Server OS and software recomendations

[eastonboy99]

Hello all,

 

I recently built a custom server and am looking for recommendations on the OS and software I should use. I am replacing my QNAP with this server and here is what I would like it to do:

 

File Storage: cloud access (Nextcloud?), network access (both windows and mac access)

Docker: I would like to run most things from here if possible

Centralized user management: This one is somewhat important to me. I really like how I can create a user on my qnap and use it to login to the web, ssh, and access network file shares.

ZFS storage: Having some sort of web UI would be nice for this

 

I have looked at Truenas Scale and ubuntu server so far. I like truenas but the docker implementation is a bit confusing making it difficult to add applications. It also doesn't have an authentication server that other apps can use. I liked ubuntu server a lot, I just ran into issues again with the centralized authentication...mainly with authenticating users in samba against a freeIPA installation

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[RONOTHAN##]

I don't have any experience with an authentication server, so I can't help out with that. I mainly wanted to say you should probably avoid TrueNAS Scale until it's out of Beta. Bugs on your NAS are a pain to deal with, so you're probably better off just having a more stable system like TrueNAS Core. 

 

TrueNAS core does work very well, super stable, easy to manage users. It does everything you want it to with Centralized user management, it's just that things are in different places. You create users and say what they can do in one tab, then control what shares they can access in the storage tab while editing the ACL. The main problem for you though would be that the containers it uses are Jails rather than Docker. Jails work very well, and are similar to docker containers, but with FreeBSD as the back end. That being said, there are ways to get docker to work on TrueNAS Core, by having a VM dedicated to hosting Docker containers. Ubuntu server virtualized on a TrueNAS install works very well for hosting docker containers. Plus when TrueNAS Scale finally gets released, you can migrate over pretty easily if you choose to do so. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

20 minutes ago, eastonboy99 said:

have looked at Truenas Scale

Id stay away as its in beta still

 

How bout unraid? Pretty easy to use, and does docker well.

 

How many tb of storage do you need?

 

Otherwise id run proxmox. Use zfs for storage, and make vms as needed..

[Master Disaster]

Not my area of expertise but I believe you can use PAM to grant user permissions and handle logins across almost everything.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_PAM

[10leej]

So really there no one drop solution that solves all your issues, but you could make something that works.

 

I peronally use Rhel 8 on my server and have SMB shares setup via commandline but you could virtualize freenas and passthrough the hard drives to it for ZFS, and rather than Docker I use Podman which is 100% compatible with docker containers. 

If you don't want to live in the Rhel ecosystem proxmox works too, but it's more dedicated to running VMs but TechnoTim on youtube has a whole host of videos you can use and it supports ZFS out of the box.

I run Nextcloud, PiHole, Gitea, NGINX, and Transmission as containers and use TPLink's cloud access to give me a dynamicdns so I can connect to my server over the internet.

[eastonboy99]

The one thing I forgot to add and is the reason why I didn't go with unraid is that my server has a wifi card that has to be used for now. Does truenas core have wifi support? I guess the only piece that I am missing from doing a customized os is the samba authentication. Is there any way to use OpenLDAP for samba auth? or is there another way to share folders to a windows client?

[10leej]

22 hours ago, eastonboy99 said:

The one thing I forgot to add and is the reason why I didn't go with unraid is that my server has a wifi card that has to be used for now. Does truenas core have wifi support? I guess the only piece that I am missing from doing a customized os is the samba authentication. Is there any way to use OpenLDAP for samba auth? or is there another way to share folders to a windows client?

Whats the model of the wifi card? Because wifi support is more tied to kernel versions then it is distro support. Unraid being slackaware based probably still uses the 4.4 kernel which is why so many people have wifi issues with it. Try a debian stable nonfree live cd see if wifi works, if it does then truenas scale will work, same with centos, and rhel