this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
37 points (93.0% liked)

Selfhosted

42763 readers
1214 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
37
First home server advice (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by pfr@lemmy.sdf.org to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hey everyone, I'm planning on setting up my first home server this year. Going to use an old Dell Optiplex with a couple 4tb SSD's.

I only need two services running. Jellyfin and immich. I've tested this out in a debian netinstall VM and it works.

Just looking for helpful hints or advice etc. I'm a long time Linux and BSD user and I'm tempted to try it out using Alpine Linux or even NetBSD (my daily driver os) but I thought I'd be sensible and go with Debian for.... Stability?

Anyway, immich is run in a container whereas jellyfin has a binary install. Apparently you can run jellyfin in a container also, not sure I really need to tho?

Thank you for any hints or advice.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] klangcola@reddthat.com 4 points 1 week ago

Some key points regarding Proxmox:

  • Even if you only want to run two services, you still want to keep them isolated. This can save you much pain and frustration in the future when they require upgrades
  • Proxmox let's you easily manage VM and LXC containers. So you can easily manage backups, or spinning up a separate test instance of your service. Which again, can save you pain and frustration when it comes to future updates of your services.
  • Backups are even better if you can deploy the separate Proxmox Backup Server
  • Should you ever want to add another service in the future, you can test it out in a new VM or container without it affecting your existing services at all
  • ZFS is indeed quite memory hungry, but AFAIK it's mainly used for the read cache, and can be tuned to use less RAM at the cost of performance
  • ZFS is mentioned a lot because it's good, but Proxmox also supports a range of other storage technologies: LVM, mdraid, EXT4, CEPH
  • Proxmox is just standard Debian and KVM/QEMU virtual machines under the hood. Which means you can use standard tooling and workflow should you need it for some edgecase.
  • You mentioned Jellyfin in a container: My understanding is that Jellyfin in Docker has some extra limitations or complexities when it comes to hardware encoding.
    • Jellyfin also has official documentation for how to deploy in LXC container and get HW transcoding working (Less complex than in Docker).
    • LXC containers are not like Docker containers. While a Docker container is meant to be an immutable image of a (single) application, LXC is more like a full fledged VM, but without the overhead of virtualization. LXC containers are full systems, and you install software via the usual apt, dnf etc
    • The "correct" way to run Docker in Proxmox is to run Docker in a Virtual machine. Installing Docker inside a LXC container is also possible, with some caveats. Installing Docker directly on the Proxmox host is not recommended

For reference, my oldest Proxmox server is a 2013 AMD dualcore 16GB DDR2 ram with VMs on LVMthin on a single SSD, with legacy VM doing mdraid of 3 HDDs using hardware passthrough. Performance is still OK, the overhead from Proxmox is negligible compared to strain from the actual workloads