Home NAS

I like self hosting things, but generally I had used VPS services to do so. However, I got a really good deal on some used hardware: ~$70 for 32gb of ram, quad core i7 + ~$120 for 16TB of NAS drives. Ok, really really good deal.

Show me what you got

I settled on TrueNAS Scale for my OS because I wanted ZFS for redundancy, as well as the flexibility of the Linux base system - I want to run containers without a headache. I configured my drive pool as a raidZ2, meaning that two of my 4 drives can fail without any data loss. That means I only have ~8TB of effective storage, but that is plenty for my needs. Speaking of...

What does it do though

  • Gitea Server
    • Mirror all of my projects on GitLab and GitHub so I have a local backup
  • Jellyfin
    • Local media streaming. It's awesome to have a personal netflix if the internet goes out
  • Tailscale
    • Private VPN: I can access my home network securely even when I'm away
    • Even access my Gitea/Jellyfin instances!
  • NFS/Samba storage
    • I can keep files on my NAS and access them from my other machines
  • TimeMachine backups
    • It's an backup endpoint for our Mac

Does it work?

I had a drive show signs of failure (come on, $120 was too good of a deal for them to be 100%) but TrueNAS warned me and I bought a replacement. I wound up not replacing it for a couple weeks and things kept trucking along. The replacement was incredibly easy; I basically popped the drive in, added it to the pool as a replacement, and it was resilvered in a couple hours.

Having access to Gitea and other persistent services is also a huge plus. It's nice to know that even if an online service goes down tomorrow, I'll still have the infrastructure to keep my work preserved.