My NAS was getting increasingly annoying.

It would give error messages about not being shut down properly after scheduled restarts.

Apps would sometimes work and sometimes not. I had to manually stop and restart my video library each time to make it work. It was slow, it was refusing to do more than one thing at a time.

So, I finally started it up. Shunted all the data to external drives, setup the box from scratch.

Between it being fresh, and me knowing better what I’m doing and how I want things from the get-go, it’s running better than ever, better even than when I got it a few years back.

Interesting, while it was offline and being setup I found myself realising how integral it’s become to my day. So much stuff I went to do, only to discover I needed my box.

It was intended as a file backup and server, but so much has changed since then, I’ve grown used to having it here!

Still tempted to get an upgrade, maybe later this year if things workout well with the cash.

Wanted to share this with a community who can appreciate the feeling of having something working well!

  • Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    252·
    4 days ago

    That’s what containers are for. Fucking up the container won’t fuck up the host. That was the best decision in self hosting I’ve done. Even that one virtual machine feels weird and uncomfortably legacy now but it needs to interact with hardware in a certain way that just won’t fully work with docker.

    • greyfox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      If your NAS has enough resources the happy(ish) medium is to use your NAS as a hypervisor. The NAS can be on the bare hardware or its own VM, and the containers can have their own VMs as needed.

      Then you don’t have to take down your NAS when you need to reboot your container’s VMs, and you get a little extra security separation between any externally facing services and any potentially sensitive data on the NAS.

      Lots of performance trade offs there, but I tend to want to keep my NAS on more stable OS versions, and then the other workloads can be more bleeding edge/experimental as needed. It is a good mix if you have the resources, and having a hypervisor to test VMs is always useful.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      That’s what I’m doing. Here’s my setup:

      • BTRFS RAID W/ snapshots - can always roll back
      • OS installed on SSD - can always reinstall without messing with the RAID
      • containers installed on SSD (also BTRFS W/ snapshots) and backed up to RAID; only access RAID through bind mounts (ro if possible)

      It’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll mess anything up on the host, but I can always reinstall if needed.