What software to use?

patat.potat · October 25, 2021

I recently upgraded my PC, and instead of selling the old one, I've decided to put it to use as a server. I am currently missing some things for it (storage and an adequate amount of RAM), but they're easy to deal with so I'm turning my attention to software.

I would like the server to do several things:

1. Serve as a home media center, so I can stream movies and other things to my other devices (decoding can happen on server or client side, I don't care)

2. Give me an easy way to store system backups for my main PC, should something ever go wrong.

3. Give me my own Google Drive, so to speak, so that I can share things with other people easily and not have to rely on services like YouTube or PasteBin.

4. Host a website (the traffic will be next to none)

5. Host a Minecraft server (1-5 players, not more).

The setup I've imagined thus far is as follows:

An Arch or Debian headless base, with KVM/QEMU virtualisation going

A TrueNAS virttual machine with Plex and NextCloud plugins to handle tasks 1-3

An Arch VM with Nginx, to fulfill task 4

Another VM (maybe Mint XFCE?) to host the Minecraft server, though I might merge that with the Arch VM

The use of a base system and delegating the rest to VMs may not be necessary, but I'd like to do it just because it's fun. I like messing with virtualisation.

To support all this, I'm going to have an Intel Core i5 4460. The machine right now has 8GB of RAM, which I worry might not be enough, so I'll probably try to expand it to 16GB or maybe even 32GB (DDR3 is cheap, anyway). As for storage, I currently have a 250GB SSD, a 1TB HDD and a 4TB HDD. I thought about putting the 4TB and 250GB SSD in there, and buying a 1TB SSD to replace the old SSD in my main machine.

I am not super knowledgeable on the differrent software solutions around, so maybe there's something better suitted for my use case than NextCloud or Plex or TrueNAS or whatever, any suggestions? I'm not looking for fancy UIs, just functionality and performance (I'm okay with the website-hosting VM being CLI-only, for example)

Electronics Wizardy · October 25, 2021

6 minutes ago, patat.potat said:

n Arch or Debian headless base, with KVM/QEMU virtualisation going

Id go proxmox. Easy web gui(can still use cli if you wnt though)

6 minutes ago, patat.potat said:

A TrueNAS virttual machine with Plex and NextCloud plugins to handle tasks 1-3

Id skip true nas and just get a basic debian container with samba for a network share.

Then id put nextcloud and plex on a seperate vm.

7 minutes ago, patat.potat said:

Another VM (maybe Mint XFCE?) to host the Minecraft server, though I might merge that with the Arch VM

Id run that in its own vm. No need for a gui here. Id probably run debian/centos here as there better supported and more stable packages.

patat.potat · October 25, 2021

25 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id go proxmox. Easy web gui(can still use cli if you wnt though)

I wanted a headless, light system to manage virtual machines, and from what I understand Proxmox is basically a distro that's designed for that? That's pretty neat, and it supports KVM, which is good since that's what I'm familiar with.

29 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id skip true nas and just get a basic debian container with samba for a network share.

Then id put nextcloud and plex on a seperate vm.

Understandable. I picked TrueNAS because... that's just what you use for a NAS. But I doubt whatever advantages it offers over a basic Debian install are worth it for my use case.

Electronics Wizardy · October 25, 2021

12 minutes ago, patat.potat said:

wanted a headless, light system to manage virtual machines, and from what I understand Proxmox is basically a distro that's designed for that? That's pretty neat, and it supports KVM, which is good since that's what I'm familiar with.

Yup proxmox is great, id use it here.

12 minutes ago, patat.potat said:

Understandable. I picked TrueNAS because... that's just what you use for a NAS. But I doubt whatever advantages it offers over a basic Debian install are worth it for my use case.

Truenas is made to use zfs. Since you already have zfs with proxmox, no need for anouther big os. Id just run a container with samba in proxmox.