Hey guys. I’ve been considering maybe moving to another OS for my home lab. Do you have have any suggestions? Especially former Unraid users? Mostly just for arrs though I would like to run reverse proxy/file hosting as well. Proxmox seems pretty trendy can I use it for arrs as well as backups?
Rant/extra info:
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I’ve been using Unraid for a couple years now, even paid for basic registration. I’ve largely used it to run all my arrs in docker, pihole and had a HASSIO VM running.
I recently tried setting up nextcloud, during the set up (which like nearly everything, I followed a video guide for) I ran into a novel error. So I deleted the nextcloud docker and got it from the official repo instead. Now my nextcloud share is gone and I can’t create new shares??
Stuff like this happened when I set up guac. Weird errors, plenty of which have little documentation or explanation. Plenty of which I need to ssh in or use Linux commands to fix. Which lead me to, “I’m having to learn this stuff anyway, why not spin up a Linux server and learn properly”.
Should I just rebuild/give Unraid a bit more time, it is young OS wise right?
Sometimes you need a VM. They’re not overkill, just useful for different things.
Examples; Running Windows, Running OSX, Passing through hardware to use isolated from the host (PCIe devices, USB, etc), Linux guests where you need a full kernel and permissions (for example to run Docker without issues caused by being nested inside a container).
VMs don’t really have much more overhead than a container in most use cases too. For example a VM with debian installed uses about 30MB of RAM.
I was replying specifically in the context of the original question. Unraid already has their services tooling built out over containers so this person already is probably using containerized versions of the arr services. It would be overkill to go build vms for these services specifically for what you said. They don’t need to be windows or osx, they don’t need hardware passthrough, they don’t need a full kernel.
That aside. You absolutely can run containers as a full isolated kernel and directly map hardware to them. CGroups absolutely allows for those use cases. You may not be using docker anymore but docker is more of a crutch for beginners who probably dont need those things.
One example of this in the real world are COS and Bottlerocket which are literally distributions of Linux where even core is components are individually running under different containers via cgroups. COS runs on every GKE cluster in the world and bottlerocket on most EKS clusters.