I currently have a hodgepodge of solutions for my hosting needs. I play ttrpgs online, so have two FoundryVTT servers hosted on a pi. Then I have a second pi that is hosting Home Assistant. I then also have a synology device that is my NAS and hosts my Plex server.
I’m looking to build a home server with some leftover parts from a recent system upgrade that will be my one unified server doing all the above things in the same machine. A NAS, hosting a couple Foundry instances, home assistant, and plex/jellyfin.
My initial research has me considering Unraid. I understand that it’s a paid option and am okay with paying for convenience/good product. I’m open to other suggestions from this community.
The real advice I’m hoping to get here is a kind of order of operations. Assume I have decided on the OS I want to use for my needs, and my system is built. What would you say is the best way going about migrating all these services over to the new server and making sure that they are all reachable by web?
If you can dedicate some time to constant keep up - pick a rolling distro. Doing major version upgrades has never not had problems for me. Every major distro has one.
My choice is Gentoo, but I’m weird like that. Having said that - my email server has been running happily on Arch for just over 5 years now.
The lemmy instance I host is on Debian testing - Gentoo was not available on DO - no issues so far.
Even when it’s mostly containers - why waste time every n years doing the big upgrade? Small change is always safer.
Agreed and big thumbs up for Gentoo. Our distro never gets enough love!
Why not dockerize Foundry and run all on the Synology?
Though I did convert my home assistant docker to HAOS on a Pi for extra features way back in the day. Not sure you have to now.
I don’t want to use the synology anymore, I’m interested in building my own system from previous parts with better performance. I don’t have a very great synology right now and also want more drive space.
Step 0). Decide if there’s anything you dont want on a common server.
I realized long ago that my projects sometimes stall out partway through. However some things need to just work, regardless of where I am in a project. HA is a great example of something that manages itself (so less advantage to the VM) and that I want always available, so even if I decide to go down a route like you are, HA stays independent, stays available
Yup, same experience. I started out hosting everything on a single box, but have slowly moved things like HA and Pi-hole to their own machines, so they don’t all go down when that one box goes down.
