Hello everyone, My home server (intel nuc6) died on me recently, I set it to be used as my home server using OpensSUSE Leap with the following services:
- NFS server
- Sftp over ssh for remote file transfers and I was looking for a faster alternative for local transfers (tftp maybe)
- Qbittorrent
- Aria2
- Emby
- I was experiencing with nextcloud then pfsense after.
- Definitely an office suite and a few nextcloud addons.
I have no alternative machine ATM to use it as a replacement but I plan to re-install everything on a VM (Virtualbox or Qemu/libvirt) on my Desktop, I have no experience with containers, but I think installing each service in a countainer would make it easier to move everything later to my new home server.
Would using debian or opensuse and use docker? Maybe even proxmox? or should I just stick with installing everything directly on my distro with no containers? I would love to know your opinion about the best approach.
Edit: I’m containerizing, I like to keep my setup simple, no OSes vertualization since I will be using a 7th or 8th gen low power minipc for my next server (Intel NUC, Hp mini, dell micro or lenovo tiny). I will use proxmox in the VM to get confortable with it and I think the web UI might be easier to use than SSHing to the VM. Later on the new server I will mostly use debain+docker (opensuse leap’s futur is cloudy atm) I would still love your suggestions and any guide/tutorial that you think is helpful to read/watch. Thanks everyone.
I’m very happy with proxmox. It was easy to learn, the community is great, and at it’s plain Debian under the hood.
If I ever rebuild it, I might consider a single VM for all of my docker services. As it stands, I have 5 or 6 VMs running one docker container each. Being new to docker, I wanted as much isolation as I could get in case I borked something. I understand it well enough now that I’d use portainer or something.
My next idea is an LXC running a desktop. I have a 3060 for transcoding and I can share that to as many lxcs as I want. There are security implications with lxc, but again there is lots of material on how to do it. If you have a GPU you can pass through whole hog, it’s maybe better or easier to do a VM instead.
If you would please, why not run the containers on top of Proxmox directly instead of in a VM on top of Proxmod?
This actually isn’t a supported method. You don’t want to install anything on top of Proxmox as you run the risk of it being auto removed on an upgrade. You should make a VM and run Docker on that VM.
Because I’m new to docker. You’re right - that’s gotta be more efficient but I’ve got plenty horsepower.
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Or inside an LXC container, both should be fine. LXC is a bit more complicated to setup but has lower overhead cost.
Thanks for the heads-up
I like proxmox, but it kinda sounds like you’d be just fine with just docker running on opensuse or debian. Or whichever the favorite container is these days (idk why podman is so great, but I seent some posts about people that love it.)
I have tiered out my server with all my app services (jellyfin, nextcloud, etc) running in docker on a debian vm, then have lxc containers for nfs, VPN, etc. Proxmox itself handles ZFS, but I’m sure that’s bad practice and there is probably a better way - but it works for me so 🤷.
I’ve also got a opnsense vm, but not used for any “production” atm; just checking it out to see if I should switch my pfsense box over.
Well, for starters, tftp is the wrong thing for local file transfers if you want it to be fast. The only reason its still around is because its simple and offer the only file transfer protocol that is built into the firmware of the network card.
You read that right, its a simple file transfer protocol built into every network card made in the last couple decades.
Your best bet for file transfer is probably something like a WebDAV server. Which next cloud can handle for you. You can just enable normal WebDAV on something like httpd but then you gotta handle authentication yourself. (Or allow local and connect with VPN)
Thanks for the note about tftp. I used to use FTP to transfer file from/to my android phone which got me around ~30MB (local transfer), but abandoned it (due to security reasons) for SSH file transfer which only got me ~8MB for local transfer (my phone probably is slow in decrypting). So, I was thinking of keeping SSH file transfer for remote transfer and use tftp (due to its UDP layer) for local transfer. If webdav offered reasonable local transfer speed, I will use it to replace all the above.
Yes, WebDAV will max your local connection. Its generally not the encryption that makes ssh slow but the fact that it is designed to give real time terminal feedback. In order for you to see each letter typed in an ssh session, the buffers are really small and it intentionally sends a tone of small packets. Great for single characters bad for large file transfer.
Its OK here and then when you need to push a config file or something but moving large files is not really what its designed for and consequently, it sucks.
The easiest thing to do would be to run a VM now and do a V2P backup and restore.
Thanks for the V2P not, if containerizing everything turned to be a headache, I will opt for a normal non-containerized setup with the idea of converting my VM to a physical machine
Forget what everyone says, go for NixOS. This is really something
chmod +x avoid-docker.sh; ./avoid-docker.sh
