and spun up those containers there.

I went for too little storage on the vm in the begiining (10G) so of course it filled up to the brim in a day. So I had to learn how to extend an lvm. Which worked only after I made some space available. It was so full, even mkdir failed.

I could live with this. I like the gnome “workflow” but I hate how restrictive it is. Not to mention that it runs worse on my laptop compared to KDE. Thanks for the inspiration! I might just try something like this.

Very interesting! It’s tempting, but I can already see the “Major Change ticket” coming in for “Divorce” if I asked for tickets at home :D

Yes, well shopping lists worked similarly for us as well. Wife would send me a list on discord, and go by that. That might not need to change. I guess we’ll have to see for ourselves how things go what sticks.

I’m afraid of falling into the trap of having too many new toys to play with, so I’ll keep simplicity and tasks.org in mind! For taking notes for myself, I have Obsidian set up the way I like it. I must say, I under utilize that one as well. Joplin, I used in university some years ago. I should maybe revisit it to see if I find any use for it.

So far this is the sanest setup for my usecase. I was only looking at the AIO docker because I thought it would be easier to scale back, rather than up from the regular. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the tip! I wouldn’t have stumbled upon it by myself. Looking through their demo, it’s rather complex, maybe too much for what I need. The price seems fair tho. With the source being available I’ll consider trying it.

An interesting take, and not very popular among the other comments, but I suppose you have your experiences and reasons to say this.

As I mentioned RAID is on the table, no problem with that. It is kind of the point to have a safer, more centralized storage for important stuff, and space for keeping media.

Speed wouldn’t be a concern. Noise is, since my apartment is very small. And reliability over time would be. Especially power cycles, or spin down - spin up events. I figured if I used SSDs, I could leave the whole rig powered on 24/7 But with HDDs I think I would probably need to turn the system off for the night.

Correct me if I am wrong about enterprise grade SSDs, but if I have the power on time and the TBW values for the drives along with the manufacturing date, ones with reasonable combination of those could be bought for a reasonable price. After some testing they could also be trusted. At what point would you expect an SSD like this to last some years in a home server environment? I am not an expert but with some pointers this should be easy to figure out, which is why I am asking.

I don’t plan to neglect backups. Currently I use Syncthing as well, but only between non-redundant storage locations, so I have duplicates. Like phone pushes photos to pc or laptop, those sync them between each other. Important docs that I can’t lose are also on all 3 devices.

And I plan to keep the local storage of mission critical data around on some clients at least. I just want to have a central, more robust, redundant system where one or 2 disks can fail without my data being gone or corrupted.

Thanks for the insights on the case and drives!

I have an old Silverstone case with about 6 of the old style 3,5" drive mounts and 3x5,25" bay. Originally I had a Samsung 1TB drive in it (which is still kicking around somehow pulling torrent drive duty) I remember it being louder in that case then in my new one. So I’ll have to test it out. If i can get my hands on some rubber bearings and if they help any at all.

I am not planning to go that big on storage for now tho. It sounds like serious work. I am doing this so I can be more comfortable. Aside from updates, I want to dial it in once and forget it unless I need to touch it.

The noise is only an issue because of how small my appartment is. I can’t really isolate noise in here. I would think it also depends on which drives I get. I read that some are louder than others.

Without context, to me it seems like you need a new colleague hired who can take some of the random work off your shoulders. This way you can be present in the oh so important meetings and focus on developing the infra.