Be careful before uploading your config files to a public location like GitHub, you don’t want to inadvertently publish some secrets like passwords, API keys and such. A copy to an external drive should do the trick just fine as a starting point.

Additional stuff you may be interested in:

Caddy for reverse proxy (accessing your services with a nice URL instead of IP address and port numbers)

PiHole for DNS-level ad-blocking and other useful router functionality

Look for a backup solutions for your config files, maybe you can handle this at Proxmox level but I don’t have experience with that.

Do you have a good alternative to recommend? I also found that lidarr sorta sucks compared to sonarr and radarr

• what you use for your documentation

Markdown files

• how you organize it

What ?

• what information you include

The commands that worked and the stuff that didn’t work and the links to the source of information

• how you work documentation into your changes

I write as I go. I keep it as part of a git repository when relevant

BTRFS has plenty of features for data integrity, auto-correction, scrubbing, snapshots. I haven’t studied in details the differences with ZFS, I just went with BTRFS because the setup is fairly simple, it’s flexible and it does what I need.

Personally, I use BTRFS in RAID10 config. I don’t need crazy performance and my NAS is pretty low power with only 8GB of RAM (use to be 4GB on my previous setup).

Nothing wrong with wanting a web interface, but for an experienced Linux user, there is no issue going without one.

Plain, good old Debian. It’s not that big of a deal to do all the config in console via SSH. You do it once and you’re done, so is the web interface that important?

Hi! I recently started with home automation myself. Despite already having a home server, I decided to get a dedicated Raspberry Pi 5 4GB to run home assistant by itself. OpenHAB should work just as well on the RPi5.

I’ve got Zigbee and Matter over Thread connectivity using 2x Aeotec Zi-Stick dongles, one flashed with OpenThread firmware, instructions on their forum. It was not the best solution to use the same dongle for both protocols as it’s recognized with the same device name in Home Assistant and I had to use my Linux skills to work around that. You can easily get 2 zigbee dongles from different brands, check ahead which ones provide an easy OpenThread flashing solution. I think the Sonoff dongle is another one of these.

Living the good life

I’ve recently started with home assistant on a pi as well. Today I have 2 zigbee relay for my lights from Sonoff, 2 zigbee fire alarms, 1 wifi plug from Shelly and 3 Ikea remotes working on Matter over Thread.

Basically, any protocol you want to support other than wifi and Bluetooth will need a dedicated radio device. Luckily they are all pretty well supposed with home assistant. I have 2 Aeotec Zi-stick, one for Zigbee, the other flashed with OpenThread firmware (that’s for Matter over Thread, it wasn’t a good idea to buy twice the same device, I had to work around this issue). I don’t have Z-wave devices today, as I noticed they tend to be more expensive that the zigbee equipment. The new IKEA smart devices are very competitive in terms of price, they all work on Matter over Thread protocol.

In the end, you don’t need to choose. You can support all these protocols on the same raspberry pi. It’s just a matter of adding the corresponding radio and integration in home assistant.

Reconnected my light switches to home assistant. I just had to press the pairing button on the device again for some reason. But it’s inside de Switch box in the wall, not so practical. I wich they thought of another way to put the device in pairing mode, like switch one-off 10 times, something like that.

I think it’s Claude, the LLM from Anthropic.

• pihole: DNS ad-blocker abd also a DNS (and optionally DHCP) server for your home
• Wireguard: VPN very simple to setup, for remote access to your services from outside your home. What I do: wireguard is running (as a server) on a VPS, with all the security measures in place (ssh password login turn off, firewall bocks everything but wireguard and ssh connection changed to another port, failban) then my NAS at home connects to this VPS, as well as my phone, laptop, etc.
• Caddy: reverse proxy to address your service using your domain, it’s easy to setup, actually it’s the only reverse proxy I managed to setup successfully 😅. You can use the Nameservers from your domain provider to point to your NAS via the wireguard IP address for connection from the outside, and Pihole DNS to point to local IP address when at home.

I have to look into that, thanks !

Come on man… I spent so much time typing this from my phone, with formating and everything…

Hello, I have some experience using Debian in NAS, but none with TrueNAS.

Before anything: BACKUP !

If possible, make a full copy of your pool onto external drives, or another NAS or anything else. If it is not possible to get enough spare storage soace, then at least backup the things your really care about (personal photos, important projects, password database). Just make sure you have a valid backup in case things go terribly wrong ! I am sure everything will go well, but this will give you additional peace of mind.

Setup Debian for NAS use

There are a few things I can think of, many might be obvious, anyway:

1. Install and configure network file sharing protocols: Samba (files sharing compatible with Windows, Linux, Android and others), NFS (more like network drive)
2. Install: S.M.A.R.T monitoring tools
3. Choose and configure filesystem. I have been using BTRFS, but since your pool is ZFS and you probably don’t want to format and start from nothing, I think you are already set on that one. I believe this is extra configuration as it doesn’t come by default on Debian.

More advanced things:

1. Setup SSH for remote connection with the terminal
2. Install htop or btop for system monitoring in the terminal
3. wireguard is a very nice VPN, it’s easy to configure on all platforms in order to access your NAS from outside your home

Power optimization

1. Enable C-stats in the BIOS (warning in case your CPU is a 1st gen Ryzen, do not activate)
2. powertop is an utility to optimize power saving settings (I’ve not bothered with this until now)
3. hdparm is an utility to manage and configure hard drives, you can use this to configure automatic spin-down after some time of inactivity, this is a bit tricky though.

Dashboards, UI, frontends

1. OpenMediaVault is the first one that comes to my mind. It’s actually a Linux distro based on Debian with a web interface that allows you to do all the NAS relevant confirmations from the Webbrowser. It can also be installed on top of an existing Debian install. I have used it a long time ago.
2. CasaOS, similar in concept, I have not used it.
3. Another simple option to get started, get a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Install Debian with full desktop environment and configure everything in person. You can always go headless at a later time

Docker

You definitely want to install docker to run most of your services. Please, also add your local user to the docker group to not have to run everything as root. Useful services I use:

• Portainer: manage containers with a web interface
• watchtower: Auto-Update other docker containers
• Jellyfin: media Manager and player (similar to Plex)
• *arr, transmission, sabnzbd: sail the high seas
• gluetun: route containers traffic through a VPN
• caddy: reverse proxy, to access your container with sub-domain name, example: jellyfin.mycoolnas.net
• vaultwarden: redistribution of the Bitwarden password manager for self-loading with the premium features available.

Graphics cards

It’s been a long time I didn’t have to deal with NVidia. Debian comes by default with the nouveau open source driver, which works but may not give the best performance. I don’t know if it impacts transcoding performance. I suppose it doesn’t give your the NVENC codecs. Anyway, you can install the NVidia proprietary drivers and should be able to transcode.

Conclusion

Debian is a solid option for a NAS, it’s been serving me well for many years. It is set and forget. However. It takes time to setup and the terminal is going to be your main configuration tool unless you go for OMV or another distro specialty made for NAS.

Your main source of information shall be the Debian Wiki. You will find step-by-step guides to install most of the things mentioned above. The Arch wiki is also a good resource, keep in mind that some files may have different locations and package different names across Linux distributions, but configuration should be similar.

Best of luck my friend

Forced to use Windows 11 at work, my brand new laptop with 32GB or RAM takes 10 to 20 seconds to open the explorer or view an image. It’s horrendous. It’s absolutely not because of the application I need to use because I literally do EVERYTHING in Google Chrome. This year IT uninstalled Excel and Word from our laptops because we are supposed to do all the work in Google Drive. Updates always need minimum 2 reboots and you need to attend to the computer because rebooting will get stuck on the encryption password. I hate it, but it always been like that so…

I’ve done this with jam without issues for may years, my parents taught me. It’s fine.

First, BACKUP EVERYTHING.

Then, the best distro is probably going to be the same you are currently using. You will not have to deal with issues that may be specific to one distro. There is enough difference from one computer to another to cause annoying issues, even on windows.