Currently working on an Arch server for my self hosting needs. I love arch, in my eyes its the perfect platform for self hosting. There is no bloat, making it lightweight and resource efficient. Its also very stable if you go down the lts route and have the time and skills to head off problems before they become catastrophic.
The downsides. For someone who is a semi-noob there is a very steep learning curve. Arch is very well documented but when you hit a problem or a brick wall its very frustrating. My low tolerence for bullshit means I take hours/days long breaks from it. There’s also time demands in the real world so needless to say I’ve been going at it for a few weeks now.
Unraid is very appealing - nice clean interface, out-of-the-box solutions for whatever you want to do, easy NAS management… What’s not to like? If it was fully open-source I would’ve bought into it from the start. At least once a day I think “I’m done. Sign me up unraid”. Its taking an age to set up the Arch server. If I went for unraid I could be self hosting in a matter of hours. Unraid is the antitheses of Arch. Arch is for masochists.
Do you ever look at products like unraid and think “fuck this shit, gimme some of that”? What is your version of this? Have you ever actually done it and regretted it/lived happily ever after?
You must log in or register to comment.
Everyone here is telling you to ditch Arch for Debian and I absolutely agree with them however, if you’re so hell bent on having an Arch server than install Proxmox VE to the host and run both Debian and Arch, get it working in Debian first then try to replicate it with Arch, compare the differences.
My travels took me from Raspberry Pi and Raspberry PI OS/Rasbpian over to Debian then to TrueNAS + Linux mounted NFS and PVE hosts.
No going to fake RAID unraid. Not paying for harddrives and then again for something TrueNAS does for free.Arch server
here’s your issue.
I fucking LOVE my Unraid server, but I’ve had it for many years and they’ve since changed their pricing. A very, very solid WebUI.
I paid like $40 just once for it, and it looks like it’s $250 now. Honestly I’d just pay the $50/yr, it has been immensely helpful to get me started as my first homelab.
And btw I use Arch for my desktop whenever I use Linux.
I helped a friend build a server to use Unraid for his new house, and to get him started with Home Assistant and the arr stack. He’s always been fairly good with computers, but had 0 Linux experience. After about 6 months he became self efficient and no longer needed to ask for help.
Edit: my original new price was unique to me to upgrade my grandfather license.
Self hosting on a rolling release platform? No way. Give me Debian, 4 hours work every 2 1/2 years. Arch is crazy and only doable if you only have a few single server
I use Ubuntu Server -> dm-integrity -> mdadm -> ext4. Super easy to set up (it just takes forever to do dm-integrity on the drives, but you don’t need to watch it), works great, easy to maintain. Everything I run on it is dockerized with docker compose and sits behind nginx-proxy-manager, so it’s also super easy to maintain.
My first homelab server is running unRAID. No real complaints from me. It’s been running for years no issues other than the crap hardware it runs on (i7-3770, 32GB RAM). I have some file shares, docker, and some VMs. The UI makes it really easy to do stuff, especially if you don’t want to have to research and manage everything.
Why would I pay for Unraid when I already have a smooth-running Proxmox cluster and an OMV-based NAS?
Same, just TrueNAS instead of OMV. I’m not thinking about unraid at all.
Arch is very easy in this context.
Reading that is wild
Why are you doing Arch on a server? You want to tinker forever and read the update notes like a hawk lest the server implode forever?
Arch isn’t gonna be noticeably leaner than Debian.
Get Debian, install docker and/or podman, set unattended upgrades, and then install Incus if you need VMs or containers down the line. You can stick on ZFS and it’ll be fine, you already have BTRFS for basic mirrors. Install Cockpit and you’ll have a nice GUI. Try not to think you have to fiddle with settings, the maintainers for each package/service have set it so it works for most people (and we’re most people!); you’ll only need to intervene on an handful of package configs. All set and it’s not proprietary.
That’s the way you to go
There was a thread yesterday where most people were choosing arch for their server, I didn’t get it either. Like you, I’d much rather Debian or something else with smoother updates.
It’s probably because tech influencers on insert your fav video scrolling app love choosing arch as their flavor of the month Linux distro
Agreed, I run arch on my desktop and laptop, because it is more stable (in the sense of fewer bugs, things like suspend/resume works reliably for example) than any other distro I have used.
But on my VPS and my Pi I run Debian because it is more stable (in the sense of fewer upgrades that could break things). I can enable unattended upgrades there, which I would never do on my Arch system (though it is incredibly rare for those to break).
Also: if someone said they were a (self proclaimed) “semi noob” I would not recommend Arch. I have used Linux since 2002, and as my main OS since 2006. (Furthermore I’m a software developer in C/C++/Rust.) While Arch is a great distro, don’t start with Arch.
Arch’s design is key for user devices - it gets you the fixes you need now with good enough guard rails that usually it’s all good!
But that’s not the design you want for a 24/7 server that’s likely headless. You want that server to have the security updates and to get them installed asap without worry about stability. Literally for years now I’ve never had unattended upgrades cause any issue, and I’ve taken that system from 11 to 13 now. And I’ll look at in a month (maybe) while it continues to do DNS and serve up vidz
Debian on a laptop would be akin to a skeleton waiting on food/water; you’ll get that fix for sleep in 14 (maybe). It’s workable - just like Arch is workable for a server - but it’s just not the ideal role.
Both designs exist for a reason though, and that’s cause they both have their strengths!
To me it seems like:
- you want to do a lot of stuff yourself on arch
- but there’s quite some complicated stuff to learn and try
I’d try Proxmox VE and, if you’re also searching for a Backup Server, Proxmox Backup Server.
I recommend these because:
- Proxmox VE is a Hypervisor, you can just spin up Arch Linux VMs for every task you need
- Proxmox VE, as well as Proxmox BS are open source
- you can buy a license for “stable updates” (you get the same updates, but delayed, to fix problems before they get to you)
- includes snapshots, re-rolls, full-backups, a firewall (which you can turn on or off for every VM), …
I personally run a Proxmox VE + Proxmox BS setup in 3 companies + my own homelab.
It’s not magic, Proxmox VE is literally Debian 13 + qemu + kvm with a nice webui. So you know the tech is proven, it’s just now you also get an easy to use interface instead of
virshconsole commands orvirt-manager.I personally like a stable infrastructure to test and run my important and experimental tuff upon. That’s why I’m going with this instead of managing even the hypervisor myself with Arch.
My tech stack is a NUC running PVE that uses an NFS disk served by a TrueNAS server. That is getting backed up by a Veeam B&R server because I am using that at work.
After having some issues with TrueNAS killing containers after updates, I went to Unraid and have never been happier. TrueNAS file sharing permissions also never did make sense to me. I got them to work but never quite grok’d them. Unraid performs exactly like I’d expect. I hand rolled a NAS using Ubuntu way back in the day and didn’t have the desire to tinker on the NAS side of things too much.
On Unraid, I roll a larger xfs array for all of my media and large storage, then I have a two disk ZFS array for my more important documents and pictures. That gets archived up to the xfs array and my cache nvme drives have their own ZFS pool. I don’t gain a ton by doing this, it was just fun to set up and I feel reasonably secure with my personal data.
I also run a smaller, lower powered machine with Proxmox and I run Home Assistant on it. Mostly because of tinkering with hardware support in Home Assistant, I didn’t want it messing with my NAS needing restarts and such. But, Unraid is my workhorse. Day in, day out, it does exactly what I suspect with no surprises. I’ve had drives go bad and need replaced. I’ve had the whole machine just die and had to build a new machine. Unraid did exactly what I expected and needed every step of the way. The docker support is fantastic and super stable. Running multiples of the exact same container by duplicating and with only different port settings works great. I can’t say that for my independent docker installs without a bunch of tinkering on things I couldn’t seem to find enough about when I ran into issues.
I tinker on the things I enjoy. I do not enjoy having an unusable server. The anxiety is actually pretty insane for me. I would pay for Unraid many times over to get this combination of factors.
Switched years ago and now things just work, no looking back for me and I am as happy as a clam.
I went with proxmox and various LXCs for either individual services or docker stacks with several things on a minimal os (I’m comfortable with Ubuntu server so that’s what I go with generally as the unpriv LXC)
How close are you to “fck it, im just gonna pay for unraid”?
Extremely far. Maximum distance. My self updating debian with an sftpgo container and some RAID HDDs slapped onto it has been rocksolid for years.
