New Server OS

[T34p075]

Budget (including currency): 

Country: United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex, torrents, docker, mysql, next cloud, etc. 

Other details Dell Poweredge 710 with 6x6TB drives in Raid 6. 
 

I bought an old Dell server to replace the decade-old Mac mini I’ve been using. I wanted something built for reliability and general server tasks (bigger processor, more ram, raid controller, etc.) and this seemed to be the cheapest route to doing that. 
 

I’m wondering what server os to use on it. I’ve been running ubuntu with docker on my current build and I’m totally happy with it. I wouldn’t say I’m a Linux

Pro but I’m pretty familiar with the cli and i like it. It’s primarily a NAS that runs stuff like Plex and nextcloud. I’ve never used my current setup to run vms and I don’t really see that as a need in the future. I’m curious what’s out there and if I should consider switching, or just stick with what I know. 
 

i want to be able to configure it with low bandwidth remotely (think ssh instead of Remote Desktop), run docker, and be able to run command line scripts like cron jobs (i have a reverse ssh tunnel that i want to script). I think that covers it, thanks in advance for advice!

[Needfuldoer]

TrueNAS Scale is Debian under the hood, it supports virtual machines and Docker out of the box, and its web interface makes setting up everything you're looking for relatively seamless and easy.

 

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/

[SupaKomputa]

For a long time i use centos, which is a free version of redhat.

Right now i have no other choice but Ubuntu LTS.

From my experience, ubuntu is very easy to use compared to centos.

I have problems with docker in centos, in ubuntu it was a smooth install.

[T34p075]

3 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

TrueNAS Scale is Debian under the hood, it supports virtual machines and Docker out of the box, and its web interface makes setting up everything you're looking for relatively seamless and easy.

 

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/

Thanks for the reply. So what would be the major advantage of using this? The web interface mostly? Is it still relatively easy to dive under the hood and use the CLI? Like I said about 90% of my interaction currently is via SSH.

[Needfuldoer]

39 minutes ago, T34p075 said:

Thanks for the reply. So what would be the major advantage of using this? The web interface mostly? Is it still relatively easy to dive under the hood and use the CLI? Like I said about 90% of my interaction currently is via SSH.

Sure, you can SSH in and manage everything the hard way if you want to.  
 

It also has an extensive library of plugins (usually implemented as Docker containers).

 

https://truecharts.org/

[T34p075]

10 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Sure, you can SSH in and manage everything the hard way if you want to.  
 

It also has an extensive library of plugins (usually implemented as Docker containers).

 

https://truecharts.org/

looking into this further, ZFS actively discourages a hardware RAID solution (which my new server has and which I planned to take advantage of). I'm not sure if the Poweredge's RAID controller can be setup to present the raw disks. I do see the benefits of ZFS, but in this situation I'm wondering if it will cause issues?