Almost 10 years ago I purchased a Synology NAS for local storage and backups. I was really happy with the ease of use and their support is top notch. I got it set up and didn’t think much about it. Fast forward and a deal on a used server comes around and all the sudden I have a lot to learn. Proxmox, TrueNas, Nginx Proxy Manager… a whole new world I had somehow never even thought about. The concept of virtual machines blew my mind. Spin up a machine, mess it up, tear it down, repeat. Kids wanted to host a Minecraft server. No problem, pterodactyl. But wait, pterodactyl wants to be installed in a machine that doesn’t have any other software installed. No problem, I got one of those! This is magic and I’m loving it. I mostly lurk around here but thanks to everyone who posts because this place is a great source of knowledge and sarcasm and I appreciate both!
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Wait until you learn about docker and kubernetes. You will not touch virtual machines again (for the most part) 😂
Enjoy. I would say with a home lab, try and plan things, what is it you want to host, what is the best hosting platform, vm, lxc, physical install etc etc. I say this because it should help stop the ‘splatter’ effect somewhat where you end up with all sorts of systems and installs all over the place. So I treat mine a bit like a work environment . Oh,.and don’t forget backups !
Welcome! I’m glad you’ve found this. If you haven’t given containers a try yet, that will be the next thing that will blow your mind. But all in due time
Been working into docker. Running nginx proxy manager, paperless-ngx, WireGuard, adguard, bitwarden, Jellyfin, and a couple others right now. Some run in a container on the NAS, a couple on a pi, and the rest on the server. Much more to learn…
Much more to learn…
I’ve been at this for over a decade and there’s always more to learn! If you haven’t checked out docker-compose yet, that’s your next step. It allows you to script container setups :) I have 5 compose files based on categories (pirating, media servers, admin, etc…) and a shell script to launch them if I want to install them all, otherwise I just call the specific compose file. I can have all my apps up and running on a new server in about 10 minutes. Docker is awesome when it works well.
Let’s say you do like me and configure multiple LXCs and VMs in Proxmox to keep your services segregated, and you want to run Docker services on all of them… Portainer (plus Portainer Agent on all the different hosts) lets you manage deployment across everything from one central UI. That plus Watchtower on all your hosts to keep all your containers fresh and up to date, and Pushover to send you push notifications as updates are happening… it’s pure magic.
I need to be better about my docker deployment. Services running on 3 devices. Some docker, some docker-compose, and some were setup in portainer. It’s a bit of a mess tbh. Portainer agent sounds promising. I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Go look at yacht.sh, I’m a dev there and you love the eaze of use.
Yacht is a docker manager like portainer is, not a hosting platform. It just manages your containers same as portainer.
Just a side question, what are pros of having docker around on various hosts compared with having one dedicated docker host?
As I said, I’m kind of a mess. I added containers while adding devices so segregating wasn’t necessarily my intention. That said, I will most likely keep DNS and DHCP on a single dedicated device. That, for some reason, makes sense to me. The rest I may move together except for the vpn services. I will run the 2 on different devices in case one service gets blocked by the external network I’m trying to connect from. I already ran into this once where WireGuard got blocked but OpenVPN did not.
I’ve sentry, drone, gitea, grafana for loggingmetrics, on one lxc… so i can migrate and backup my dev stuff whenever i want, without thinking about it… without forgetting something… and without blocking other stuff
In hindsight maybe not a ton, but my thinking going into it was that if one container were to get compromised, the attacker would find less other stuff on each host. So the most logical way I could see to segregate my services was by purpose (media, productivity, bitcoin etc)
Can you elaborate on your user server hardware? I converted my 2012 desktop with TrueNAS and I’ve been but by the bug. I hoped to run a NixOS VM and my processor temps went instantly through the roof.
A little late but if you are still hosting game servers I really recommend something a other than pterodactyl. When I was setting them up I found it the most obtuse to use and configure. Something simple to setup is PufferPanel and what I ended up settling on is CubeCoders AMP. Though AMP does cost money, it’s also the best one I have used, easy to setup and configure, runs great and was a one time purchase. PufferPanel was great for Minecrafter servers though.
I do have cubecoders amp running as well. And, I agree, setup was easy and I have a bungee cord server running on there now. I don’t mind paying a reasonable one time price for well supported software. The only reason I am also trying pterodactyl is the integration with databases directly in the panel. I wanted to try a few addons for the Minecraft server and they require regis and sql. Still working on getting it all setup but I also read that database support is in the pipeline for Amp so I’m looking forward to that.