Its new homelab time. And with that, potentially a new OS time too.
I currently am very happy with Debian and Docker. The only issue is I am brand new to using data redundancy. I have a 2 bay NAS I’ll use, and I want the two HDDs to be in raid 1.
Now I could definitely just use ZFS or BTRFS with Debian, and be able to use Docker just like I do currently.
Or I could use a dedicated NAS OS. That would help me with the raid part of this, but a requirement is Docker.
Any recommendations?
Debian and the standard linux mdraid?
I’d suggest lvmraid which is just mdraid wrapped in LVM. It’s a tad simpler to setup and you get the flexibility of LVM, plus the ability to convert from linear to mirror and back as needed. That is you could do a standard install on LVM, then add another disk to LVM and convert the volumes to RAID1. It’s all documented under man lvmraid.
Do you mean mdadm? https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/A_guide_to_mdadm If not can I have a link?
Yes, as the other people pointed out, that’s what I mean. The standard Linux software RAID (also called MD RAID)
It’s proven, battle-tested, pretty robust and you don’t rely on any specific vendor formats or any hardware for that matter. The main point would be to keep it simple. You could use BTRFS or ZFS or all kinds of things. But it only introduces additional complexity and points of failure. And has no benefits over a plain mirror (what the RAID1 does) if we’re talking about just 2 devices. At least it served me well in the past. Contrary to cheap hardware RAID controllers and also BTRFS which also let me down once. But a lot of development went in to that since then and the situation might have changed. But mdraid is reliable anyways.
Yeah, that’s what he means.
I’m doing kinda the same thing with my NAS: md raid1 for the SSDs, but only snapraid for the big data drives (mostly because I don’t really care if i have to re-download my linux iso collection, so snapraid plus mergerfs is like, sufficient for that data).
Also using Ubuntu instead of Debian, but that’s mostly due to it being first built six years ago, and I’d 100% go with Debian if I was doing it now.
As long as you’re not relying on RAID as your backup. Don’t know why so many people struggle with understanding, RAID is not a backup. It’s a solution to ensure uptime in the face of a lost disk. I would guess most selfhosters shouldn’t be concerned with uptime. Use Borg or restic. Or if you are going to use zfs or btrfs then have a completely separate drive or pool where snapshots are stored.
Of course, Gentoo with mdadm! I am running Linux software raid for the last… 20 years? And never had a single issue.
Also a big Gentoo fan, and of course use podman instead of docker :)
I was in a similar boat. Initially, I ran debian with docker but later on decided to check out unraid. It’s pretty easy to get setup, and you have a lot of docker containers pre-configured, so you can just click and install. I have it notify me whenever something goes on with it, but outside of that, I don’t tinker much with it.
Only two weird things about it though…
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You dont install unraid. Instead, you run it through a usb. More specifically, the usb has a specific config that’ll then load everything to your memory.
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Recently, they redid their pay structure so not too familiar with the changes but you do have to pay for unraid.
Bog-standard Debian with LVM. LVM can also do RAID, but you could also do mdadm below LVM if you prefer. Keep it simple.
