It’s probably more than you are looking for but if you are already looking at self hosting things connected with NextCloud, use NextCloud Talk. We use it for the family and it is great.

We tried to host it ourselves to save cost, and it’s a beast but it mostly works. It certainly lags behind in features and uses a lot of resources, but when you compare with the cost it’s certainly passable.

It’s a lot for the homeland, but I love zabbix

Fair, my home office is a monument to too much free time, a hoarding habit for ewaste, and a wife who works weekends and overnights.

That is a self-made soldering kit box I made when I was in college and had to haul it around a lot. I have actually been meeting to replace it with something more permanent now that I’m a grown up with my own house. I have an air flow soldering rig which doesn’t really have a home, and I could have a much better use of space. I have my brocade ICX6610-24 next to that which I’ve been programming for way too long, and a whole bunch of 3D printer parts on top of that.

I’ve done some of that, recently I have an old putty knife and I will put it right against the crack and just hammer it which will unstick it enough that I can pull it off. Newer drives definitely have weaker magnets than some of my much older ones.

I started collecting in probably 2007, so manufactured before that for sure.

That’s rad, and you did an amazing job keeping them whole. Recently I have been wrapping them in cloth, then the kids form clay around them for various fridge and office magnets.

I’m not an expert, but I’ve been using TrueNas Scale since I cut over from TrueNAS core, and before that Freenas, since about 2010. I have a bunch of lessons and assumptions, but someone can correct me if these are misguided, they’re my tl;dr of knowledge.

1. Your data drives should be in sets of 3 for a raidz1, or 5+ (I use 6) for a raidz2. While technically the minimum is 2 or 4 respectively, best performance and protection comes in sets of 3. This is a good synopses: https://superuser.com/a/1058545 In that case he points out that a 3-way mirror also works but then you lose a lot of the data integrity checking that comes with ZFS. I keep an offline spare; in your situation putting 3 drives in with a RAIDZ1 and keeping one in the drawer would give you ~8TB of capacity protected against bit flipping and drive failure. This is a better description of the raid levels: https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html
2. In terms of just storage, that system will be fine, though ideally you get ECC RAM; that’s often a bigger swap, so if you can’t change that, so be it. It does matter in terms of integrity checking. The more containers you run, the tougher it gets to spec out. I have a separate proxmox hypervisor and routinely have 4+ jellyfin streams going at a time, so it wouldn’t be enough in my case, but you’ll have to experiment and scale. I will say, even though a separate proxmox box comes with a lot of headaches, it was more important than any schooling I ever did in terms of my IT career. Networking, monitoring, access control, suddenly I have a solution to every IT problem I encounter and I have experience with it.
3. Personally, I do a 2-disk mirror for the OS, and then multiple 3 or 6 disk vdevs for data. If you lose the OS drive and it’s just 1, that’s fine if you have backups to just restore, but I find swapping in a cheap ssd is better. I use cheap-as-dirt 64G SSD’s as the boot drives, and if one dies, you can swap it and replace it in the UI, no problem. You can technically use 2 mis-matched sized disks, but it’ll fuss at you.
4. Start with TrueNAS Scale as just a storage device; ideally that needs to be close to the hardware and not virtualized. In the beginning, especially since you’re likely dealing with 1 pool, just make 1 vdev for everything. You can make folders in there, or datasets, and play with partitioning data, sharing data to other computers, etc. I use NFS sharing AND iscsi luns to my proxmox, and ultimately I’m in 1 big dataset with multiple vdevs in it. Add your things like homeassistant one at a time; going through it will show you how you sort storage, how you provision it, etc. Over time, things grow; this will not be your final configuration, most people expand over time. You may decide “I want bulk storage in one vdev, I want containers and vm’s in another.” When you expand, that’s when you split things off and make more nuanced decisions. That will come from better assessing your needs.

You mention Jellyfin…my struggles with that were never storage. My struggles there were networking; it was a big part of why I decided to upgrade my server networking to 10G, which supported running Jellyfin on another hypervisor and having all that go over the network.

For most systems, ext4 because it seems stable and uncomplicated.

For my NAS and big data, ZFS. People whose opinions I trust recommend it, and to the best of my technical ability to evaluate said things, the claims make sense and seem to be extremely beneficial against the threats I perceive to my data.

The pi4 especially is great for proof of concept or MVP testing, but I often migrate to VMs on my proxmox hypervisor once something becomes critical. I started Shinobi, pihole, and home assistant on a pi4.

Tt-rss though the developer can be a bit abrasive if you go asking for help. Been using it since the icanhaz days.

Crashplan can’t tell the difference between local folders and NFS mounts, and they have an unlimited size backup plan per device for like $10/month. I have 1 device with NFS mounts from many desktops and my Nas. About 9TB.

Subdomain; overall cheaper after a certain point to get a wildcard cert, and if you split your services up without a reverse proxy it’s easier to direct names to different servers.

Lots. I have 2 proxmox hypervisors and 3 Raspberry Pi’s; my OS of choice for servers is Ubuntu Server or Raspbian.

• ISC-DHCP-Server (DHCP)
• Bind9 (DNS)
• Pihole (pihole upstreams to bind9) (More DNS with ad and content blocking)
• OpenLDAP (Directory)
• Jellyfin (Media)
• Nextcloud (General google drive replacement)
• Vaultwarden (password Vault)
• Asterisk (Phone)
• EasyRSA Certificate Authority (Certificates)
• Minecraft (Gaming!)
• HomeAssistant (Home Automation)
• Octoprint (3D Printing)
• Shinobi (Security Cameras)
• Multiple Apache Websites (Web)
• Exim4 mail relay (Mail)

Experimental:

• Photoprism (Photo Sharing)
• tt-rss (RSS Reader)-