Welcome to the club! Gates are open. Come on in!!

FWIW, if you want to learn how to use the command line, docker, and how to manage and secure your services, I’d recommend installing Ubuntu server or Fedora server on the NucBox; and then install docker and learn how to get your services stood up using the docker cli.

This is the route I went specifically because I wanted to learn more about Linux, and how to manage a server and services.

The tools being offered as suggestions (unraid, truenas, yunohost) are abstraction layers meant to make hosting easier. And to be clear, there is nothing at all wrong with these tools or using them. What they’ll do is give you a GUI to manage your system and services, making using the command line mostly unnecessary. Again, nothing at all wrong with that. Just depends on what you want.

Regarding exposing the services, it’s good to be cautious. I went with Pangolin, which is like a self hosted version of tailscale/cloudflare tunnels (I’m simplifying a bit).

Pangolin allows you to access your services over a VPN tunnel, and, to set your desired level of authorization needed to access that service. I really like it and have found it to be very reliable.

Also, FWIW, I’m not in IT or an expert. Just a person who wanted to learn about Linux and self hosting to take back control from big tech.

I did initially, but then changed my setup a little bit.

My rpi (4b, I think it’s 8GB, but it might be 16. I don’t remember). Also serves as my on site backup for my media. So Jellyfin is connected to the NAS, and the rpi has two drives in a toaster and I have a cron job that syncs new media from the nas to the rpi whenever I add new stuff.

So kodi is direct playing from the hdds in the toaster.

I’ve been running kodi on a raspberry pi for years as my media center and It’s great. There’s an official jellyfin app for kodi too.

10/10 for not using g the arr naming scheme

You’re welcome!

Racknerd always has good deals. You get get a vps for as low as $11/year.

Here’s a link (no affiliation with them. Been using them since 2020 when I grabbed one of these deals)

https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/

(Don’t worry that it says black Friday. You should still be able to get the deal)

I read about half. It’s a terrible article.

Heads up, ersatzTV is no longer being developed.

I love forgejo!

I actually laughed out loud at this meme.

Ah. Both misunderstood what you were saying and was uninformed. My apologies. Editing my original comment to reflect that.

Update: Correction. While you do get five years of security updates for Universe on an Ubuntu LTS, those are updates done by the ubuntu community, not canonical. To get Universe security updates from Canonical, you do have to sign up to Ubuntu pro, which can be done without any payment, but as I describe in my original comment, does require creating an account.

While Canonical deserves the criticisms leveled by op (that I agree with), it’s also incorrect to say that they lock security updated behind a paywall.

Anyone that does use Ubuntu gets security updated until they stop supporting that particular release version, which iirc is for six years (I may be wrong, thus is from memory).

If you want extended security updates for a specific version of the os, you can elect to sign up to Ubuntu pro without paying any money. You do have to make an account, and if you so choose you can populate the account info with garbage info and a disposable email, and you’ll get extended security updates for that release version.

I got a test box set up with nixos and a config that runs all of my services. I wanted to test the declarative rebuild promise of it, so I:

1. Filled the services with my some of my backed up data (a copy of the data, not the actual backup)
2. Ran it for a few days using some of the services
3. Backed up the data of the nixos test server, as well as the nixos config
4. Reinstalled nixos on the test box, brought in the config, and rebuilt it.

And it worked!!! All serviced came back with the data, all configuration was correct.

I’m going to keep testing, and depending on how that goes I may switch my prod server and nas to nixos.

I also recommend forgejo over gitea. I’m running forgejo and I love it.

For your reverse proxy, look into pangolin. It combines proxy with wireguard tunneling and auth. So you can set up access controls on a service by service level. It’s great. I use it and love it. No affiliation. Just really happy with how it works.

I agree with the other folks recommending Pangolin on a VPS for this. It’s great. It combines a reverse proxy and a wireguard tunnel together for you. You don’t have to open any ports on your home network, and Pangolin allows you to set access levels for each individual service.

So you can have some fully open for those who aren’t going to mess with VPNs and tunneling, and you can put other things behind Pangolin auth to add additional protection.

Are you able to ssh in with Pangolin? I’m also using Pangolin on a VPS, and though a little while ago (last year somteime?) they demoed a tool for ssh over the pangolin tunnel, I could not get it to work.

I scored some new WD 14tb drives for $120 US last October, and I am glad I did! Was a hell of a deal.

I gave nixos a shot and pretty immediately noped out. All I wanted as a starting point was nvim with lazyvim. And as you said, it was a huge research project and after an hour with no luck, I nuked it.

Is WordPress running in docker or on the host is?

What you could do is set up and NFS or smb share on the ote other server, move all the media to that share on the file server and then mount the NFS/b share to the folder on the WordPress server.

Set up the NFS/smb share to mount at boot. WordPress shoudnt wvwn notice the difference.

I didn’t realize that. Thanks for pointing that out!