One thing i’ve learned over the years is the way I did something when I was learning is usually not the best way of doing it, and I later go back and redo everything now that I have gained experience and knowledge. I have decided to ditch google photos, and was lucky enough to snag a free rackmount 2017 server from work with an i7 installed and 2 6tb drives on the way. But now comes the hard part of deciding what software I am going to end up learning on and hopefully living with. First and foremost I want a photo backup service, and I have debated between immich and xpenology, I also know that I want to run Pihole and would really like to self host my own website documenting my projects, even if no one will ever look at it.
If you had to start from the beginning, which OS, which container manager and which containers would you build. I would love the recommendations from those who walked so that I can run
I did start over recently - Dell R730 salvaged from work, 64 cores, 256GB RAM
Took the guts and moved it to a Machinist X99 motherboard in a Rosewill server case so I could put in silent fans and have room for 15 drives.
Proxmox hypervisor booting on 2x 2TB NVME drives.
Bought 6 x 16TB drives and a HBA to run them, then did HBA passthru to a virtual machine running Truenas which mounts everything as a samba share
Multiple other Ubuntu VM’s running docker compose. One VM runs utility / ARRS, 2nd VM runs Plex so that my media playback isn’t affected by utility. These servers mount the TrueNAS samba shares for file processing. That way they are booting/running on NVME but media is on spinning iron.
Also have LXC running Adguard Home for DNS based adblock/malware protection for the entire house. Also have a Raspberry PI as a 2nd DNS server.
Several Windows VM’s used for work (I connect to customer environments so I spin up a separate VM for each customer to keep their environments isolated.